How to Find Influencers for Your Brand in 7 Ways

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Finding the right influencers for your creator marketing strategy is key to boosting your organic engagement on social media. For example, if you’re a brand that sells dog supplies, partnering with an influencer who creates content about dog training to help people with a new puppy could introduce your products to their audience in a way that feels authentic, interesting, and valuable.

But how do you find the perfect match? This article will walk you through finding influencers to help you reach your creator marketing goals, like growing your LinkedIn and X accounts with organic engagement.

Megaphone's viral on-demand platform can help you find the right creators to target for your next campaign so you can quickly achieve your goals.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Brands

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand

1. Amplify Your Brand Visibility

When influencers generate content showcasing your products, your brand gains traction with their audience; this is especially beneficial for new ecommerce brands that have yet to build an engaged following. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around a new product or collection launch.

For instance, Athletic Greens used TikTok influencers to spread awareness of their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers. These social media influencers created content that showed how the supplement can become a part of their audience’s daily routines.

The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90 million views and 39 million views, respectively.

2. Break into Untapped Markets

Influencer marketing can help you identify niche audiences and reach broader demographics. Take the food brand King's Hawaiian, which partnered with creators to create its #foodtok. They worked with 16 creators who produced slider recipes for 'Slider Sunday' using the brand's delicious sweet bread. They used hashtags like #mealinspo to reach new viewers. Identify and collaborate with relevant influencers whose social following overlaps with the niche audiences you’re trying to achieve.

The first step to encouraging sales through your social media? Build an engaged social following with influence marketing. As influencers talk about you and get their audience's interest in your brand, followers will likely follow you, too. This will hugely benefit your social media marketing efforts. Partner up on some giveaway campaigns with your social media influencers. The trick of asking people to follow your brand in return for a chance to win a gift will work a charm. After all, everyone loves a freebie.

4. Source Valuable Product Feedback

You can also use influencer marketing to source feedback on a new product, collection, or product feature. Because many influencers engage with specific niche audiences, they’ll have valuable insights into what your ideal buyers look for in a product. Plus, they can share detailed feedback by trying your products for themselves.

Feminine hygiene company Thinx did just that. They invited 25 influencers for a slumber party event in Los Angeles to get feedback on their new athleisure line. Thinx used the information they gathered to launch clothing their consumers would be interested in and grew their sales by giving influencers unique discount codes. This led to $810,000 in revenue with a per-customer acquisition cost of $35.20.

5. Build Trust and Credibility

Content that talks positively about your brand can help you build a good reputation and is essential for enhancing brand awareness. As influencers discuss you and endorse your products, you’ll slowly build trust with your target audience. Skin + Me uses influencers and user-generated content (UGC) in their Facebook ads.

From people unboxing their products to before and after videos to show how their skin has improved after using their products — this is sure to build trust and credibility with their target market. This tactic has worked so well that customers often post their own before and after pics in the comments section showing the improvements they saw in using their products. This just adds to the positive perception of your brand when customers are making purchasing decisions.

6. Boost Sales and Repeat Purchases

Influencers can help increase sales directly as they share discount codes or recommend your product and indirectly as your brand awareness grows. Intimates brand KNIX collaborates with influencers for this reason — using custom discount codes to drive sales. For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix's products via her Instagram page. By checking the post descriptions, you can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE.

Every influencer has a different code, so when someone uses it in their online store, it's easy for the team at Knix to know which influencer has had the most impact. Moreover, if your current customers see their favorite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders.

7. Bring Fresh Content to Your Audience

Creating new and creative ideas is part of the job of a marketer. But it can get tiring having to continuously think of new ideas, especially if you're a small team. Experienced influencers can bring fresh, out-of-the-box marketing ideas to the table.

They'll have a new perspective on your brand and can offer creative ways to promote your product - with little effort on your part. To find influencers or manage your campaigns, look at our list of influencer marketing tools ideal for small and growing brands.

8. Collaborate with Micro-Influencers to Save Money

Another benefit of influencer marketing - and one your boss will love - is that it can be cost-effective. Running influencer campaigns is 30% cheaper than most advertising and marketing strategies. For this very reason, Doe Lashes‘ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other paid ads for the first 4 months of his brand’s launch.

Jason found that sending a shipment of lashes to micro-influencers would cost less than $10 per shipment. And if he made even one sale from an influencer, he’d break even. If he got 2-3 sales, he’d profit and slowly start gaining traction. This is precisely what happened. One month of influencer marketing led to $2.6K in daily sales by effectively reaching niche audiences!

9. Educate Buyers About Your Product

A non-salesy way to market to potential customers is by educating them on how to use or style your product — depending on what you sell. By thoroughly briefing influencers about your product, you can empower them to create content that educates their target market about your product in an engaging manner.

