5 steps to find the right Instagram influencers

More and more Community Managers are wondering how to find the right Instagram influencers to set up marketing collaborations.

Unlike traditional communication campaigns, influencers reach their audiences as trusted people, who can generate powerful and authentic word-of-mouth to convert their subscribers into potential customers of your brand.

Beyond simply detecting a few accounts with a large number of subscribers, the social media professional will have to ask the following questions:

• does this influencer have values ​​close to my brand?
• how much to pay this influencer?
• should we favor the number of subscribers or the engagement rate?

Throughout this article presenting itself as an Instagram training, I will tell you about 5 essential steps to detect and choose the right Instagram influencers for your brand.

Step 1: decide why your brand needs influencers

With a rapidly growing influence market, it is clear that companies are well aware of the opportunities of collaborations with Instagrammers.

However, before going through any Instagram to build your list of potential partners, think carefully about the benefits you want to derive from it.

Running for influencers without defining your marketing objectives can cost you dearly. For example, if you have not decided which performance statistics you will use to measure the success of your campaign, you will act blindly.

Starting a campaign with specific goals in mind will help you stay within your budget and your brand values.

Here are some examples of marketing goals:

• increase the size of the brand community
• develop brand awareness
• sell more products/services
• rejuvenate the brand 

Step 2: find the right collaboration depends on the story of the influencer

Finding the best influencers for your brand doesn't just depend on the size of their community.

Like brands, influencers all have different stories. And if the story of your brand does not match that of the influencer partner, the content produced will not seem authentic, and subscribers will quickly realize.

The most followed influencers may well create superb photos including well-groomed captions, but if there is no alignment or emotion between the opinion leader and your potential customers, the return on the investment will not be very certainly not there.

So how do you find Instagram influencers with the same values ​​as your brand?

A simple way is to search for accounts by keywords either on Google by exploiting the results of the rankings carried out by blogs/magazines or else on Instagram directly because the keywords inserted in his profile can be detected, as I tell you. shows an example below: 

Then click on the little white triangle on a blue background to get more similar accounts: 

Taking the time to ensure that you have the right alignment between your brand and the influencer means that the sponsored publication will appear more sincere and this will lead to the fact that targeted Internet users maybe more receptive to your product.

Step 3: micro or macro-influencers? Size is not always the right indicator

Indeed, the term "influencer" is often automatically associated with the notion of rich celebrity, all the time on vacation and untouchable.

However, influencer marketing can also be very effective (sometimes even more) on smaller scales.

If you are looking to collaborate with influencers with a tight marketing budget at your disposal, micro-influencers (less than 10,000 subscribers) could then be good partners for your brand.

According to some studies, influencer marketing from collaboration with micro-influencers generates 4 times more engagement due to the high loyalty of their audience.

Again, your marketing objectives will have a real impact on the approach you should have on the choice of macro or micro-influencers.

If you operate in a niche market, micro-influencers maybe better allies, but if you are looking to develop your brand awareness, it will be rather relevant to work with macro-influencers.

Step 4: Look for authentic community engagement

A multitude of factors must be taken into consideration when it comes to setting up a successful influence marketing campaign. From the number of subscribers to demographics and context, determining the true reach of an influencer’s content is not as simple as observing the number of “Likes” on a publication.

A metric, however, is essential in determining the reach of the influencer: audience engagement.

It is important to remember that popularity does not necessarily mean results for your brand. First reason: it could be that the person is a false influencer.

Real engagement is the key metric that drives conversions as well as word of mouth, and this is the most important one to consider when looking for the right Instagram influencers for your brand.

Observe comments on influencer publications to see if there is a real engagement with the sponsored products. The particularity of a good influencer is his ability to generate conversations in comments and to get more Instagram followers to identify their friends to generate future conversions.

As you do this, ask yourself if the accounts that interact with these posts match your potential customers, and see if the influencer regularly responds to questions from subscribers. This last point is important because you will want internet users' questions to be resolved during sponsored promotion operations for your products/services. 

Step 5: Maintain regular relationships with influencers

A final piece of advice to complete this article is to think carefully about maintaining good working relationships with influencers.

Influence marketing is an investment in terms of relationships, which means cultivating communication is as important as measuring & analyzing the results of your collaborations.

Indeed, the one-shot influence marketing practices soon seem to be finished, and the brands now have real long-term relationships with influencers, always to implement future communication actions.

Like any relationship, successful collaborations are based on mutual respect and ongoing dialogue.