By Reez Ndukwe
Brands are continuously searching for influencers, In Hobo.Video’s story today read about what’s better a manual search or an automated search. There are many forms of marketing out there. In the digital space, we have social media marketing amongst many others. Influencer marketing as a subset of social media marketing has been observed to be the most effective and profitable marketing strategy employed in recent years after email marketing.
In fact, data analysis results from Nielson Catalina Solutions confirms that influencer marketing yields an excellent ROI of 11times more than other common forms of digital marketing.
The epicentre of all these notions is influencers. An influencer is someone with quite a large number of faithful fans online, who has the ability to urge them into making a purchasing decision based on his/her recommendation.
Influencers play a vital role in increasing brand awareness, boosting interpersonal engagement with customers or potential customers, and therefore driving sales up.
Because of the immense importance of influencers to brands, many people are pursuing this as a career. It has even gained the nickname “pink-collar job”. Nowadays, there are so many aspiring social media influencers emerging on a weekly basis.
Everyone wants to be an influencer but brands will select only a few to collaborate with. In India for instance, the number of influencers is over 50,000 which imply that finding the right influencers is becoming more difficult as the competition stiffens. There are two ways of finding influencers: manually or through automation tools and platforms. Consider what’s involved in both processes to decide how you want to launch your next winning influencer marketing campaign.
Searching for Influencers Manually
Some big corporations hunt for mega influencers such as Khan Shahrukh for more than $10,000 per Tweet or Kylie Jenner’s shout-out on Instagram for $1million per post.
On the other hand, many other companies hunt for mid-level or micro-influencers such as promotion for rupees per tweet or Instagram story. These days, there are countless brands looking for a couple of micro-influencers that will charge less and yet have a higher, more authentic engagement with their audience. Manually finding influencers who will resonate with your brand’s values takes a few steps.
You can probably guess that the labour of having to search through an ocean of content creators on social media and in the blog space is very inconvenient. Although it may be time-consuming searching for influencers with many social media accounts, it may turn rewarding at times. One very important thing to note is that fraud and fake social account holders.
You should learn to be able to spot fraudsters who boost their social media presence by buying fake followers and bots. Fake followers always make nonsensical comments or too many comments in a different language and emojis that don’t fit the content of the post.
Another red indicator that you’re dealing with a fake is if the account hasn’t been updated in months or years. You should suspect accounts that have few pictures, posts, and engagements but yet a large following. The low engagement will make it hard for your marketing department to spot trends since enough stats aren’t available.
In most instances, brands when searching for influencers manually when they’re looking only for just one or two known celebrity influencers. They search for them on the influencers’ most dominant social accounts and thereafter observe their activities before pushing in a DM for their collaboration. If the marketing department determines that the influencer is suitable for the brand after analysing the metrics, they will begin to participate in posts, comments and likes.
It is recommended that the continuous engagement by the brand marketing representative take place for months. Before sending a message to the influencer. You must create rapport with the influencer by your active engagements in his/her social posts before reaching out; otherwise, you will come up too pushy and scare away the influencer. Searching for influencers manually is a time- and resource-consuming process. It may end up making a poor choice because your decision has more to do with a risky gut feeling than factual metrics. These have a high potential for benefiting your brand.
Searching for Influencers by Automation
There is a statistical report from Moz that reveals that brands that use automated ‘influencer discovery tools’ for their search have produced 53 percent higher conversion rates than those that don’t. The annual revenue growth of brands that search for influencers by automation is often slightly higher than brands that conduct manual search.
An influencer discovery tool is the fastest and most efficient way to discover the right influencers that will be perfect for your brand. It reduces the risk of fraud as well as the time spent in manually searching for reputable influencers and celebrities.
In order for marketers to work more efficiently, many of them use influencer marketing platforms and software. These constitute the influencer discovery tools aforementioned. Using influencer discovery tools doesn’t make the task less daunting. It is because managing the hundreds or thousands of influencers who have already signalled availability or have signed in is another headache.
An influencer discovery tool is a software tool that assists the user to search for influencers who are capable and willing to partner with marketers for an influencer marketing campaign. You can search for influencers relevant to your marketing needs by doing the following:
- First, open an account with one of the examples highlighted below. Beware that for the best outreach experience, it is better to subscribe to the premium account.
- You can fill in your profile form and ensure that you clearly map out what your wants are so as to enable your search results to be well optimised in harmony with your profile details.
- You can either type in a name directly on the search box or if you have no influencer’s name in mind, you can simply juggle through the filters.
Every influencer discovery tool has search filters that provide you with options on the influencers’. They Include scale/number of followers, demographics, the market niche and so on. Marketers or brand representatives utilise this and add the best influencers to their cart. When they are done selecting influencers that meet their taste. Think of it as an e-commerce site for influencers rather than for regular goods. For example, you can pick micro-influencers from Shimla India who are in the Travel and Adventure niche. Most of these automated tools provide an unlimited list of influencers. That can match your brand’s criteria as well as well-researched profiling on each of them. You can also copy some influencer/audience data and insights. You can export it to a spreadsheet or do social media analytics on some of the platforms.
6 Tools That Help Automate Your Search For Influencers
- Shoutcart
Shoutcart is an influencer marketing platform where you can automatically search for Instagram influencers. You can also decide to buy shoutouts from mega-influencers or celebrities if you prefer that.
- Brand Connect
Formerly called Famebit. Brandconnect by Youtube is a search tool used mostly to find YouTube content creators. It operates like a freelance site due to the fact that brand representatives or marketers would create a marketing campaign, set a budget for it and open the floor for influencers to bid by signing in and promptly sending in proposals.
- Influenz
Influenz just like the majority of tools mentioned here has undergone meticulous verification. This has been done to ensure their clients’ followers are real and engaged. In the same light, they can help your brand communicate with the influencers on your behalf.
- Ninja Outreach
Ninja is an outreach program that discovers bloggers and social media influencers for you with the ability to help you import and manage existing contact lists.
- Influicity
Influicity is the largest list-builder for all ranges of influencers from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. It will help you find influencers, organise and build a list of them. It’ll also help you manage contract activities with the ones selected.
- BuzzStream
Buzzstream is actually one of the most powerful tools on this list. Yet the most underrated out there for this sort of function. It is like a do-it-yourself CRM tool. It gives you the added leverage of compiling a database of influencers and managing outreach independently. Using BuzzStream Discovery and BuzzStream Outreach, marketers can research on influencers before contacting them.
Discover Indian Influencers on Hobo.Video!
Hobo.Video has one of the most trusted influencer discovery tools in its search box. It has many selective filters you can add to your keyword search before presenting the final search results to you. Hobo.Video’s influencer search tool can benefit your marketing efforts and budget. Especially if you’re looking for macro-and micro-influencers in India. Click here to discover Indian influencers of all categories.
