How To Find Influencers: Guide to Sourcing Creators

The majority of brands tap into influencer marketing for their social strategies — in fact, influencer marketing spend is outpacing social ad spend, growing at a remarkable 14.3% compared to 9.7% for social ad budgets. However, this doesn’t mean throwing your valuable budget at just any influencer — even if they’re one of the most followed influencers on social. 

Finding the right influencer might mean a creator with a smaller following that’s ultra-popular in your niche or that reaches an ultra-engaged segment of the audience demographic you’re trying to target. Simply put, finding the best influencers is a balanced practice that can propel your campaign to new heights. Here’s how to find influencers for your brand who can help you build trust, drive sales and achieve your goals.

Dash Social’s Creator Management feature provides end-to-end creator management for your brand. Here’s how to tap into the tool to find the right influencers for your specific objectives:

Set Goals 

Before diving into the platform, identify your campaign goals. Whether it’s simply boosting awareness or driving specific product sales, these are essential to finding the right influencer. 

Refine Your Search

Based on your goals, use filters to select creators based on followers, location, keywords, interests, brand mentions or even a visual filter to find creators posting similar media to the content you’re looking for.  

Sort Creators

Once you’ve identified potential creators, sort creators by different metrics like engagement rate or follower count. 

Review Content

It might go without saying, but data is just one portion of your influencer sourcing. Now, explore each creator’s content and online presence to ensure a good fit. This is also your time to determine if there are potential controversies surrounding an influencer that might conflict with your brand identity and values.

Bookmark and Compare

Finally, take a look at influencers and creators side-by-side to compare overall data — average engagements, engagement rate and followers, to help you determine which creators you’d like to work with. 

Scroll Social Media 

While it might be considered a bit basic, we have to touch on the simple act of scrolling social media. While data and tools are helpful to streamline the posting process, there’s something to be said for organically finding an influencer who resonates with you — or your brand. 

Scrolling social media helps you stay informed about what UGC creators are sharing, the creators that are popular among the masses, what trends they’re tapping into and more.  

Conduct a Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is essential to nearly any aspect of your social strategy — whether you’re developing a new campaign, event or working with creators. For sourcing influencers, your team’s competitive analysis should include a few key things:

• Who are your competitors?
• How many influencers do they work with?
• How much content is UGC, and how much is developed for the brand? 
• How much content is posted to the brand’s and creator’s pages? 
• What type of content do these creators share to promote products or services? 

You might ask yourself other questions during this process, but these are some essential things to look for while conducting your analysis.

Attend Industry Conferences

Industry conferences are a great way to connect with your peers to chat creator strategy — what’s more, creators often attend these events, making it a great opportunity to meet people in person and get a better feel for how they could work with your brand. While Zoom and Skype have undoubtedly revolutionized the way people work, there’s something to be said for the connection you can build with in-person meetings. 

Tap Into Existing Brand Advocates 

Who knows their network better than creators who already advocate for your brand? Whether you’re a food brand partnering with professional chefs or a beauty industry brand working with a makeup artist, these professionals likely have an idea of other folks in their industry who would be a great fit for your brand or even influencers they love to follow — whether or not these creators end up being an excellent match for your brand, it gives you an idea of who people in this industry like to watch, who they see on their social feeds and more. 

Use Hashtag Research 

Hashtags can be a powerful tool to source creators. Hashtags exist for nearly any industry and niche — to use TikTok hashtags to source influencers, visit the ‘Explore’ or the ‘FYP’ pages, finding creators in your niche and which hashtags they use. From there, dive into the tags and explore the influencers posting with them. Similarly, this approach works for Instagram hashtags — checkout which hashtags suggested accounts on your timeline use, and how creators in your industry are using hashtags to promote their paid and UGC content. 

We know there are many ways to source influencers, but how do you excite them about your brand and make the most of your relationship with them? When you find the right creator for your brand or campaign, this can be the hardest — yet most rewarding — stage of your creator marketing strategy.  

Engage Authentically 

It should go without saying, but engaging with the creator is a great way to indicate your interest in their content. It also helps the impact of your proposal and initial outreach — while not every brand takes this step (especially depending on the scope of influencers they work with), it shows your brand genuinely likes and consumes their content. 

Create a Proposal

Crafting a compelling proposal is key, whether you’re a brand seeking internal buy-in for influencer marketing or reaching out to creators directly. Here’s how to approach it from both perspectives:

For Internal Influencer Pitching

• What are the benefits?: Clearly explain how influencer partnerships can help achieve specific business goals like increased brand awareness, conversions or audience growth. Use data from case studies or data aggregators like Emarketer. 
• Which influencers will you target?: Identify the types of influencers you plan to work with, whether you’re looking for micro-influencers, fitness influencers or other types of influencers. Emphasize how their size or their niche aligns with your campaign or overall brand objectives. 
• What’s your budget?: Detail how much influencer campaigns can cost in a typical social media marketing budget, along with how you’ll compensate influencers and any other budgetary considerations, like content production costs, for example. Address potential concerns in this section by explaining social media ROI potential. 

For External Influencer Pitching

Outreaching to influencers benefits from a personal, yet professional proposal. Here’s what to include to help your brand stand out: 

• Who are you?: Share who you are, your agency or brand’s niche and, of course, why you’re reaching out in the first place. Explain what makes your brand unique — this could range from your mission, standout products, solutions your brand offers and how it relates to the creator. 
• What’s your campaign objective?: Explain your campaign goals and how you think the influencer will complement your campaign. Clarify what you hope to achieve — whether this is driving sales with an affiliate link, generating awareness or launching a product. 
• What does the collaboration entail?: Outline the scope of the partnership, like deliverables (how many posts, Stories, Reels, etc.), timelines and even content themes or briefs, if appropriate. Be clear about expectations to proactively set the standard for your partnership.
• How will they be compensated?: Describe the proposed budget or offer details, including product gifting, flat fees or performance-based payment. If you’re open to negotiation, mention that flexibility to show you’re serious about creating a fair partnership.

Meet the Influencer

Whether it’s on Zoom or in person, meeting the influencer is an essential part of working with influencers. This allows you to get a feel for how your team will work together and develop a closer relationship between the influencer and your team. Meeting in person can allow you to see what kind of impression the influencer makes on others and get a better sense of their personality.  

Dash Social’s creator and influencer marketing solutions simplify creator relationship management with tools that centralize communication, performance metrics and optimizations. Its dashboard lets brands oversee all partnerships in one convenient place while providing AI-driven insights to predict content success, so you can hone in on the creators that will help your brand and their content. With integrated reporting, brands can measure ROI across owned, earned and creator media and analyze trends within their creator network to inform future strategies. These features streamline collaboration and influencer management so your team can spend less time organizing and pulling data, and more time strategizing.

How to find micro-influencers? 

A great way to find micro-influencers is to focus on creators with niche audiences that align with your brand. Use tools like Dash Social to filter creators by following count, engagement and more. Another, more manual way to find influencers is to search relevant hashtags for creators making content that fits your niche. You can also check your followers for micro-influencers who already love your brand or have already made content around it. Partnerships with these creators often feel more impactful and authentic.

How do you find local influencers?

Local influencers are great for regional campaigns. Search location-specific hashtags and geotags (perhaps for your brick-and-mortar locations) on Instagram or TikTok. You can also check local businesses, city-based media outlets or attend events to find creators in your target region. Don’t forget to scan your followers for active creators living near these regions — they could be a perfect fit for local partnerships or reaching a global audience.