Instagram as the best performed influencer marketing platform has attracted more than 25 million businesses joining the platform. For businesses who want to increase business awareness and grow followers, Instagram influencers marketing is considered the first option amongst social media platforms. On Instagram, around 47% of them are influencers who have followers more than 1K. They are all over the world and in different industries. That leads to the question on how to find high quality influencers for their campaign.
I used to look for influencers through the Instagram search tool in the app and experienced the following difficulties:
Overloaded influencer database without precise search filters to sort out the proper influencers. The search results are broad and helpless to brands/businesses.
Inauthentic influencer statistics due to fake followers and counterfeit engagements deceive brands/businesses from the truly well-performed influencers.
Loose audience distribution and undefined audience demographics to determine if the audience group matches brands target.
Unclear benchmark for brand to judge influencer ads performance. Because compared to regular posts, advertising posts are in general to different extents distasting by their audience.
The above is a list of difficulties my business has been suffered which keeps us from progressing on Instagram marketing, until I found an Instagram analytics tool, GugeeData. It solved my problems and improved my social media marketing strategy a lot. I have summarized my experience in the following for your reference.
I generally go over the simple steps to locate high quality influencers:
Clearly understand the target audience and market as well as budget.
Use Instagram user search tool to locate potential influencers.
Analyze the influencer in the aspects of account overview performance, audience demographics, as well as the advertising performance to ensure if the influencers match with my brand.
4. Get in touch with them via email or direct message on Instagram for more business inquiries like charge fee, intention of collaboration etc. and then finally decide who to collaborate.
This is a case study from my real experience.
My business is a female clothing brand which targeting at young women in the United States. I filled up filters including account category, influencer gender and contact information, audience data like location, gender and age to match with my target audience.
Next, according to my budget and goal, I would like to pick up influencer at follower size between 500K to 1M. After filling up the above filters, I will get a short list. I will only need to sort them in the order of quality followers or engagement rate to further analyze them.
After the initial filtering, I will continue to review the analytics report for each interested influencer which help me decide who to collaborate. The report analyzes the influencer from the perspectives of account overview, audience demographics and ads evaluation.
Once I have picked up several candidates, I then contact them through contact feature, by sending email for any inquiries I might have. After comparing prices, I can decide my Instagram marketing partner.
This is how I efficiently find influencers to collaborate on Instagram. I hope this will help you when looking for influencers for your brand.
Writer and blogger.