Influencer marketing is one of the most popular marketing and advertising tools today. Big and small brands leverage influencer marketing to boost their sales. Reports show that influencer recommendations make up nearly 50% of the total sales. However, you can only bear the fruit of influencer marketing when you choose the right ones for your business. Thus, influencer identification plays a major role in the success of your influencer marketing campaign.
No matter the niche of your business, you can always find an influencer who will create content to market your product. Depending on the platform you want to target, they might create Instagram reels, YouTube videos, or Pinterest posts. Sometimes, businesses consider influencer and affiliate marketing the same. However, affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are unique marketing strategies, bearing specific benefits. Influencer marketing typically involves payments and PRs, whereas affiliate marketers work on commission percentages.
This article covers everything you need to know about influencer identification methods and tools for influencer marketing.
How to Identify Influencers?
70% of business marketers say that finding suitable influencers is the most complicated task of influencer marketing.
So, apart from being a useful marketing strategy, influencer marketing is also a nerve-racking task. Considering a few important elements can help you with influencer identification for your brand. Here’s how you can identify the right influencers for your brand:
Leverage Google
The easiest way to find influencers in your niche is Google. It is one of the best browsers that answer your queries within seconds. Search for influencers in your niche, and Google will provide multiple resources. At the same time, you can also skim through blogs in your niche to find the most suitable influencer for your needs.
Ensure Relevance through Social Media
Influencers can bring consumers’ attention to your product and increase sales to meet your goals. However, all that works only when the influencer is relevant to your business niche. For that, you must ensure that their target audience matches your ideal consumer profile.
If you monitor social media, you can find out which influencers work great in your niche. Otherwise, analyze your competitors’ hashtags and see which influencers are working on those hashtags.
Analyze the Followers
After finding a suitable influencer to market your business, ensure they are reliable; check if their followers are authentic or bots. It is a very important step to ensure your investment doesn’t go in vain.
You can do it by comparing the activity on their posts to the number of followers. Furthermore, check the names and profile pictures of the followers and analyze the comments on some of their posts. You can use inBeat to determine if the influencer’s followers are organic or bots.
Check Engagement for ROI
Look for the engagement ratio on an influencer’s content, i.e., the likes, shares, and comments on their posts or blogs. What is the benefit of a large audience if they don’t even engage in the posts? Focus on the comments and discussions to ensure they are relevant because the quality and quantity of engagement decide the return on investment (ROI). Tools like HypeAuditor and FakeCheck are suitable to check engagement rates.
We have explained these and some other tools in detail later to ensure you can find the best influencer for your business conveniently.
Use Influencer Marketplaces
Influencer identification tools like influencer marketplaces can be suitable for finding influencers, considering specific metrics. These marketplaces give you all the details of the influencers, along with rates and contact details. These include Pitchboard, Influence.co, Affable.ai, etc. However, some of them have a subscription fee to use the platform.
Top 10 Influencer Identification Tools
Now that you know all the tested and helpful tips to pick a suitable influencer for your brand, using the right tools is a must. Here are the top 10 influencer identification tools that you can use:
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is one of the most commonly used influencer identification tools. It helps find influencers and assists in planning content creation. Add the correct keywords to find the most active influencers in your niche. The tool then scrutinizes the quality of tweets to discover the best possible influencers for your business.
The tool focuses on related online content to identify the type of tweets that gain more customer attention. Buzzsumo also analyzes if the people sharing and focusing the content align with your ideal consumer definition. This way, you can connect and discuss with the influencer how you want your content to be. There is a free version of Buzzsumo, but it offers limited features.
HypeAuditor
HypeAuditor will find the best influencers for your business niche by analyzing their audience and engagement quality. It only considers influencers with authentic followers, likes, and comments and identifies frauds with bots (fake audiences). Based on authenticity, HypeAuditor ranks influencers so that you can prioritize the higher-ranked people.
On HypeAuditor, you can easily narrow down the influencer list through location and niche filters. With detailed analytics of each influencer’s content, it also provides their social media handles. So, you don’t have to search for any official handle, including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more. HypeAuditor has free and paid versions, but you need a paid account for hassle-free influencer identification.
Kitly Business
Kitly Business is another influencer identification tool that helps you find influencers from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Once you find the most relevant influencer with the help of useful insights, it lets you directly contact the influencer’s agent. Plus, the contact details of influencers keep updating, so you do not waste time finding the recent ones.
This tool analyzes influencers’ content and engagement quality to predict the success possibilities of the collaboration between both parties. Kitly Business is a paid tool with prices starting from a minimum of $99/month with further packages based on personalized campaigns.
Klear
Klear is both an influencer marketing and a social listening tool to make influencer marketing fruitful for you. It is a hub of over 500 million Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and blog influencer profiles. You can filter out the best matches using keywords related to your niche. It will then provide detailed demographics for every influencer to help you consider the details before working with them. Once you find the influencers that align with your marketing goals, you can contact them through Klear’s CRM.
