3 Ways to Find Powerful Micro-Influencers and Reach a Brand New Audience

There's a long history of celebrity endorsement in advertising.

From Orson Welles selling wine and peas, to Britney Spears for Pepsi in the early 2000s…

The influence celebrities have over consumers can help power brands and product lines toward success.

But today, social media has changed the game.

We still have traditional celebrities like famous actors and pop stars, but the internet has created a new class of notable, influential individuals.

They're called “influencers,” and they're basically people who are popular online.

They can reach anywhere from 10,000 to over 100,000 people.

They can be well-known Youtubers, niche bloggers, Instagram beauty mavens, and more.

On the lower end of the scale, you have what are called “micro-influencers.”

These are people with five-figure social media followings, and for the right price, they're willing to promote a product that gels with their own brand image.

Unlike a true celebrity endorsement, getting a good word from a micro-influencer is something small businesses can afford to do.

In a recent post, Buffer explains how to find the right micro-influencers for your brand.

The interest in influencer marketing has been growing steadily over the past few years and more people are seeking to understand more about it now than ever before.

Just take a look at this Google Trends chart:

[image source: Buffer]

According to eMarketer, 48 percent of marketers decided to increase their budget for influencer marketing in 2017. And only four percent had plans to decrease their budget.

If you’re thinking of running an influencer marketing campaign, it can be a little daunting:

How to do I discover the right influencers?

What’s the best way to reach out to influencers?

What does success look like?

We’d love to help you answer these questions and more…

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you run a social media influencer marketing campaign.

[image source: Buffer]

What are micro-influencers?

In this guide, we’ll focus on only micro-influencers — influencers with a niche engaged following.

A study by Dr. Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, and the Keller Fay Group, defines micro-influencers as:

Individuals who work in their category or are truly knowledgeable, passionate and authentic and are seen as a trusted source when it comes to recommendations for what to buy.

To illustrate how micro-influencer marketing works, here’s an example I found on Instagram where @amandafrederickson collaborated with Thermomix.

As you can see in the video below, Amanda shares an interesting and fun recipe with her audience and makes it using one of Thermomix’s products:

A step-by-step guide to running a micro-influencer marketing campaign

As this is a long and detailed guide, here’s a quick overview of the steps in this guide:

Plan and strategize

Find suitable micro-influencers

Reach out to your target micro-influencers

Coordinate the campaign

Measure the results

1. Plan and strategize

Set your goals and metrics

The first step is to set your goals and the metrics you’ll use to measure success.

Your goals will affect which influencers you work with and how you collaborate with them. And your selected metrics will help you assess the success of your campaign at the end of it.

Here are some possible goals and metrics you could consider:

Brand awareness – Reach of the campaign, growth in social media following, number of social media mentions, etc.

Increased sales – Growth in sales, amount of sales through a designated coupon code for the influencer, etc.

Engagement and customer retention – Engagement generated during the campaign, number of repeat customers during the campaign, etc.

Increased social media following – Growth in social media following

Once you have selected your metrics, record the current stats just before the start of your campaign. You’ll compare them with the stats at the end of your campaign.

Select your social media platform(s)

The next step of your planning phase is to decide where you want to run your social media influencer marketing campaign.

Each platform has its unique style, audience and works well for different objectives.

Here are some things you can think about:

Target audience: Pick the platform where your audience is. For example, if you want to reach teenagers or young adults, you might want to go with Snapchat.

Visual or text content: If you want the micro-influencer to post a photo, you might want to go with Instagram or Pinterest. For videos, maybe YouTube or Facebook. For text, maybe LinkedIn.

Outbound link: It is slightly harder to drive people to an external website from Instagram and Snapchat platform. (A method is through Stories.)

You might also want to check out less-known and less-popular social media platforms as well. For example, musical.ly, a platform for creating and sharing short videos, has become very popular among teens. Other platforms you can check out include Anchor, Medium, and Tumblr.

If you already have a marketing persona, you can use that to guide your decisions. You should look to identify:

The platforms your audience is already active on

The type of content they would want to see

Copy that would attract their attention

2. Find suitable micro-influencers

As this is a key step for running an influencer marketing campaign, this section is a little more detailed than the rest to help you find the best micro-influencers for your campaign.

3 ways to find micro-influencers

There are several ways to find suitable micro-influencers, depending on the amount of time and money you want to spend.

1. Manual research

The most affordable way is to research manually on each social media platform.

The major social media platforms all allow you to search for profiles. The best way to research users is to enter the keyword for your campaign such as “food” or “fitness” and use the filters to narrow down the search results.

Here are some examples:

For Facebook, you might want to only look at “Pages”. You can filter the results by category, if your friends have liked the Page, or if the Page is verified.

[image source: Buffer]

For Twitter, you would want to select the “People” tab. You can reduce the results further by selecting “People you follow” and “Near you” if you are looking for a micro-influencer near you.

Here are more tips on using Twitter’s Advanced Search feature.

[image source: Buffer]

For Instagram, you can search for “People”, “Tags”, or “Places”. Here’s more information on the five ways to use Instagram Search to find Instagram influencers.

[image source: Buffer]

For YouTube, the best method seems to be searching on Google. You can search for “(your keyword) youtube” such as “food youtube”, and Google will bring up YouTube channels related to your keyword.

[image source: Buffer]

The next step is to manually look through the profiles and take note of those that might be suitable for your influencer marketing campaign.

A quick tip is to keep an eye out for relevant keywords in the username or handle. Often, micro-influencers would include their niche in their username or handle such as @kellybakes.

The downside to this approach is that it can be quite time-consuming. But here’s a tip I learned from Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant that specializes in influencer marketing:

2. Look through your follower list

Sometimes, the micro-influencer you’re looking for might already be following your brand on social media.

You could manually go through your follower list or use a tool like Social Rank to help you.

Once you connect your Twitter or Instagram account to Social Rank, you can filter by keywords in bio. For example, here are my followers who have “food” in their Twitter bio:

[image source: Buffer]

You can also look for clues on their profile, such as their handle, username, bio, or posts, to see if they belong to the niche you want to reach.

Apart from speeding up the search process, another advantage of this approach is that the micro-influencer might already be a fan of your brand and would more likely agree to a collaboration.

3. Use an influencer marketing platform or hire an agency

This approach might cost a little but can save you some time and could bring you better results.

In general, most platforms are self-serve, while most agencies would have someone to help you with the search and collaboration.

These platforms and agencies often keep a record of the past collaborations and reviews of the influencers, which can help you make better decisions.

Here are some of the influencer marketing platforms you could try:

Whalar

Tomoson

Grapevine

Influence.co (provides free influencer search)

Klear (provides limited free influencer search)

Revfluence

Famebit (by YouTube)

[image source: Buffer]

As for influencer marketing agencies, here are the eight that Influencer Marketing Hub recommends.

If you run a local business, you might also want to search on Google for agencies that are based in your area. They might have the best relationships with the influencers in your area.