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How to Find Instagram Influencers for Free

David Morneau

By David Morneau
8 min READ | Jan 6 2020

In this guide, I will show you how to find instagram influencers for free using different tools.

Influencer marketing gets the brands into the circle of trust.

It creates engaging, organic, and relevant content and persuades customers to buy.

User-generated content surpasses any paid ad by the authentic engagement.

  • Instagram influencers became irreplaceable in promoting beauty and lifestyle products.
  • They are great at collaborating with fashion brands.
  • Companies offering travel and dining experiences find Instagram essential for their marketing strategy.

Over 72% of users say that Instagram affected their buying decisions.

So brands are racing to find influencers on this social media platform to boost sales.

TL;DR

Choosing the Right Influencer:

  • Not all influencers will fit your brand; the target audience must match.
  • Relevance is key to influencer marketing success; it should align with your product and niche.
  • Collaborations with the right influencer can surpass the results of paid ad campaigns.

Defining Your Ideal Influencer:

  • Identify your product's purpose and target market.
  • Set clear influencer campaign goals such as brand awareness, product promotion, website traffic, and sales.

Criteria for Selecting Influencers:

  • Consider engagement rates, especially with micro-influencers (over 60% engagement).
  • Define the ideal influencer's target audience and gauge their genuineness through followers' interactions.
  • Track influencer engagement metrics, adjusting for Instagram's privacy policy.

Finding Instagram Influencers:

  • Manually search using hashtags, locations, and influencer followings.
  • Utilize influencer marketplaces like FameBit.
  • Employ custom Google searches specific to Instagram.

Tools for Faster Search:

Pitching to Influencers:

  • Gather influencer contact details, preferably email for better response rates.
  • Use tools like Mailshake or Gmass for scaled cold email outreaches.
  • Keep pitches concise, clear, and personalized, highlighting mutual benefits.

Conclusion:

  • Influencer marketing is pivotal for niche growth and brand promotion.
  • Successful influencer marketing relies on setting clear goals and crafting engaging content to maximize brand visibility.

Why Is It Essential to Find Instagram Influencers in Your Niche?

Not all Instagram influencers can fulfill your campaign goals. You need to define your target market, buyer persona, and analyze the audience of the influencer. They need to match. A dissonance will result in pitching your product to irrelevant audiences. As a result, you will lose time and waste your social media marketing budget.

To avoid pitfalls, you must find Instagram influencers whose personality and style resonate with your brand. Their niche has to align with your products, services, or business.

For example, if you sell luxury watches, find Instagram influencers from the luxury fashion and accessories niche. Relevance determines the success of your influencer marketing strategy. The fate of your campaign depends on finding the right influencer.

Content from the like-minded people that your customer trust will augment your brand loyalty and boost sales.

Collaboration with the right influencer can beat any of your paid ad campaigns and take your brand recognition to the next level. It is especially true for fashion products, wellness services, or dining experiences.

How to Find Good Instagram Influencers?

Finding influencers on Instagram that are right for your brand can seem challenging at first.

In this guide, I will outline ways you can use to find Instagramers who match your requirements. It will help you streamline your social media marketing efforts and save you a ton of time finding the right influencers.

Before you start, ask yourself these questions to define your ideal influencer:

  1. What is your product, and why did you design it?
  2. What is your target market, and who is your buyer persona? What problem is he/she trying to solve?
  3. What are the goals of your influencer campaign? The most common objectives of influencer collaborations are increasing brand awareness, promoting a product launch, driving traffic to your website, and increasing sales.

Now you found your niche and identified your target audience. It is time to discover the right influencers to make your campaign a success!

How to Find The Right Instagram Influencer For Your Brand?

These questions will help you define your influencer marketing strategy. So you can find Instagram influencers that will fulfill your goals:

  1. How important is follower count to you? Do you consider working with micro-influencers? Remember: micro-influencers have the highest engagement rates (over 60%). They are the best to build trust by having real conversations around your brand. And they are more affordable than top-tier Instagram influencers.
  2. Who is your ideal influencers’ target audience? Define their followers’ location, age, gender, and interests. Read followers comments, questions, and personal statements. This tactic also helps understand how genuine the influencer is.
  3. What is the influencer’s engagement rate? Since Instagram Privacy Policy has changed, it became challenging to calculate engagement rate percentages on the platform. So you may need to dig into different metrics or use software to measure the engagement.

