How to Find the Right Influencer for Your Campaign

1. Who is referred to as an influencer?
2. The different types of influencers
3. Finding the right influencers for your campaign
4. Butter with the fishes - what does an influencer cost?
5. Keep an eye on your influencers and costs always!

It is estimated that there are over 30 million influencers worldwide. In particular, TikTok, but also the pandemic and its associated increased internet usage, are likely to have significantly increased this number in recent years. A few years ago, influencers were still scoffed at as a trend, but today their discipline has long since proven its worth and become an integral part of the marketing mix.

This is not without reason: Influencers not only have reach, but also a strong proximity to their communities, which holds great potential for many marketers. Thanks to platform tools like direct messages, story stickers or live formats with chat function, influencers and their followers have many tools at their disposal to regularly get in touch and exchange views.

The resulting trust of the users pays off! According to various studies, around one in five users can be motivated by influencers to buy products. When it comes to age groups, GenZ and millennials are the groups most likely to be influenced. Numbers that are a little impressive and underline the impact of influencers.

Our guest author Marlene Petz explains how and with what tools you can find the right influencer for your campaigns.

Who is referred to as an influencer?

In short, influencers are opinion leaders and multipliers who regularly create content and initiate social interaction. What is interesting here is that Instagram and TikTok creators are usually referred to as influencers, while bloggers, streamers and YouTube vloggers are not included. In our glossary you will find the Definition of influencer marketing.

Another special feature is that the term influencer is not tied to any potential reach. Basically, even people with few followers who have specialized in a niche topic, such as histamine-free nutrition or cryptocurrencies, can be referred to as influencers. Influencers create content for one or usually several social platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest or Twitch.

Content synergies between platforms are often established, meaning that content is published simultaneously on several platforms to exploit the incremental reach of all channels. An example of this would be references to the TikTok profile within Instagram posts, like @jessiebluegrey on Instagram, among others.

In their content, influencers rely on a mix of video, photo, text and/or audio. In recent years, and this trend has been significantly initiated by social platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, there has been a shift towards moving images, and is hardly imaginable without it anymore. Podcasts have also gained in importance, especially after last year, which is further emphasized by a look at the current user numbers in Germany. Almost a quarter of 14- to 29-year-olds listen to podcasts at least once a week. Among the 30- to 49-year-olds, it is around 14 percent. This also led to a rethinking in the Content strategies of many influencers. But how and where do you find the right influencers for your campaign, according to which criteria do you best select them and what costs are to be expected?

The different types of influencers

At the beginning of each influencer marketing campaign, it is important to define the goal, target group, product, storyline, timeframe and budget. All these factors influence which influencers are suitable for your campaign. When it comes to the types of influencers, there are various classifications. The two most commonly used are those according to follower count and content. We start with the subdivision of influencers according to their follower count, which usually varies slightly depending on the platform. In practice, however, the Instagram influencer categorization is frequently used as a guide:

Each of the influencer categories shown above has different advantages. Nano influencers usually serve a niche and are characterized by their high expertise, whereas mega influencers offer potential for companies in the field of brand ambassadorship with their high reach and iconic status.

In addition to the subdivision by follower size, influencers can also be categorized by content. There is almost no topic for which an influencer cannot be found. The classic subject areas include beauty, fashion, travel, sports, food and gaming. Thanks in particular to TikTok, content such as medicine (@doc.felix) or law (@herranwalt) has also become established.

Your budget and the creative idea will ultimately decide, for example, whether mega influencers are considered, whereas your product will influence whether you work with beauty or fashion influencers.

Finding the right influencers for your campaign

Once the questions described above have been clarified, qualitative and quantitative selection criteria need to be defined before searching for influencers. These are essential for the success of the campaign and the achievement of your goals.

• Qualitative criteria not only include the brand fit, i.e. do the influencers share your values, but also the image and content quality. Particularly the latter often plays a special role if the product, for example, has a certain look & feel that should also be picked up by the influencers.
• On the other hand, it is necessary to define the quantitative selection criteria. These include country following, age, gender, and engagement rate. You are planning a campaign in Germany and want to minimize scatter loss? Then it is advisable to set the Germany following at at least 50% - depending on the product category even higher. Why not 100%? Many German influencers also publish content in English, so their fan community is not made up of German followers alone.

Once the influencer category and selection criteria described above are defined, the actual influencer sourcing can begin. There are numerous paid Influencer marketing tools, on the market with which you can find influencers. You don't want to spend any budget on this yet? Manual research can certainly also help to find influencers. We show you on selected platforms how this works:

• To manually source influencers on Instagram, you need a suitable influencer as a starting point. Once you have arrived at the profile, you can have similar influencers suggested to you based on profile suggestions. However, this approach involves a lot of effort.
• TikTok clearly stands out here with its own free creator research tool. After verification by TikTok, you can use the so-called Tiktok Creator Marketplace to search for influencers according to various criteria. The special thing about this is that the data is first-party-data.
• On Twitch, you can source streamers through recommended channels.

