Ready to take your marketing campaigns to the next level? Partnering with an influencer may provide just the spark you need to reach new goals and new audiences effectively. Influencers are content creators who’ve built trustworthy reputations and engaged relationships with their audiences — who can also be your target markets. Because of the ways their audiences view them, influencers have the ability to guide these followers’ purchasing decisions. When you build a relationship with an influencer, they can share your product benefits and reach your shared audience in ways you might not.
Are you planning a campaign for YouTube or Instagram? Let’s take a look at how to find influencers on these platforms — and why you should.
Benefits of Working with Instagram and YouTube Influencers
Having an influencer introduce your brand to their followers as a trustworthy company is just one advantage of this type of marketing. Other benefits of influencer marketing include the following:
- It helps you reach your target audience more effectively. Influencer marketing feels authentic, almost as though a friend is making a recommendation. The audience trusts the influencer’s opinions. Plus, seeing an influencer use or review a product feels more personal and less like a hard sell.
- Influencer marketing boosts brand awareness. You’re reaching the influencer’s audience, which can be quite different from your existing audience.
- It can improve — or at least diversify — your content. For example, say you’re not currently using video as part of your marketing strategy. Working with a YouTube influencer opens your campaign up to a whole new type of previously untapped content.
- It can enhance your search performance. Your influencer can create buzz around your brand, provide brand mentions and backlink to your site. This increases traffic and boosts your domain authority. The higher your domain authority score is, the more trustworthy search engines deem it, resulting in better SERP performance.
Choosing a Campaign Type
You’ve decided to work with an influencer, but it’s important to make sure your campaign is one that can fully utilize influencer marketing strategies. Remember that YouTube and Instagram are highly visual platforms. These options can help you make the most of the partnership:
- Giveaways: You give your influencer one of your products, and they have their followers perform certain actions to enter for a chance to win the product. They might need to use a campaign-specific hashtag on Instagram or subscribe to the YouTuber’s channel before they’re entered to win.
- Sponsored posts: Your influencer posts a YouTube video, Instagram Story, Instagram photo or combination of content types featuring your product. They might demonstrate how to (or how they) use it. This could pair with a giveaway.
- Product seeding: This approach isn’t as coordinated as others, but it can be cost effective and feel more organic. It involves gifting influencers your product without payment and taking the chance that they’ll use it, like it and tell followers about it.
- Takeovers: Better suited for Instagram than YouTube, a takeover involves an influencer posting new content to your social media accounts. The influencer promotes the takeover on their own accounts, which directs their followers to your profile.
Finding Instagram Influencers
In any campaign, it’s important to find influencers who engage with followers, reach people and align with your brand’s field or niche. There are several helpful ways to find Instagram influencers who are the best fit for your marketing efforts. One of the most helpful (and simplest) is to search for hashtags related to your industry. You might already use them in your posts to connect with consumers. Find out who else is using them, how often those people post and how frequently they engage with followers.
There could also be potential or existing influencers right under your nose. Take a look through your own followers to see if any of those users post about your niche or already have substantial audiences. They’re familiar with your brand enough to follow you, which you can use to your advantage. And don’t forget competitors. Check their accounts to see who’s following them — these users might also be interested in your product.
Finding YouTube Influencers
After Instagram, YouTube is another of the most important platforms for influencer marketing. Finding influencers on this platform differs slightly from researching for Instagram.
One of the easiest ways is to search YouTube itself. As a Google subsidiary, YouTube’s search algorithm is highly targeted. Perform a search using keywords related to your niche, brand and audience, and don’t be afraid to get specific. Looking for “millennial vegan baker” will get you closer to your audience than something generic, like “foodie influencer.” Do the same thing with hashtags or by searching on YouTube’s Trending page to find influencers whose star power is growing.
Finding influencers on both platforms is also simpler when you use influencer research tools. These platforms can help you find influencers that fit your niche and whose audiences fit your target demographics. They often take care of the vetting process to ensure you pair up with someone who’s the right fit for your brand, too. Learn more about what one of these tools can do for you by exploring the IZEAx Discovery influencer marketplace.