Besides influencer identification, its social listening features are also very helpful. It provides you with insights into your competitor’s business, showing how collaborating with an influencer worked for them. With such detailed insights, you’ll find the most suitable influencer for your business. Klear is free up to an extent and also has premium subscription packages starting from 250$ monthly.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is mainly a Twitter-related tool as it filters out Twitter accounts for your influencer search. Use keywords to search and filter Twitter influencers to identify a suitable match. The tool filters out the accounts whose followers are similar to your ideal audience.
In addition, Followerwonk compares different accounts and their performance on Twitter to make this decision easier for you. It is a freemium tool that you can use for free until the influencer has up to 25k followers. Even for a higher follower count, Followerwonk is not very expensive and offers affordable monthly packages.
Upfluence
Upfluence is among the most popular influencer identification tools for Influencer marketing for startups with data of more than 3 million influencers. These influencers are from all major social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, blogs, and Pinterest. The tool is very user-friendly and has a free Chrome plugin. On Upfluence, you can compare the reach and engagement of influencers and directly email the one that suits your goals.
Traackr
Traackr helps you find the most suitable influencer for your business marketing. You can use keywords (like your niche, location, and audience age) to narrow the influencer list. It is a tool that provides you with influencer insights and performance reports. Pretty impressive, right?
If you don’t find the influencer you’re looking for, Traackr has a solution, too. You only have to give one of their social media handles to Traackr, and it will track down their socials with performance demographics.
Once you find the best fit for your influencer marketing campaign, it helps personalize a campaign plan considering your audience and business goals. Traackr is a paid tool with varying prices, starting from a minimum of $500/month.
Affable.ai
Influencer identification methods also involve connecting to the influencers and designing a campaign. Affable.ai is the tool that helps complete your influencer marketing campaign from A to Z. It assists you in every step, from building a campaign and searching for influencers to contacting them.
Affable.ai is like a sum of tools working on different aspects of influencer marketing. It also analyzes the influencer’s performance in your niche and predicts the results. This way, you get an idea of the success level of the influencer marketing campaign for your business.
It is a fully paid tool that works on every major platform, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The AI analyzes the influencer’s social media data and their engagement on different platforms to find the best fit for your business.
GroupHigh
With its data of more than 15 million blogs in every niche, GroupHigh mainly works on blogs and bloggers. You can analyze online content that connects with your influencer marketing campaign in any way. It helps you connect with your desired blogger to create content for your marketing campaign.
GroupHigh helps you track the performance report to help you understand the expected ROI of your campaign easily. The price packages vary based on the campaign plan and influencer’s level. And that’s why GroupHigh offers the option for a free demo to know the pricing.
Hunter.io
Hunter.io is among the most used influencer identification tools where you can find a valid email address for domains and individuals. Finding authentic email addresses is a time-consuming task, and hunter.io helps save valuable time. You can enter the name of an influencer or a domain, and it will suggest the valid email address of their business or site.
In addition, if you doubt whether an email address is correct, you can use hunter.io to find out. It’s a freemium tool, and you can use the free Chrome plugin version, which is quite simple. However, the free plugin has limited searches per month.
Things to do After Finding an Influencer
Create a Marketing Plan
To start with, create an influencer marketing campaign plan. In the plan, you can mention things like the details of your ideal consumers, the campaign period, the due time of payment, and more. Also, add the business goal you’re seeking from the campaign.
Find and Contact the Influencer
Find the right influencer using influencer identification tools and tips and contact them on their official social media account (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). Also, discuss the target audience to know how well the influencer understands them and their needs.
Discuss the Collaboration
Ensure that you address your expectations throughout the campaign. Also, discuss how they will update you on everything, including the results. It will help in a transparent conversation beforehand and avoid miscommunication later in the project.
You can always hire an influencer marketing agency like Kubico to skip the hassle of searching for the right influencer. We build the marketing campaign and find the influencer that suits your goals the best.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is among the top content marketing trends in 2023 and 2024 for achieving the desired business results. All it needs is successful influencer identification using the right methods and tools. While looking for an influencer for your business marketing, ensure relevance, authenticity, and engagement quality for better ROI. Undoubtedly, influencer search is a challenging task, but the above-suggested ten best tools will help make this search straightforward. Use the tool that matches your influencer marketing requirements and guarantee a clear conversation with the influencer from the start for a seamless campaign. Alternatively, connect to an influencer marketing agency to make the process easier.
FAQs
Should I do influencer marketing?
The need for influencer marketing depends on what your business currently requires. Influencer marketing is best for brand awareness. It is also suitable to push your sales with discount coupons.
How to identify influencers in a specific niche?
Check who your competitors work with to identify influencers in a specific niche. Though you must not collaborate with the same, it gives you an idea of what’s suiting the niche. Search on Google, social media, and influencer marketplaces and search for influencers in your niche.
What are common mistakes to avoid when identifying influencers?
Brands often consider the massive following without thinking if they need to target a macro or micro-influencer. You must always consider your needs before collaborating with an influencer. Also, always check the authenticity of the followers by analyzing engagement and using influencer identification tools.