Marketing has changed a lot in recent years. Promotion and communication tools that were popular a decade ago are now ineffective or completely irrelevant. To some extent, the game has changed because innovative instruments like chatbots were introduced and bloggers on social media paved their way to becoming influencers in a particular niche.
Trying to adjust to the new reality, a lot of marketing specialists started exploring how influencer marketing works and questioning how to find an influencer to promote their product, services, or brand in general. This article will help you find answers to these questions and more.
How to find an influencer in your niche
1. Determine your goals
If you have been working in marketing for a while, you definitely know that every activity should start from the goal determination. Before you start preparing and planning a campaign, a project, or a single publication, you should clearly understand what you need to achieve and which tools you will use along the way.
Would you like to attract a new audience or boost sales? Or maybe your aim is to grow your list of subscribers in the following months? Your future goal determines the type of influencer you will be looking for. This could be mega (over 1 million subscribers), macro (around 500, 000 subscribers), micro (up to 100, 000 subscribers), or even nano influencers (up to 10, 000 subscribers).
There are additional questions you need to answer yourself before you start planning and preparing a campaign. Is influencer marketing the right tool to gain your objectives? Are there any other ways that can help you achieve your goal? Influencer marketing is not the cheapest tool and you should make sure that it will help you achieve your objectives.
2. Study your target audience
Another thing you should find out before you start looking for an influencer in your niche is who your target audience is. You need to know every detail about their demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and average income. However, it is also important to understand the psychographic segmentation. It includes values, beliefs, lifestyles, and other similar information about your audience.
Recently, marketers started exploring their audiences by generations as well. Marketing to Baby Boomers, Millennials, or Generation Z requires different approaches because the habits and lifestyles of these groups vary. They grew up in different historical and economic circumstances and the ways they consume products and communicate with brands are unique. Filtering audiences by generations helps marketing professionals select the best tools and channels and make sure their efforts are effective.
Research influencers in your niche
When you outlined your goals and your audience, it’s time to start looking for influencers in your niche. You can start googling, surfing Instagram or TikTok however, it gets more complicated when you need to find influencers on LinkedIn.
How to find an influencer on LinkedIn and extract their contacts using SignalHire software
The simplest way to find an influencer on LinkedIn is to search manually. Just type in the keywords or phrases in the search field and you’ll get a selection of people who used a particular keyword or phrase in their posts or bio. Click on the names on the list and examine the profiles. How many subscribers do they have? What are their specializations and occupations? Is their audience engaged? You can look at the number of comments under their posts but also how many likes and shares they get from their followers.
For the primary research, you can create a file to which you will gather all the information about that or another influencer. For example, you can include their full name, links to their LinkedIn and other social media profiles, number of followers, their biography, and sphere of expertise. The last aspects are also important because they showcase the experience and personality of an influencer in the best way.
Unlike on Instagram or Facebook, you can’t press a button ‘Contact me’ and reach out to any influencer in a matter of seconds. However, there’s still a quick way to get the contacts of a person you found on LinkedIn using SignalHire software.
The SignalHire software and its tools will allow you to retrieve high-quality contact information of any person in just a couple of clicks. All you need to do is to create an account on the website and install the SignalHire Chrome extension. Then, you should open the LinkedIn profile of an influencer that you’d like to contact and launch the extension of the email extractor.
On the right top corner of your screen, you’ll see a small pop-up window that has a button “Reveal contacts”. Press the button to retrieve the business email of an influencer and add it to your file with the primary research. In the same way, you can extract all the other necessary contact information of influencers including their phone numbers using Signalhire software.
If you’re also trying to find someone’s Twitter account by email or phone number, check out this guide for quick methods that complement your outreach efforts.
Additionally, for platforms like Instagram, you can use Instagram lookup methods—this article explains how to search effectively even with limited data.
Now you have a list of potential influencers for your product or services. What’s next?
Finding an influencer for your brand is only half the battle. Another significant component of influencer marketing is communication. You have to prepare an effective outreach strategy that will win over the attention of influencers and help you achieve your KPIs.
Create an appealing email template
Start with creating a concise but appealing email template. Watch your tone of voice and make sure you include information that would be of interest to an influencer. In addition to an introduction and a short explanation of why you are reaching out, you should clearly state what are the benefits of this partnership for an influencer.
For example, you can mention that your brand has an international audience that would help them grow their list of followers. You can also provide your social media, website, or blog statistics to show that collaboration with your brand will increase their own brand awareness. Don’t forget to showcase all the perks your product or services has to offer, thus, inciting curiosity and desire to partner with your brand.
Personalize each email
Another point of discussion among marketers is whether you should send out bulk emails or not. A strategy with a motto ‘the more, the better’ could have worked a couple of years ago but nowadays it is irrelevant. Influencer marketing is a growing sphere of monetization and bloggers and opinion leaders get dozens of emails from different brands on a daily basis.
Considering such a state of affairs, you should aim for quality instead of quantity. This approach will bring you better results and will allow you to achieve your goals. Try to personalize every email you send out to an influencer. Mention their name and devote time to slightly adjusting the text in the main body to fit the personality of an influencer. These small but important details will make your email stand out from hundreds of other letters in the influencer’s inbox and encourage them to give you a positive response.
In conclusion
Save this article to your bookmarks and turn to it when you will be looking for influencers for your brand. These quick but useful tips will help you achieve your goals but also save time and effort when reaching out to influencers in your niche.
Image source: pixabay.com