Leveraging social media marketing starts from defining who you ideal customer and influencer. Knowing who to find makes your job easier and saves time contacting the wrong people.

How to Find Influencers on Instagram Manually?

There are multiple ways to find influencers on Instagram. After you have done your research and answered the questions we’ve outlined above, it should be easier to discover top Instagram influencers.

The best ways to find influencers on Instagram are to:

  • Browse hashtags
  • Browse locations
  • Browse the relevant influencers’ following

How to Find Influencers on Instagram by Hashtags?

Start by building a list of relevant hashtags.

With a few of these, you can create a sizable list by using Display Purposes.

It is a free tool that allows you to find additional related hashtags:

How to Find Influencers on Instagram by Hashtags

What are the relevant hashtags?

  • Top hashtags that your target audience explores.
  • Hashtags your ideal influencers use in their Instagram posts.
  • Hashtags of the relevant influencers who purchased your product in the past (if any).

How to Find Local Instagram Influencers by Location?

If you’re looking for locally relevant Instagramers, you can use their Map tool to find pertinent location hashtags. You should be able to find top locations for a region within these hashtags.

View the Instagramers following. Influencers from a location cluster and follow each other.

How to Find Influencers by Browsing Their Following?

You can head to Instagram and start going through hashtag feeds.

Each hashtag page will order the posts by popularity and freshness.

Pick profiles that match your marketing campaign and add them to your list.

Don’t forget to view the following of each profile you discover. Relevant influencers follow other relevant influencers.

Find Influencers by Browsing Their Following

How to Find Influencers by Browsing Influencer Marketplaces?

There are multiple Instagram influencer marketplaces out there (FameBit, for example).

These marketplaces are directories where brands can browse through the lists of social media influencers.

Use these marketplaces to find relevant profiles. They usually categorize them by reach, niche, and engagement rate.

You can contact the Instagram influencers you picked inside or outside the marketplace. I recommend you try reaching them outside the platform as the cost will be lower.

How to Find Instagram Influencers Using Custom Google Searches?

Advanced search is a handy feature of Google. You can specify additional requirements for your search to help the search engine refine the results.

This feature makes looking for Instagram influencers easy.

For exanple, you're looking for parenting Instagram influencers.

Head over to Google and type in the following query:

site:www.instagram.com “[Your keyword]”

Let’s give this a try: site:www.instagram.com “mom”

How to Find Instagram Influencers Using Custom Google Search

Once you find relevant influencers, you can do more in-depth research on their hashtags, locations, and target audiences. Just follow as we did in the previous steps.

Want to Find Influencers Faster?

If you have limited time and resources, finding the right influencers can be challenging.

So we have built a tool to make this part of the process easier.

Using inBeat you can drastically shorten the time you spend looking for influencers.

Use our free plan for smaller-scale campaigns, or upgrade if you need to scale up.

Our influencer search tool helps you find influencers based on their following, engagement rate, location, and language.

How to Pitch Instagram Influencers?

Create a list with selected influencers’ information that you have (profile URL, name, email, etc.).

You can find email addresses of Instagramers in their bio.

If you don’t, head to the Instagram app to access their email if the influencer has a business profile.

I prefer contacting influencers by email as the response rate is much higher. From my experience Instagram DM’s get very little attention compared to emails.

You can use cold email outreach tools such as Mailshake or Gmass to manage cold email at scale. These tools will make your life easier.

Keep your pitch personalized and straightforward. Prepare a clear offer to the influencer and outline the desired outcome from the campaign.

Describe how much work the influencer will have to do to make your campaign a success. Most Instagram influencers value their time and don’t like to beat around the bush.

Provide sample content, images, or text they can refer to and share your thoughts on their work.


Conclusion

Influencer marketing is essential to help you grow within your niche and is one of the best ways to promote your brand.

Now you know how to find the right Instagram influencers. So use these tips and tools, such as an influencer database, to start mapping out your social media marketing strategy.

By having clear goals for your campaign and developing rich, engaging content, you will reap the incredible benefits of influencer marketing and boost brand visibility.

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