Finding Instagram Influencers is not a big deal. But finding the right ones for you is a different story! If you want to avoid a huge scatter loss in your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to do your due diligence. It’s worth the effort!
Let’s take a look at Youfoodz, an Australian fresh meal company, that partnered with 81 Instagram influencers, which helped them generate 500,000+ impressions and more than 70,000 direct engagements.
Maybelline, a global cosmetics brand, managed to 1.3x its total media value by collaborating with Instagram beauty influencers like Kimberly Pavao.
Similarly, thousands of other brands, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and many more, collaborate with Instagram influencers to drive awareness, boost credibility, and ultimately increase their revenue.
Running an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram can deliver some serious results. However, it’s not about throwing money at the first influencer with a massive following. To make it work, you need to find and partner with the right influencers on Instagram. And if you’re struggling to find the right influencers in your niche, allow us to help you out.
Throughout this post, we’ve put together six brilliant ways you can find Instagram influencers in your niche. Let’s dive in.
The secret of a successful influencer marketing campaign is being strategic and targeted in your search for the fitting creator. Here’s a list of six ways to help you find the right influencers in your niche:
Table of Contents:
Let’s touch down on each of these points to help you find the right Instagram influencers.
There’s no better way to find the right Instagram influencers than by using an influencer discovery platform like influData. Imagine the countless hours you and your marketing team will have to put in if you try to do it manually.
Sure, you can do a Google search. But Google can only give you an overview. If you want to narrow down your search to, let’s say, “micro-influencers on Instagram in the healthcare space from Germany”, there’s no way Google can give you the right results.
An influencer discovery platform like influData slashes down the time you and your team spend on finding the right influencers.
What’s so special about influData?
influData is a powerful influencer search engine combined with an analytics tool to help brands find creators, influencers, and other brands they can collaborate with on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Alongside this, you can use influData to find the right influencers using a combination of different filters. influData provides you with data from over 20 million accounts from all over the world. Allow us to show you influData in action.
Let’s say you want to find US-based beauty influencers with more than 10,000 followers. We hopped onto influData and added the following filters:
influData gave us 20,894 results. Let’s narrow down our search further. Let’s say you want to collaborate with female influencers. You can just select the Gender as “Female”.
influData fetched us 7,784 female US-based beauty influencers with more than 10,000 followers.
Let’s not end our search here. Let’s narrow it down even further. Suppose you want to work with female beauty influencers with more than 10,000 followers based in New York. So, we set the city as “New York”.
We got 1,136 influencers we can collaborate with. Note – you can also add multiple cities at once.
To find the best influencers, you can tap into advanced features like Language, Minimum Growth Rate, and Minimum Engagement Rate. You can also search by Audience. Once you have set your filters, you can check the Quality Rating and other relevant metrics inside influData.
Want to collaborate with these influencers? You don’t need to head over to their Instagram profiles and send them a cold message. No, influData’s database comprises emails of many influencers. At the same time, you can prepare a list of influencers you want to collaborate with by adding them to your collections, favorites, compare lists, and more. The possibilities are endless.
Apart from Instagram, influData also helps users find the right influencers on TikTok & YouTube.
However, using a self-serve influencer discovery platform isn’t the only option for finding the right Instagram influencers. If you’re not ready to invest in a tool yet, you can try the manual approach.
Love hashtags? You can use them to aid your influencer discovery process.
Let’s say you want to find beauty influencers; you can look up hashtags “#beautyinfluencer” or “beautyinfluencers” via an Instagram search. We did the same:
And here are the results:
Now, to find the right fit, you’ll have to check out many of these posts one by one.
Monczi, a beauty influencer, with over 223K followers (as of this writing) used #beautyinfluencers as one of the hashtags among others in one of her posts.
Similarly, if you’re looking for a fitness influencer, you can look up hashtags like “#fitnessinfluencer” or “#fitnessinfluencers”. From here, you can head over to their profiles and learn whether they are the right fit for you or not.
However, it’s worth mentioning that taking this approach could demand a significant investment of time and effort from you and your team. Imagine the countless hours you’d have to spend to find New York-based Instagram influencers. After all, not many New York-based beauty influencers use hashtags like these:
At the same time, there’s no way to verify the credibility of these influencers using this approach. Additionally, there’s no chance to look at their minimum growth rate and engagement rate, or how many of their followers are authentic.
Working with a reliable influencer marketing company is a great way to find and collaborate with the right influencers. However, if you want to make it work, it’s super-important to find the right agency. So many influencer marketing agencies out there use phrases like “results-driven”, “results guaranteed” and “premium” to describe their services.
Who should you trust? Who should you not?
Working with the wrong influencer marketing agency can impact your brand reputation negatively. So, we highly recommend having a strict vetting process before signing a contract with the first influencer marketing agency you see.
What you may not know is that many influencer marketing agencies (even the most relevant ones) use influencer discovery tools like influData on their own to find the right influencers to collaborate with. So, if you’re planning on hiring an influencer marketing agency, keep in mind that you are most likely going to get the same results as using a tool like influData yourself, just that you do not have to invest internal resources for the handling. The downside: The high costs for the agency.
