How to Find Social Media Influencers to Promote Your Brand

You’ve worked hard to build your small business brand, and you may be at your wit’s end as to how to successfully and effectively promote that brand.

Have you considered influencer marketing? When you utilize influencer marketing, you team up with social media influencers who resonate with your brand and use their platform to get the word out about your products or services.

That way, you can save a lot of time and energy on marketing and advertising while still reaching your target audience. Learn how to build relationships and boost your brand visibility. 

Know Your Core Audience

Before you start your search for the perfect social media marketer, you need to familiarize (or re-familiarize) yourself with your target audience.

Your business may have changed over the years, or your audience may have changed. Either way, it’s good to re-evaluate who your target customer is.

Once you have that information, you’ll have a better idea of how to find influencers who cater to the same audience. 

Know Your Potential Influencers

Once you’ve refined your idea and definition of your core audience, it’s time to seek out top influencers in your industry.

The best way to do this is to use a search engine and social media platforms to search hashtags, keywords, and topics related to your industry or products/services.

Specifically, you want to look for journalists, bloggers, and analysts.

After you’ve found a potential influencer, scroll through her or his feed. Do posts resonate with your company culture, brand, and values?

Would you welcome this person onto your team? Do you feel you’d have a good working relationship with them?

Does this person actively engage with his or her audience? Does this individual have a sizeable audience? 

Know That Bigger Isn’t Always Better

With a free influencer, you might want to target those who have the biggest audience. This is not necessarily true.

The reason for this is that a social media influencer with a massive audience may not come across as authentic and genuine as an influencer with a small audience of anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.

Think about it: It’s easier to stay more engaged with a smaller audience and make them feel valuable and heard than it is to accomplish the same feat with a larger audience.

Plus, an influencer with a smaller audience is more likely to try your product or service, rather than follow a script.

You want positive word of mouth regarding your brand, rather than a questionable word of mouth, right?

Try your luck with micro-influencers and smaller audiences first and see how that works out for you.    

Engage with Influencers

Alright, so you’ve found a few potential candidates for your influencer campaign. Now it’s time to reach out to them.

One of the first things you want to do is follow them on social media and start engaging with posts that resonate with you; see if they respond.

It’s also a good idea to boost, promote, and share any posts you especially like. After all, there’s nothing wrong with starting things off with a little flattery.

Once influencers have you on their radar, it’s time to make contact. When taking the plunge, let influencers know who you are, what your brand is, and how you stumbled across their page or profile.

Explain that you’d like to gauge their interest in helping you with your content marketing strategy.

Break down what you can offer in exchange for their expertise and end your note with a call to action regarding how you’d like to proceed.

After you’ve sent your initial message, you’ll want to follow up. This is a good idea because there’s a good chance this person receives hundreds of emails a day, which means that yours can easily slip through the cracks.

Without following up, you may think the person isn’t interested while the influencer would love to work with you and promote your brand, it’s just that your initial message got lost in the inbox.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to send a follow-up email if you don’t hear back after a couple of days.

You may find yourself shocked at how much social media influencers can do for you and your brand. Use the above strategy to find and contact influencers to help with your marketing and advertising strategy.