How to Find the Right Instagram Influencers for Your Brand

Influencer marketing is a huge social media trend for a reason: it is extremely effective, especially on Instagram! In this guide, we’ll look at how you can find the best influencers and grow your brand.

To say influencer marketing is a must for brands on social media is an understatement. With an estimated market size of $13 billion in 2021, influencer marketing is huge.

The majority of brands have recognized the importance of collaborating with influential users on social media, and 59% of brands even dedicate a special budget to influencer marketing. Why? Because it’s effective!

Why you can’t ignore influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is essentially the digital version of word of mouth, and most people are likely to buy a product or use a service if a person they trust recommends it. Gen Zers and Millennials are especially likely to trust brands and buy their products if they have been recommended by a person they follow on social media.

While the importance of influencer marketing can be seen throughout all social media platforms, Instagram is probably the most powerful influencer platform.

On Instagram, influencers tend to have very strong and often even personal relationships with their followers. Users often view the influencers they follow as friends, and this closeness generates a lot of trust.

According to a survey by Retail Dive, 72% of Instagram users have based purchases related to style, beauty, or fashion on recommendations from people they follow on Instagram. 50% of the surveyed users also stated that Instagram has the biggest influence on their shopping decisions, followed by Facebook (23%) and Pinterest (22%).

So, if your business is on Instagram and you want to grow your brand, you can’t ignore influencer marketing. But how do you find the right influencers for your brand?

Do your research

Before you even start looking at influencers, you should make sure that you know what your brand is all about. Define:

• what your brand stands for,
• what you want to achieve through influencer marketing, and
• who your target audience is.

With this in mind, start thinking about what influencer might be the best fit to reach your target audience. After all, finding the best influencer fit for your brand also depends on your particular marketing goals.

If, for example, as a tech brand, you want to sell your products to specialized IT users, it might be a good idea to work with a tech-savvy person who is well-respected in the tech community.

Or, if you decide to expand your customer base and market your tech products to parents working from home, collaborating with a working mom or dad might be a better fit for your brand’s influencer marketing.

Don’t focus on the number of followers alone

When deciding which influencers you want to work with, it might be tempting to pick the ones with the most followers. However, it is worth taking some extra time to dig a little deeper. Sure, working with an influencer who has 100,000 followers looks good on paper, but how engaged are these followers? Do they leave a lot of likes or comments under a post?

Ideally, you want to work with influencers who have a close relationship with their followers. So sometimes, working with micro-influencers who have fewer but highly engaged followers might be more beneficial for your brand.

Be efficient when searching for influencers

As you can see, finding the perfect influencers for your brand requires some effort. And while it is important to invest time and be diligent, you can also make your search more efficient.

One easy way to find the right influencers for your brand is to look at your own followers. Are there any movers and shakers among them? If so, reach out to them!

They clearly already know you and are interested in your brand. So, besides the fact that they are likely to be a good fit for you, working with people that know your brand will also save you time because you won’t have to explain everything from scratch.

Another way to find suitable influencers is to search for hashtags on Instagram that relate to your brand. Chances are that users who post about similar topics would be good collaboration partners.

Finally, don’t be afraid to search on Google. Especially if you are promoting a niche product, a quick Google search might lead you directly to several influencers who would be a good fit for your brand.

Take a closer look at their followers

Apart from looking at the influencers, it’s also important to check out their followers because these followers will be the target audience of your influencer marketing efforts.

So, make sure that the influencers’ followers line up with the target audience you want to reach. Otherwise, you will be wasting a lot of time and money without getting the desired results.

Send personal messages

Once you have selected the influencers that seem most likely to be a good fit for your brand, make sure to contact them with personal messages.

Nobody likes mass emails, and personalizing collaboration requests is also more likely to yield better responses because it shows that you have put some thought into contacting specific people.

Use collaborative platforms

After finding influencers you want to work with, you will notice that this type of collaboration can be time-consuming. This is true especially in the beginning because you still have to get used to each other, coordinate work flows, and also make sure that the content the influencers create is really on point for your brand. The easiest and most efficient way to work with influencers is to use collaborative platforms such as Storrito.

Storrito is a web tool for creating and scheduling Instagram stories. Since multiple users can be connected to one account and work together on creating and editing stories, Storrito makes it very easy to collaborate, even from different locations and devices. This makes Storrito a perfect tool for working with influencers. Try it out for free!