You’ve got your influencer marketing strategies nailed down. You’ve honed your campaign goals, key metrics, messaging, and budget. All that’s left to start the campaign is finding the perfect creators with whom to collaborate. Manually searching platforms like Instagram or YouTube is no longer a viable option now that your boss or client wants hundreds of new creators or ambassadors added to your talent roster. On the other hand, influencer search solutions like CreatorIQ’s Discovery module can produce a significant volume of results. Going through the results utilizing the right influencer discovery strategy — including the order you search and filter — can help to quickly narrow down your options and ensure you connect with influencers who are perfect for your campaigns.
Check out Creator IQ’s top 5 strategies for discovering creators below:
Most Discovery tools like CreatorIQ provide a way to specify logic across filters. With each subsequent filter selected, the pool of people previously specified is incorporated, excluding anyone who doesn’t fit those first parameters. This is why it is essential to focus on the “must-haves” before honing in on the “nice to haves” — this way, we optimize our influencer discovery strategy and the quality of our discovery results. For example, you may want to search “moms who love tofu, live in Seattle, and are vegetarians” — but you’ve first searched for those who mentioned “tofu” in their captions and now those moms that eat tofu and don’t publicly talk about it, are left out of your search results! Instead, first specify the broader criteria like location, mom, and the creative ways in which vegetarians identify themselves (perhaps through creator bio) on social media.
By keeping a degree of flexibility in your search parameters, you’ll increase the number of creators that fit the requirements and free up the hours you would have spent searching for “vegetarian poker enthusiasts living in Mexico City.” While it’s easy to speculate that this is the exact type of creator your campaign needs for your influencer strategy, getting too granular too soon limits your results and your campaign potential because creators who in practice fit your description, might not label themselves that way explicitly. Instead, first, focus on the “must-haves” and sprinkle in the “nice to haves” in a trial and error process that will help you connect with influencers.
If you’re searching for keyword-based results, think about how your target audience is speaking about a certain topic, then research the specific hashtags used in that topic to know which should give you the greatest results. Once you have a list of hashtags, you will have a flexible list to mine for the different ways the same group talks about that particular topic. For example, are you searching for creators who are currently dating someone AND mentioning it on social media? Do they have to be a certain age? Would they use #bae or #datenight? Different hashtags will bring back results based on the group using that language.
You’ve found the perfect creator to help promote a hyper-local product launch event in Nashville – but their audience is located in Los Angeles. Whether they picked up national followers from a cross-country move or were featured on the Instagram Explore page, it’s important to make sure that a creator’s audience location aligns with the geographic goals outlined in the influencer marketing strategies for your campaign.
To draw a comparison to traditional advertising, purchasers often looked at a TV network’s audience before purchasing a commercial “spot” — similarly, your creators can be viewed as many TV channels, each with a captive audience to evaluate as potential converted markets.
The same logic applies when we discuss creator audience demographic vs. creator demographic. Most importantly, directional audience data like ethnicity, age, and gender is more widely and readily available and is served in aggregate while mining individual creator’s demographic data often poses both legal and ethical challenges.
A final pro tip on location: If you already have a creator that’s worked great for you in the past and applies to your campaign BUT they don’t have a perfectly aligned audience with your target audience, you can always promote the influencer’s content via paid media — that way, you can reach the exact audience you are intending to reach with relevant and authentic content.
Another influencer discovery strategy you can use is searching for keywords within creator bios. A bio provides insight into how the creator self-identifies, for example, as a member of the LGTQIA+ Community, and the other communities in which they are active. While searching by interest may reveal a creator’s hobbies or which accounts they find aspirational, the content in the creator’s bio serves as a closer indicator that they authentically practice what they speak about versus just putting up appearances that a keyword filter implies. An example of this might be someone trying a #crossfit class once and mentioning it in their caption vs. being a regular part of the Crossfit community, which enables them to identify more closely with the hobby and mention it in their bio. A creator’s bio not only allows you to intentionally connect with influencers but it provides a way to understand what matters to the creators with whom you connect.
Feeling ready to apply your new influencer discovery strategy? The above list is just the preview when it comes to influencer marketing strategies taught by CreatorIQ’s best-in-class Implementation team once using the tool. What’s more — CreatorIQ recently launched an all-new, more modern experience of our influencer marketing platform. It’s focused on simplicity and the usability of solutions like the Discovery tool that boosts your influencer strategy. To learn more about these upgrades including new, crystal clear search & filtering capabilities, where a more intuitive organization and workflow helps users master Creator searches from the start, please request a demo.