I bet you’re finding the answer for “how to find Instagram influencers” if you’re a Shopify store owner. Well, influencer marketing becomes one of the most powerful marketing tools in today’s digital world. It’s better if you have Instagram feed on your online store. But, how to to find them for your own online business?
Instagram boasts a huge audience that you can tap into with your marketing tactics. 1 billion people use Instagram every month, and that audience is growing bigger by the day. However, lots of online merchants are struggling with how to find Instagram influencers for their stores.
Let’s have a glance at how Daniel Wellington (DW) leverages the influential power of Instagram influencers:
DW team approached thousands of influencers across niche groups, including fashion, photography, lifestyle, travel, even tech influencers on Instagram to promote the brand. They give out free watches and drive consumer action by including unique coupon codes with their influencer-created content.
And the result?
DW’s Instagram account has grown from 850k to 2.1 million followers within 1 year, then drives the company’s revenue around $220 million.
And what about us? Do we need to reach out to top influencers on Instagram to drive brand awareness, exposure, conversions, and customer retention? Or you just need to approach micro-influencers? That’s why we hand you ways to find “that one” on Instagram for your online business in this post.
Before digging deep into the guide on how to find Instagram influencers, we’ve split our content into the following main parts:
- What are Instagram influencers?
- Different types of influencers
- How to find Instagram influencers?
- How to contact Instagram influencers?
- Common mistakes when looking up social media influencers
Now, let’s get to it…
What is Instagram Influencers?
It’s simply reaching out to different influencers on Instagram to promote your products to their audience. So these influencers already have their followers on an Instagram account, and businesses leverage those followings for business goals.
3 types of influencers
We’re gonna break it down into 3 different influencer categories:
Micro-influencers: 1,000 – 10,000 followers
They can help you tap into tiny markets. So, if you’re looking to convert followers to customers, this is your best bet.
Macro-influencers: 10,000 – 1M followers
With micro-influencers, you can partner up with hundreds of them. But what if you don’t want to do that? That said, you should give macro-influencers a place in your strategy.
Celebrities: > 1M followers
If it’s lots of awareness that you need, they’re your best bet. But it’s a little bit like putting all of your eggs into one basket.
So, why are Instagram influencers so dominant in today’s digital world?
Building a following on Instagram is not easy, especially if you’re a beginner in operating a business account. If you sell visually-appealing products, it certainly helps. But honestly, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to build a following just by posting images related to your products or your brand.
If you don’t already have an established audience on the platform, it’s going to be hard to use Instagram to grow your business. That’s exactly why Instagram influencers are so useful for eCommerce brands. They’ve already built up their following on the platform organically. They have thousands of followers, and these followers are genuinely interested in what the influencer posts. In other words, they’re “who to follow on Instagram”.
As influencers already have their fanbase, they’ll help you a lot in generating website traffic. Their followers will search for your products, your brand on Google to find your website. Do you see it? They also help with the SEO field. As they are influencers, they absolutely help you increase social media following, in this case, is Instagram, hence improve your conversion rate.
The power of social media influencers bring us to the next point:
2. How to find Instagram influencers for Shopify?
2.1. Know your business goals
Do you have any specific objective in mind? Why do you want to collaborate with influencers? Before finding social media influencers, especially on Instagram, you should have a particular goal in mind.
- Do you want to increase brand awareness?
- Do you aim to generate leads or sales?
- Or, do you need more followers for your Instagram business account?
Your choice of influencers will depend on these.
To increase your Instagram followers, you might need to create competitions or quizzes that require hashtags. Roping an influencer who can encourage followers to participate in the contest could be the right way to go.
On the other hand, for sales and lead generation, you will need affiliate marketing and discount codes. So, make sure to partner with influencers whose audience is likely to buy your product.
After determining the goal for your business, now ask yourself:
Do they fit your brand’s personality?
If there’s no alignment between the influencer and your brand, the ROI will be so low. So, do find an influencer that matches your brand.
That said, an influencer who is known for her excellent taste in fashion would be a good fit to promote a new pair of heels. Looking up for music influencers on Instagram might be a waste of time.
2.2. Look for engagement
Engagement is one of the critical metrics that you need to take into account if you’re deploying Instagram influencer marketing.
The average engagement rate on Instagram is around 3%. Of course, each type of influencer has a specific engagement rate. So, take the time to make some comparisons to make the best decision.
2.3. Analyze comments
Beware of Fake influencers! One way to determine if the influencer is fake or genuine is by analyzing comments on their posts. Such vague comments like “nice pic”, or “cool dress”, or “looking good”, and comments with emojis are regarded as fake.
Also, relevant and conversational comments are the sign of real engagement, which brings us to the next point:
2.4. Search for Word of Mouth (WOM) reactions
Signs to recognize real followers:
- Ask questions
- Make personal statements
- Tag friends in the comment
Check out the following post from Jeanne Damas, a fashion and lifestyle Instagram influencer. All her posts receive real responses from her genuine followers, not bots. Check out this one:
2.5. Explore hashtags relate to your brand
It’s better to find Instagrammers have already talked about your brand or your product. They could be a good fit for your influencer campaign. To do this, do some hashtag research.
