Consumers are tired of listening to brands blow their own horns. They prefer recommendations from more trusted sources they can connect with on a more personal level. These people are often influencers who are experts in their niches and have loyal fan-followings. To reach their target audiences, big brands find these influencers and partner with them. 

This form of marketing seems to work too, and its popularity has surpassed that of print marketing. About 92% of marketers believe that it’s an effective method of marketing their products and brands. 

However, to get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to find reliable influencers. To help you find the right influencers for your campaign, let’s take a closer look at how the big brands find their influencers. 

1. Social Media 

Social media is the place where you can expect to find a large number of influencers. Due to this reason, it’s one of the best places to find influencers for your brand. 

To do so, you need to start looking for people posting in your niche. There may be some people who consistently post good content about your industry and generate good engagement. These people may be influencers. 

Alternatively, there may be some influencers who are already talking about your brand. By using social listening tools such as Awario and Hootsuite, you can find all the posts where your brand’s name has been mentioned. Some of these people may be influencers who would be happy to partner with your brand. 

Image via Hootsuite

2. Google Alerts 

You can use Google Alerts to monitor keywords online. Brands use this feature to find influencers as well. You can pick keywords from your industry and set up alerts up for them. Additionally, you should consider adding your product names and brand name as keywords too. 

Image via Google Alerts

Whenever someone uses these keywords, you’ll get notified. From these people, some of them might be publishing content related to your industry regularly. These people may be influencers. You can reach out to these influencers for collaborations. 

3. Influencer Research Tools 

One of the best ways of finding influencers is by using specialized influencer discovery tools. It can be quite a task to find a reliable and relevant influencers through other modes. But with the use of tools, it becomes simpler. 

Influencer research tools usually have a massive database of verified influencers from various niches. All you need to do is look for influencers in your niche and go through their profiles to figure out if you want to partner with them. 

These tools do all the hard work for you, such as calculating engagement rates, listing follower demographics, etc. This makes the entire process of finding influencers simpler and more transparent for you. 

Some of the tools that you can use to find genuine influencers are Influence.co, BuzzSumo, BuzzStream, and Traackr.

Image via Influence.co

4. Hashtag Research

Hashtags started out on Twitter but were quickly adopted by Instagram and Facebook to help categorize content. They can be used to find relevant influencers in your industry too. There are two ways of going about it: manually and by using tools. 

To conduct hashtag research manually, you can come up with a list of hashtags that are relevant to your niche. You can then keep track of these hashtags regularly and see who’s posting content using them. 

On Instagram, there’s a “Top” section, where all the top posts in the hashtag will be listed. Those who get featured on this list may be influencers. You can check their profiles and accordingly reach out to them. 

It also helps to have a branded hashtag. You can conduct hashtag research for your branded hashtags as well to find out if anyone’s talking about your brand. Some of the people who use your branded hashtag in their posts may be influencers who’d love to partner with you. 

Alternatively, you can use hashtag research tools such as Hashtagify. All you need to do is search for your hashtag, and the tool will provide detailed analytics about the hashtag. This includes its popularity, related hashtags, and trends. 

However, it also provides a list of the most popular influencers who use the hashtag. These are the people you can track and then reach out to for partnerships. 

Image via Hashtagify

Final Thoughts 

Finding a reliable influencer for your brand is crucial for the success of your influencer marketing campaign. You can find them through social media searches and social listening. 

Additionally, you can conduct hashtag research on platforms like Twitter and Instagram to look for relevant influencers. 

Google Alerts can also help you find influencers whenever anyone mentions a keyword that you’re following. To make the process even simpler, you can use influencer discovery tools that have a database of influencers. 

Do you find influencers in any other ways not already mentioned above? Let me know in the comments.