Influencer Marketing – How To Find The Right Platforms And People To Boost Your Brand

Over the last couple of years, influencer marketing has become a valuable marketing strategy for brands in all kinds of niches. And it can help your business in a number of ways.

When you partner with social media influencers (people with highly targeted, engaged, and usually sizable followings), you increase brand awareness and brand sentiment, and you get your content and offers in front of a significantly larger audience, thus improving your traffic and sales potential.

Especially if you’re a brand that’s struggling to connect, influencer marketing is a means of tapping into the already-established networks of social media influencers in a way that’s mutually beneficial. And when done influencer marketing is done right, it can be a total game-changer. 

How To Find Influencers In Your Niche

Below, you’ll more about two ways that you can scout out the best influencers for your brand.

1. You Can Use A Platform

Using a platform makes influencer marketing significantly easier to scale. Most influencer marketing software platforms consist of tens of thousands of influencers in a wide variety of niches. And when all of your partnerships are housed under one platform’s roof, they’re also much easier to manage.

If you’re a startup, however, and don’t yet have much of a marketing budget, you should hold off on using a platform and look for free ways to get mentions instead (more on that below).

But if you’re a seasoned brand, using a platform will help you build a solid campaign without all the guesswork.

Revfluence

Revfluence - Influencer marketing

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Our software tools empower in-house teams to build large-scale influencer programs to drive meaningful, measurable ROI.”

Revluence provides access to more than 150,000 influencers across social media. Its clients include ecommerce brands, like Dollar Shave Club, and global retailers, such as Walgreens and Calvin Klein.

Find Your Influence

Find Your Influence - influencer marketing

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Find Your Influence (FYI) provides a cloud-based application and service that enables brands and their agencies to connect with the highest caliber digital influencers to create authentic, organic content.”

The FYI platform has run more than 10,000 campaigns, connecting over 100,000 influencers to over 500 brands and businesses. Some of its noteworthy clients include Kleenex, Sony, Honda, and Budweiser.

Webfluential 

Webfluential - Influencer marketing

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“The platform makes it easy for marketers to create, manage, and track campaigns with credible influencers and provides influencers with the tools to market themselves to brands and monetize their audience.”

Like Revfluence and FYI, Webfluential has tens of thousands of influencers in its community. And it’s worked with a range of clients, including Adidas, Jaguar, Burger King, and Mindshare.

All three of these platforms can help amplify your marketing campaigns. Check out their websites and see which would be the best fit for your business’ needs.

2. You Can Find Influencers On Your Own And Use Vetting Tools

If you’re on a tight budget, this may be the better option for you. But before you start looking for influencers, you should first decide what your campaign goals are.

If your goal is to improve brand sentiment or loyalty, getting a small number of influencers with highly attentive followers to share your brand’s story is the optimal approach. On the other hand, if you want to increase brand awareness, you should aim to cast a bigger net, connecting with a larger number of influencers with larger followings.

Generally speaking, though, the size of an influencer’s following shouldn’t be the sole or even the primary determining factor you consider when assessing an influencer’s merit in relation to your goals.

When choosing which influencers you want to work with, here are 3 additional factors you should consider:

  1. Relevance – How closely aligned an influencer’s content is to your brand’s message
  2. Engagement – How much and how often an influencer’s audience interacts with the influencer’s content (e.g. likes, comments, retweets, and shares)
  3. Authenticity – Influencers who incorporate more personal stories into their sponsored content are perceived to be more trustworthy and authentic.

And to help evaluate the influencers you’re considering, here are two tools you can use:

  1. Social Blade – Use this tool to track user stats for YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch.
  2. Planx – Use Phlanx’s engagement calculator to assess how engaged an influencer’s audience is.

Influencer marketing is a powerful and lucrative strategy that’s helped countless brands significantly enhance their business.

What’s your opinion on influencer marketing? Have you tried it before? What results did you get? Contact us via social media and let us know!