Not only does this help grow your sales, but it encourages customers to create user-generated content featuring your product. This, in turn, gives you more exposure and grows brand awareness. Take a page from Supergoop's TikTok influencer marketing campaign. The sunscreen brand reached its ideal audience by pairing with influencers in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty niches.

Their influencers made creative content that highlighted Supergoop sunscreen's features in a light-hearted and entertaining way. This aligned with the brand's voice and educated the influencers' followers on the importance of wearing sunscreen. They also showed how Supergoop's clear SPF50 differed from the traditional, white-cast sunscreen people are used to.

10. Build a Library of Content for Future Use

Finding time to create high-quality content can be challenging if you're a small or growing marketing team. You're already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. Working with influencers means that content is created for you, and you can repurpose it across your campaigns and channels. Brands like Starface, for example, use pieces of content created by their customers to enhance their checkout.

Using real people will add a personal touch to your brand's online store, which helps reduce friction when they're getting ready to buy. However, you'll need to keep track of contracts and image usage rights. If you have content from last year's campaign, it is essential to determine if you have permission to reuse it the following year. Using content without permission can lead to some severe brand damage.

11. Gather Data to Understand Your Audience Better

Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your niche audiences. As gathering third-party audience data becomes harder, working with influencers can help you source audience data. The more data you have, the easier it is to create better and more audience-relevant marketing content. Your influencer will have data on audience demographics.

That’s age, gender, and location — broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you about the engagement, reach, and impressions their posts get. This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going and whether they resonate with their audience. For direct sales attribution, it’s worth setting up tracking codes to see who’s clicked through to your website and checkouts.

You’ll need to give this to your influencer before they start the campaign. However, not all influencers are open to sharing their audience analytics. Building long-term relationships with influencers can often lead to them giving you access to their demographic data from social media platforms and any other tools they use. This, in turn, helps you make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

12. Work with Authorities to Boost Brand Reputation

If you’ve good brand authority, your customers view you as the subject-matter expert in your industry. Growing your brand authority will increase brand awareness and give you a better chance at helping prospects overcome objections. To increase brand authority and focus on enhancing brand awareness, you could interview experts as part of your content strategy, create a podcast, run webinars, and be a guest on other people’s platforms. You could also enlist the help of an expert influencer.

13. Turn Influencers into Brand Ambassadors

Another key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators, leading to increased brand awareness. If they try out your products and genuinely love them, they’re more likely to post about them organically and recommend them to friends and people outside their following.

Just look at this case study from Grin, who helped online brand Inkbox create an influencer campaign to build a community of brand ambassadors. They got 70+ creators to post about their products across different marketing channels. This, in turn, created a 40% uptick in unprompted creator posts. If you can cultivate genuine connections with your influencers, you can turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.

14. Strengthen Your Online Community

Online communities are fantastic places for like-minded people to connect, chat, swap tips, and share advice on particular topics. Communities mainly flourish on social networks, which makes them a great place for brands to build connections with their customers. (Look at big brands like Gymshark and GoPro to see what we mean.)

But building a sense of community isn’t easy. You must establish a loyal customer base, a good online following, and an emotional connection with your audience. This is where influencers can help. Take Lick, a UK-based paint brand. They took a slightly different approach and encouraged their Director of Interior Design to be their ‘internal’ influencer. Having this regular face show up on socials is essential in building a strong bond with their community.

15. Get Better Quality Leads

As we mentioned at the start, 82% of brands say they see better ‘quality’ leads from influencer marketing campaigns over any other campaign, especially when targeting niche audiences. That’s quite an impressive stat, and after learning about the influencer marketing benefits in this post, you can see why. By partnering with influencers who talk about your specific niche, you can reach a loyal audience that’ll be genuinely interested in your products.

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand in 7 Ways

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand

1. Leverage Megaphone to Find Influencers

Megaphone is a powerful tool for businesses looking to connect with creators and influencers. This viral on-demand platform is designed to boost your online presence authentically and organically by connecting you with influential creators in your niche. Using Megaphone, you can grow impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include:

A sophisticated engagement network,

A private engagement pod service (coming soon),

Diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Our complex matching algorithm ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with our viral on-demand platform.

Finding influencers on social media is a straightforward process. Start by browsing trending industry posts. If you notice a post going viral, see who published it and whether they have a substantial and active following. Also, look at the comment section of a popular post to see if any influencers are engaging with it.

If you’re searching for LinkedIn influencers, search a relevant keyword and set the filter to ‘Posts.’ Scroll through the results and look for posts with a high level of engagement (i.e., likes, comments, views, etc.). A lot of engagement is usually an indicator that someone has a large audience. For instance, a simple content search for the term ‘SEO’ on LinkedIn led us to Danny Asling, a marketing professional with over 30,000 followers.

