How to find and recruit the perfect influencers for your brand – without breaking the bank

Influencer marketing is the fastest growing area of modern day marketing. But to make it work for your brand, you need to find and recruit the right partners – which doesn’t always mean the biggest influencers.

Authentic influencers are really the key to success. According to an article from Martech, 90% of marketers believe influencer marketing is effective – but the #1 challenge for those who run campaigns in-house is finding creators.

The traditional ways of finding influencers involve extensive research – going platform by platform, searching hashtags and keywords, spending precious hours to often come away with nothing. Alternatively, many brands choose to hire high-priced agencies to manage influencer marketing. But not all organizations can afford such luxuries. 

How to Find and Recruit the Perfect Influencers for Your Brand – Without Breaking the Bank

Choose Authentic Creators

Above all else, finding creators who are authentic and relatable to your desired audience is pivotal. This means you need to develop a picture of your ideal customer, including their pain points, needs, and wants. 

The right kind of influencers for your brand are those who resonate with your ideal customer. They align with your brand, voice, and values. Ideally, they actually use your product or service and are able to connect authentically with your shared audience because they are true fans of your offering.

Skipping this step is a serious error. Don’t fall victim to a pure numbers game. In influencer marketing, authenticy breeds trust – and sometimes smaller creators can actually have a greater impact.

Choose Your Influencer Mix

There are 6 categories of influencers to consider when beginning your partner search.

1. Mega-influencers – greater than 1 million followers. This is the category most brands think they need in influencer marketing. But bigger isn’t always better, especially if you don’t have a huge budget or built-in name recognition, because influencers of this size are often seen as “advertisers” and can come across as inauthentic.

2. Macro-influencers – 500K to 1 million followers. These are big shots who often have many offers and are usually looking for the greatest payout.

3. Midi-influencers – 100K to 500K followers. If you don’t have a huge budget but want at least one creator with reach, midi-influencers are a sweet spot because they generally look to find authentic, scalable brand relationships that will propel them to the next level.

4. Rising influencers – 50K to 100K followers. Diversifying your influencer mix is key and this category of influencers are typically more open to collaborating with newer brands and negotiating compensation.

5. Micro-influencers – 10k to 50K followers. This is a great place to start when you’re looking for a niche market because these up-and-comers are dialed into their community and on their way to amassing a larger following without being overly hyped.

6. Nano influencers – up to 10K followers. While they may not have a huge following, they could be a perfect place to launch your influencer marketing campaigns. Plus, they usually are thrilled to partner with a brand and may go above and beyond for you.

Although having many options to choose from seems like it would make things easier, without the right guidance, knowing how to choose the best influencers for your brand can be tricky. 

You need to think like a marketer – and a human. Building relationships and true connections is the name of the game in effective influencer marketing, which is why it’s crucial to recruit the right creators and develop a successful, long-term marketing collaboration. 

Authenticity, brand alignment, and reputation—no matter how big a following—takes precedence in a fruitful brand-influencer relationship and should be taken into consideration every step of the way.

Fast Track Your Influencer Recruitment

While, of course, you can follow the traditional methods of searching for your ideal creator partnerships, many brands want a solution that offers highly quality results without spending a ton of time or money to achieve it.

And until now, that was a pipe dream.

There’s one platform changing the landscape as the premier provider for influencers and brands. 

Creatable not only plays matchmaker for creators and brands, but also the technology is designed specifically to quantify brand-influencer metrics. This means you find, recruit, and manage your influencers right in the platform, and also see direct results from their efforts. 

Best of all, tracking is clean and reliable as it uses first party attribution. In a channel dependent upon third party data, this is a game-changer in the industry.

Plus, this all-in-one software partner natively integrates into your e-commerce backend, ensuring you have all the real-time, accurate data you need to determine ROI. The simple-to-use platform streamlines your operations (and saves you time and headaches) by managing influencer payouts too. 

Without the high ticket prices most agencies charge, brands of all sizes are able to start influencer marketing—or optimize existing efforts—comfortably. Organizations that use Creatable report up to 3x higher conversions than before the partnership.

To find out more about how Creatable can save you time and start making you more profitable, authentic influencer partnerships, schedule a demo with us here. We’ll show you exactly how this will work for your company.