However, there are a few more necessary steps to follow for running a profitable influencer marketing campaign, than just finding the right influencers to work with. Once you have found the right influencers, you need to:
If you and your team have limited bandwidth and can’t really spend time on these activities, then hiring an influencer marketing agency – that can do the heavy lifting for you – makes sense.
The whole point of running an Instagram influencer marketing campaign is to reach out to your potential target group. To do that, you need to collaborate with the influencers they follow and look up to for purchasing advice on Instagram.
How can you identify these influencers? Simply by finding out the influencers your existing customers are following on Instagram. Your existing, and potential customers are likely following the same influencers. Hence, there may be some overlap in the personalities and content they enjoy on social media. By identifying and collaborating with influencers your existing customers are following on Instagram, you can reach out to a wider audience and increase the chances of success for your influencer marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you are in charge of influencer marketing at a New York-based bakery. Since you want to promote your bakery, it makes sense to collaborate with food influencers based in New York.
How can you find these influencers?
Step I: Prepare a list of influencers your customers follow. Identify your most loyal customers and check out the influencers they follow by hopping onto their Instagram handles and stalking their “Following” section. Or you can directly reach out to them to understand which influencers they follow for purchasing advice.
Step II: There’ll likely be some overlap among the influencers many of your customers are following. Look for common influencers your customers follow and narrow down your list accordingly.
Once you identify these influencers, head over to their Instagram profiles and look at a few factors like:
However, the problem with this approach is that you’ll have to spend lots of time and effort. From manually exploring your customers’ Instagram profiles to preparing a list of influencers they follow to verifying the credibility of these influencers to initiating the communication, it’s a lot of hard work.
Another good way to find Instagram influencers in your niche is to tap into your network or relevant communities. You can personally reach out to a few brands in the same space as yours for Instagram influencer recommendations. After it is questionable if direct competitors or companies from the same industry will give you a hint, you may also want to try asking Corporation partners for their advice. In any way, don’t be hesitant to use this template while trying to reach out to them.
Dear (Brand Contract),
I hope this message finds you well. My name is (Your Name) and I am the (Your Position) at (Your Brand Name). We specialize in (Your Product/ Service), and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to reach our target audience.
I noticed that your brand is also in the (Your Industry) space and has a strong presence in social media, particularly on Instagram. I am reaching out to you today to inquire about any Instagram influencers that you have had success working with in the past. We are currently exploring different ways to leverage Instagram influencers to promote our brand, and we believe that recommendations from other industry players would be incredibly valuable.
If you have any recommendations or suggestions for Instagram influencers who would be a good fit for our brand, we would greatly appreciate it. We are looking for influencers with strong engagement, high-quality content, and a large following in the (Your Target Audience) demographic.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Best regards, (Your name)
Or you can tap into Slack digital marketing communities like:
Find the right channels and send a message like this (feel free to steal the template):
Hello everyone,
My name is (Person X) and I am a part of the beauty industry. I am excited to be part of this community and to connect with other like-minded individuals.
I am currently in search of micro-influencers based in New York who specialize in beauty.
As we all know, micro-influencers can be incredibly effective in reaching niche audiences and driving engagement. I am particularly interested in those with a following of 10,000-50,000 who have a strong presence on Instagram and who align with our brand values.
If anyone has any recommendations for beauty micro-influencers based in New York or any tips on how to effectively work with micro-influencers, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you in advance for your time and support.
Best regards, (Your name)
You can also reach out to your friends for recommendations and also ask on Quora or Reddit for influencer recommendations.
Last but not least, you can just find influencers with a Google search. Let’s say you want to collaborate with beauty influencers, all you need to do is search “beauty influencers” on Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles with the top beauty influencers.
But let’s say you want to find beauty micro-influencers in Miami, Florida. Let’s look up “beauty micro-influencers miami”.
Every article we came across was presented in front of us beauty micro-influencers, but we specifically mentioned that we were looking for micro-influencers in Miami, and not all results fit the bill.
No matter how good search engines are, narrowing down your search with them is literally impossible (at this stage). After all, they’re search engines and not influencer discovery platforms. If you’re looking for any top creator and don’t want to narrow down your search, you can find influencers with a quick Google search. On the other hand, if you are looking for a more targeted approach, we heavily recommend using an influencer discovery platform like influData.
To drive actual results, we heavily recommend collaborating with influencers who belong to your niche, have a high engagement rate, and are a good fit for your brand, rather than just cooperating with any influencer you find or think could be interesting.
We’ve seen brands spend thousands of dollars on influencers with fake followers. We’ve also seen so many brands working with influencers whose following doesn’t even align with their target audience group.
To avoid these pitfalls, we highly recommend working with a reliable influencer marketing agency (if you don’t have the time for heavy lifting), by asking experts, communities, or partners for their expertise and help, or by using an influencer discovery tool like influData to find the right influencer fit for your brand.
Click here to learn more about influData.