3. Hashtags Help You Narrow Your Influencer Search

Use social media platforms’ search functions and look up keywords and hashtags related to your products or services to find influencers already creating relevant content. For example, an ethical clothing brand looking for TikTok influencers might check out the platform’s #sustainablefashion hashtag. If you’re looking for Instagram influencers, use location-specific hashtags to find influencers in your area. Try a combination of your location, niche, and words like ‘influencer,’ ‘creator,’ ‘blogger’ or ‘vlogger’ — like #atlantamomblogger.

4. Check Out Competitors’ Influencer Partnerships

Are your competitors working with influencers? While you might want to use different talents, checking out their influencers’ audience and who they follow can help you find similar creators. Also, keep an eye on who gets a lot of likes or comments on your competitors’ posts, as they could be influencers, too. For example, skincare brand Mario Badescu posted a Reel from lifestyle influencer Vanessa Zambito. Looking at her followers led us to Elxi Elvina, a digital style creator with over 170,000 followers.

5. Google Is Your Friend

Try using Google to search social media sites. Here’s how: Type “site:” followed by the website name you’re searching. Follow the website name with a single space and then type the search phrase. If you wanted to search for a beauty influencer in Detroit, you’d type the following into the search field: site:instagram.com “detroit beauty blogger.” A search like “your industry + influencers in X region” will help you find local influencers. You might also see some articles with lists of the best influencers in that region. For instance, if you’re a San Francisco-based cookware brand, a simple search for ‘Bay Area food influencer’ generates millions of hits.

6. Tap Into Your Network for Recommendations

One of the easiest ways to find an influencer is to ask for recommendations. Contact your network—colleagues, employees, friends, industry contacts, business partners, etc.—and see if they know any influencers that would fit your criteria. You could also post about your influencer search on social media. Encourage your network to recommend or tag potential influencers in the comments and share or like the post to help boost its reach.

7. Attend Events and Conferences to Meet Influencers

Influencers may work online, but you can still personally connect with potential partners at events and conferences. Try attending creator-specific events like VidCon or CreatorConf to discover new influencers and gain tips and inspiration to optimize your next campaign. Don’t you have the budget to participate? Look up some events and conferences in your industry and see who’s speaking at them. Event organizers often hire influencers as speakers as their sizable audiences will attract attendees.

Collaborative Marketing

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Instagram Collaboration

11 Tips for Efficient Influencer Collaboration

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand

1. Use Megaphone: Your Secret Weapon for Finding Influencers

Undoubtedly, using a platform is the best way to find influencers to help with your marketing campaigns. Megaphone helps businesses connect with social media creators and online publishers to amplify their content and improve their SEO. The platform enables you to find the right micro or mid-tier influencers in your niche to help you achieve your goals. Using a sophisticated matching algorithm, Megaphone ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with our viral on-demand platform.

2. Do Your Research: Finding the Right Influencers

Finding the right person is the first step of your journey. Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, and your primary goal should be to find the most suitable ones. If you’re entirely new to this, a great way to get started is to create a list of keywords relevant to your industry and see what people frequently appear as a top result. A great way to start is by finding those already talking about your brand or competitors.

3. Make Sure You’re Working With Influencers

Influencer marketing centers not on the influencer but on the audience that follows them. You must analyze whether the followers of the person you plan to contact are part of your target audience. Compare where different influencers stand regarding engagement, impressions, and reach. View their top-performing content, what messages they are sending, what strategies they use, and how their audiences respond.

4. Leverage Long-Term Partnerships And Commission-Based Payments

Building long-term relationships with influencers can lead to better rates and more authentic endorsements. Influencers are more likely to become genuinely invested in your brand, leading to more consistent and compelling content. Implementing an affiliate program where influencers earn a commission on sales, they generate aligns the influencers’ incentives with your business goals while allowing them to make more money than the fixed rate.

5. Relationships Matter

Even if we’re building a commercial relationship, we’re all people. Never forget that. Building a strong personal relationship will take you a long way. An excellent example of this mindset is Héctor De Prada, a tech founder who frequently collaborates with creators and shared that “One of the things that have worked best for us–without realizing it at first–is attending events to meet and build relationships with influencers and content creators.

Opportunities for collaboration often arise organically.” “Plus, having a previous personal relationship allows for more favorable conditions when working with them. Without that connection, you might not even get to work with them due to their “status” compared to your brand, especially if you’re just starting.”

6. Brand Alignment

Selecting the right people to work with is the first necessary step for a successful campaign. Reach, interaction, and fee don’t matter if there’s a significant misalignment between brand and influencer. The biggest creator in the world couldn’t bring results to a brand in an industry that its audience isn’t interested in.