• YouTubers can be found via the trend section, or the video suggestions. Under the video of a selected influencer, you can check out further suggestions.

In order to find suitable influencers and get a first idea, it can also be helpful to look at best lists of the respective platforms and to start sourcing from there: Here for example, you will find a listing of the most reach-strong TikTok influencers. If you are planning to regularly carry out influencer campaigns, the use of influencer sourcing tools is recommended. These usually offer different functionalities:

• Storyclash on the other hand, focuses on content-based influencer discovery. On OMR Reviews you will find an overview of all influencer marketing tools including customer ratings.
• influDataallows you a detailed search and analysis of over 20 mio. influencers based on different scores and quality ratings.
• On CreatorIQ you have for example the possibility to search for influencers across platforms and have quantitative criteria displayed.

Butter with the fishes - what does an influencer cost?

The question that many find most exciting is how much collaboration with influencers costs. The internet offers a variety of figures, which can provide an initial rough direction. Some of the tools mentioned here also offer forecasts. According to a study by HypeAuditor, for example, nano influencers earn an average of 1,420 dollars a month and mega influencers over 15,356 dollars. The question “how much does an influencer cost” cannot be answered across the board, as a variety of factors influence the final costs. Ultimately, and to give a concrete figure, influencer costs per post can range from 100 euros up into the six-figure range. A look at the influencing factors clarifies why it is difficult to give a concrete figure:

1. Influencer category: You want to work with mega influencers? Regardless of the factors mentioned below in the post, higher costs are to be expected here. This is justified by the iconic status, fame, PR value and image of the influencers. If an influencer is currently much present in the media, this will also be reflected in the prices charged by the influencer or his management. This can usually be predicted well in advance through preliminary research and can therefore be planned accordingly.
2. Performance according to platform and format: The fact is: The better the content performance, i.e. the more people are reached and interact with the content, the higher the expected prices. This applies to all popular social media platforms and formats. It can well happen that influencers, due to stronger Instagram StoryPerformance compared to feed post, charge higher story costs at equal quality. To get a feel for the performance, best to have the current performance screenshots sent to you. This recommendation applies to all platforms and can help you to forecast costs. It is more difficult on TikTok, as the performance here is subject to stronger fluctuations, due to the sophisticated TikTok algorithm. Therefore, the focus when calculating TikTok influencer costs is stronger on other factors such as content quality, exclusivity and buyouts.
3. Quality of contents: Another point that influences the final influencer costs is the quality of the content. Behind a TikTok video, Instagram Reels, or even YouTube video, are many hours of work, professional equipment and a lot of know-how. This also needs to be considered and can justify higher price proposals on the part of influencers.
4. Buyouts and exclusivity: You plan to use the content generated within the campaign for your advertising activities, such as display ads? The more usage rights to the content you plan, the more impact this will have on costs. Also the duration of the usage rights and the number of platforms on which you want to use the content need to be considered. Is it essential for you, in addition to the use of influencer content, that the influencers do not enter into a promotional cooperation with a direct competitor for a period of 3 months after the campaign? This also has an effect on the cost.
5. Campaign duration: Long-term cooperations are to be mentioned as a special case. These are highly sought after by influencers, as studies show, and also offer many advantages for brands. Two of these are the authenticity of the content and the associated acceptance within the communities, and the possibility to agree on package prices. This way, costs are not calculated on a cost level, but a package is put together that often includes a discount.

The multitude of influencing factors makes it difficult to give concrete figures in view of influencer costs and for this exact reason, the most varied figures are circulating on the net.

But how can you check whether the price quoted by the influencer is justified? A first point of orientation can be the CPM. The formula is simple: (cost/impressions) x 1000. To calculate the CPM, let the influencer give you the current posting performance via screenshots of the insights. Many agencies usually have their own tools and benchmarks for this. But how valid is the CPM? The CPM is an important KPI which, however, has to be expanded by the factors mentioned above. In particular, the quality of the content, buyouts and exclusivity should not be neglected and should influence your decision.

Keep an eye on your influencers and costs always!

Whether manually or with the help of the tools presented above, both can help to find the right influencer. Over time, you can also build up your own influencer pool that you can fall back on at any time. You can create this influencer pool in some of the tools using lists, or keep it in an Excel list.

It is important that you regularly evaluate your influencers in the pool and check whether they still have a brand fit and meet the other selection criteria. In the lists mentioned above, you can also enter your influencer costs. The more often you work with an influencer and the more successful this cooperation is for both sides, the better prices can be negotiated.

Start your (first) influencer campaign now!