Avoid high-density hashtags
Hashtags are like keywords for SEO. High-density hashtags are like the seed keywords in SEO, they are the most used hashtags on Instagram. You probably don’t want to use these for your post. Using these hashtags to look up influencers wastes time.
If you start your search with “floral”, you’ll have to go through more than 19,000,000 results.
But, if you dig deeper into long-tail hashtags, the number of posts is lower. In this case, #floralshop has 22,581 posts, #floralstore has 2,75 posts, while #floralshopmiami has only 84 posts.
We suppose the #floralstore will provide you with more accurate search results. #floralshopmiami has quite a few effects to be considered for influencer searches.
2.6. Start with keywords describe your brand or your target audience
Doing hashtag research, you can also start with keywords that describe your brand or target audience as well.
If you’re selling a travel gear, start your search with something like #travel, and Instagram will suggest the most trending and relevant hashtags.
Here you can use hashtags like #traveladdict, #traveldiary, or #travel_captures to look for influencers catering to a specific niche. By doing this, you might find out even the top travel Instagram influencers.
2.7. Notice the #sponsored or #ad
Instagram requires influencers to put #sponsored or #ad into their posts to distinguish promotional content. Absolutely, why don’t start your search with these two hashtags? Influencers on Instagram will display on your screen. Now, your job is choosing the right one.
2.8. Use influencer finding platforms
All the above methods might be useful but still manual and time-consuming. Now, we have influencer marketing platforms for you to find the right one with just a few clicks.
The following benefits will make you want to use influencer finding platforms:
- Save time
- Has parameters to find the right one
- Manageable
- Analytical
But remember, ask yourself the following questions when choosing a platform:
- Does the platform have a substantial number of influencers from your niche? How is the influencers’ quality?
- What kind of content creation, distribution, and tracking tools are available on the platform?
- Does the platform provide a good selection of real-time analytics and reporting tools?
- Do you have any problems with payment?
- What are people saying about that platform?
Here are several examples of influencer marketing platforms you might want to get started with:
With influence.co, you can find not only a bunch of influencers but also their profiles that show how many brands they’ve already worked with. The platform also allows you to see how much it costs to work with these influencers.
This is a really great tool to start doing research and putting together a list of potential influencers that you want to partner with.
Klear is a free tool made specifically for influencer marketing. We call Klear is essentially an influencer database as it breaks down influencers into 60,000 topic categories and analyzes their demographics and psychographics. So, the search doesn’t take much time. Klear allows users to filter the influencer lists by social media network, their audience size, their skills, location, keywords they mention.
This tool also enables you to measure and analyze the results of your influencer campaigns to find out which one works best.
This platform helps you find Instagram and Twitter influencers from its database.
Once you choose your niche and location, the platform will display a list of relevant influencers, along with their profiles on social media, and emails as well. With NinjaOutreach, you can also see each influencer’s engagement level, and how much to work with them.
How to contact Instagram influencers?
Now, let’s go through what you need to do to contact an influencer.
1. Craft a compelling pitch
First and foremost, put yourself in the influencer’s shoes. Your purpose is to create content that’s an appeal to their audience, so how can you create an offer that makes them excited? Why would they want to collaborate with your brand?
You need to think through different collaboration options, provide the influencers with the proposal that they can’t deny.
Now, you should also keep your pitch short and sweet. Do not send them a 5-paragraph email as it’s overwhelming and our receiver might not want to read through. So, make sure that you’re able to convey passion, personalize it as much as possible.
Another thing: yes, you can definitely send messages, direct messages on Instagram. Lots of brands do that, and it’s quite useful. But, we also encourage you to email them.
2. Create email sequence
The next thing you would want to do is have an email sequence. Most influencers have tons of emails to respond to, so normally, it may take them 3-5 days to reply back. So, what we suggest you do is set up an email sequence through your email marketing software (Mailchimp or Pitchbox). This is quite easy to set up. All you mostly have to do is write personalized emails.
Just one thing, don’t expect the influencers to write back to you right away, it might take up to 3 emails for them to finally reply to you.
3. Popular mistakes
Let’s talk about some common mistakes that brands make when they look for influencers:
- Contact extremely popular bloggers. You might have done this in the past. You contacted someone, but you never hear back from them. They receive your offer, they look at it, then they just ignore it.
- Dismiss to analyze the influencer’s audience. This is important because you need to ensure the influencer’s audience matches your brand’s customer profile. Make sure their audience’s profile is a proper fit with what you’re selling. Otherwise, you’re wasting your money.
- Fail to spot “Fakes”. There are lots of fake accounts out there, so you need to take time to go through one by one account to make sure they are available potential partners to work with.
The last words
Now you should know how to find Instagram influencers, which is no longer a new marketing technique. But, only the right influencers can help you succeed. Spend time and effort to do research and find the perfect match for your business. There are no best people to follow on Instagram, there are suitable ones to follow!
What did you do when looking up influencers for your brand? Share with us in the comment section below!