The below is a great example of an excellent brand and influencer alignment. Lagavulin Scotch whisky maker Diageo partnered with actor Nick Offerman–who played the famous Parks & Recreation’s Ron Swanson. Not the most popular TV star, but a charismatic character that most of the brand’s target audience can relate to.

7. Set Clear Expectations

Clarity is key. Ensure you’re all on the same page regarding objectives, deliverables, timeline, budget, and payment terms. Include guidelines, creative briefs, and performance metrics. Don’t forget legal and ethical stuff like disclosure and copyright. No one can read minds. Provide crystal-clear guidelines on morality, content topics, and profanity, if necessary. Communicate openly about your brand and expectations.

8. Monitor Influencer Content

Keep a close eye on the content influencers post about your brand:

Regular Check-Ins

Review the content posted by influencers. This helps ensure the content aligns with your brand’s message and meets quality standards.

Engagement Metrics

Track engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and overall sentiment.

Feedback Loop

Provide timely and constructive feedback to influencers. Suggest adjustments or provide additional guidance to improve future posts if an influencer’s post doesn’t quite hit the mark.

9. Interact with Their Audience

Two small actions can help you increase engagement and visibility:

Comment Section

Jump into the comment section of influencer posts and engage with people. It’s an excellent opportunity to win them over. Answer questions, acknowledge compliments, and address concerns.

Use your brand’s accounts to boost the influencer’s content.

10. Support Your Influencers

‘Where did they get that old logo?’ ‘Didn’t we change that copy?’ These are just two of the many issues that can happen if the influencer doesn’t have access to the proper resources. Make sure you supply them with product samples, information, or branded content they can use.

11. Track Results Accurately

Noemí Carro, a marketing expert and fractional CMO who recently led a launch campaign with influencers that generated over $300K in sales, says: “Prior to selecting influencers, it’s crucial to clearly define the desired action. Seeking brand recognition is a different goal from capturing potential customers.”

“Once the key metric defining the campaign’s success is clear, you can start considering different candidates based on their media kit, social mentions, and brand affinity.” This is the campaign’s final part, but you must have thought about it initially.

The same campaign can have different goals, but we must set them beforehand and know what we will measure. You can go crazy and track many of them, but if you’re new to this type of campaign, it’s better to stick to some tried and tested essentials.

10 Examples of Successful Influencer Collaboration

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand

1. Dunkin’ & Charli D’Amelio: A Match Made in TikTok Heaven

Dunkin’ Donuts partnered with TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio to create a drink inspired by the influencer called “The Charli.” The collaboration helped Dunkin’ boost app downloads by 57%, and, of course, it also helped sales.

2. Gymshark’s Influencer Army

Gymshark makes fitness apparel. The company has worked with thousands of influencers to help grow its brand. The founder said working with fitness influencers helped the company go from a struggling startup to a multimillion-dollar brand overnight. Today, Gymshark is worth over $1 billion.

3. Daniel Wellington’s Micro-Influencer Strategy

When it comes to influencer marketing, Daniel Wellington may be the OG. The watch brand built its empire by gifting watches to thousands of micro-influencers, creating a massive network of social media posts to promote the brand. This resulted in a whopping $220 million in revenue in just a few years.

4. Fenty Beauty’s “Beauty Army”

Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty launched with unprecedented shades to accommodate all skin tones. Fenty Beauty collaborated with various beauty influencers to promote the brand's inclusivity. The strategic move helped the company make $100 million in sales within 40 days of launch.

5. Pepsi & Cristiano Ronaldo

Pepsi leveraged Cristiano Ronaldo’s massive global following for branding campaigns that generated millions in views and engagement. The soccer star has been a brand ambassador for Pepsi since 2008.

6. Audible’s Partnership With BookTok Influencers

Audible partnered with TikTok’s “BookTok” community to promote audiobooks in a campaign encouraging users to create content on the platform. The collaboration helped the company increase audiobook adoption and sales.

7. BMW & Supercar Blondie

When BMW launched its new electric car, the iX, it partnered with automotive influencer Supercar Blondie to promote the vehicle. The YouTuber featured the car in a review on her channel, helping the company gain millions of impressions and engagement on social media.

8. Chipotle & David Dobrik

Chipotle teamed up with influencer David Dobrik for a TikTok campaign that encourages users to create their videos for a chance to win free burritos for a year. The campaign went viral, resulting in over 250,000 video submissions and a record-breaking sales boost on National Avocado Day.

9. Nike’s Controversial Campaign Featuring Colin Kaepernick

Nike faced backlash for featuring Colin Kaepernick in a campaign that sparked global conversations about social justice and racism. As a result, Nike’s online sales jumped 31% following the controversy.

10. Airbnb’s Collaborations with Travel Influencers

Airbnb has long partnered with travel influencers to help promote its brand. The company offers free stays at its properties in exchange for social media content to drive bookings and awareness.