How to Find Influencers to Drive Sales and Brand Awareness

If you don’t know how to find influencers for your brand, you need to learn. ASAP.

Why?

Social media is currently the most effective advertising medium for most brands, and influencers can help you unlock its potential.

Partnering with the right influencers can help you generate brand awareness. They’ll make amazing UGC for your brand to repost, use in ads, and show on your product pages.

If you need more sales, they can help with that, too.

But finding the right influencers is an art. 🎨

Believe it or not, it’s not always easy to find influencers who fit your needs as a brand. That’s why we wrote this guide–to help you figure out how to find influencers, no matter your budget or needs.

Navigating different platforms to find influencers can be challenging, so we’ll help you with that, too. We’ll also let you know what to watch for–after all, you will have to vet the influencers you find for fake engagement, fake followers, and bad-quality content.

If you’re ready to stop wasting time and start finding influencers who can drive real growth for your brand, then this article is for you.

Keep reading to learn everything we know about how to find influencers.

Why influencers are key to growing your brand

Before you identify influencers you’d like to work with, you’ll want to understand why you need them in the first place. This will help you pick the right influencers for the right reasons.

So, let’s investigate why you might want to know how to find influencers ⬇️

Influencers drive brand awareness and sales

If you want to drive sales and increase brand awareness with content, you need the right audience.

That’s why you need to find influencers who already have the audience you’re trying to reach.

Maybe there’s an overlap in the kinds of people who follow your brand and this influencer. Or maybe you’re trying to break into a new market, so you collaborate with influencers who have their pulse on a new demographic.

Either way, for your collaboration to achieve the desired results, the influencer must have the right audience for your brand.

After that, it's crucial to check that the influencer creates high-quality content–you don’t want your brand poorly represented.

And finally, check their engagement rate–you’re looking for something in the good to excellent range. Check for fake followers and follow-for-follow or loops. If you find them, the influencer’s numbers may be inflated.

Influencers produce UGC

Influencers are a great way to get more UGC for your social media channels and ads.

How does UGC help grow your brand?

UGC will probably not result in direct sales, but you can use it in social media ads to drive sales.

UGC is usually expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This depends on the source, but generally, high-quality and affordable UGC takes more work.

So why not ask influencers you’re already working with to create some for you?

Here’s the deal: You will want to start building a bank of UGC as quickly as possible so you can use it later to drive growth.

Even if you aren’t using UGC in social media ads, you can use it as content for your Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok pages.

Now, instead of your team developing something creative to post, you can use a video from a satisfied customer/influencer that will create trust with your audience.

After all, potential customers like and trust UGC more than regular, branded content–because real users and fans of the product generate it. 💁‍♀️

If you think UGC is optional, it’s not. It’s the best way to build trust with your audience, which is crucial for long-term success. Over time, that trust will translate into valuable growth for your brand.

Types of influencers you can work with

As you start wading into the world of influencer marketing, you need to know the difference between the various types of influencers you can hire. They all come with different price tags, audience sizes, and engagement levels. Check out the five most popular categories below:

Nano influencers

Nano influencers are starting their influencer journey on Instagram or TikTok and have up to 5,000 followers.

A nano influencer is an excellent option if your main goal is to obtain affordable UGC for your marketing channels. Try to find nano influencers with portfolios that show good content creation skills because that’s your primary concern.

Nano influencers can also generate sales and targeted brand awareness in specific niches, but if this is your goal, you’ll want to look at other influencers, too. Like–

Micro influencers

Micro influencers have 5,000-50,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok.

They’re more experienced with brands and often do a mix of gifted, affiliate, and paid collaborations (depending on their metrics). You can work with them to generate UGC, brand awareness, and sales– and they’re relatively affordable.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, micro influencers typically have an engagement rate of 6%. That’s MUCH higher than the average celebrity engagement rate, which is 1.97%.

The best thing about that high engagement rate is that it means micro influencers are in a sweet spot for marketing–their audiences tend to be highly engaged but still large enough to generate real awareness for your brand. Plus, they’re less expensive than more prominent names. That’s a win-win-win!

If you’re wondering how to find micro influencers, aka the holy grail of influencer marketing, look no further. We love micro influencers at Social Cat and have thousands of them in our network who are actively looking for work!

Macro influencers

Macro influencers have 50,000-500,000 followers on social media.

When you find influencers at this level, they usually have a following across multiple networks, such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or even Pinterest.

Macro influencers are more expensive–with greater reach comes greater prices. Generally, that’s because influencers who have built an audience of this size are good at generating brand awareness and sales.

However, check their engagement rates if you want to work with macro influencers. It’s common for influencers with more followers to have less engagement because people feel less connected to them, so they may not be worth the extra money.

If you’ve never worked with influencers before, we recommend working with nano and micro influencers first. Learn the ropes with influencers with higher engagement and smaller audiences before you shell out a ton of money to work with a macro influencer.

With any new marketing platform, there will be growing pains and lessons you need to learn about what works for your brand–so you might as well make those lessons as inexpensive as possible.

Mega influencers

Mega influencers have more than 500,000 followers. And, we’re just going to say it– Mega influencers are super hard to reach.

At this level, they have ongoing big brand deals and choose who they work with. If you’re a small to medium-sized brand, it’s hard to get their attention– or to pay their prices.

Celebrity influencers

In the case of celebrities, the number of followers is irrelevant. If you can work with Kim Kardashian, you’re not going to ask how many followers she has– you’re just going to do it.

Unfortunately, reaching celebrities is even more challenging for small and medium-sized businesses than reaching mega influencers. So, although this could be something to aspire to, you’ll probably want to focus on micro, macro, or even nano influencers if you’re just starting.

A note on categories

Don’t get confused if you see different categories and follower counts of influencers. There’s no central authority on this information, so we’ve made the list above based on our experience. You may find occasional outliers, but this is a decent starting point.

How to find influencers for your brand

Wondering where to find influencers? There are two main ways to find an influencer that fits your brand’s vision and audience. Let’s explore both of them now:

Manual influencer search

Manual influencer search is how most people start out trying to find influencers. And, there’s nothing wrong with it–although it can get a little tedious.

Here’s a quick explanation of how to identify influencers for your brand using a manual search:

• Step 1: Use hashtags on social media to find posts related to your products, niche, and industry.
• Step 2: Build a list of influencers you’d like to contact. Check the quality of their posts, engagement rates, and audience makeup before adding them to this list.
• Step 3: Find their contact information online and reach out.
• Step 4: Follow up because there’s a huge chance they won’t respond to cold outreach.
• Step 5: Collaborate with the influencers who get back to you.
• Step 6: Go back to the beginning of this list and start over.

So, for example, if you were looking for small business influencers who might be interested in promoting your product, you’d want to search hashtags like #smallbusiness or #shoplocal in addition to hashtags related to your product or service.

To maximize your chances of getting a response–because, let’s be honest, most of us don’t reply to unsolicited messages–you will want to reach out via email and DM.

Most of the time, you can find their email on their social media profiles. If not, you might need to do some detective work by checking their website or other social profiles.

Influencer search tools

The second way–and, by far, the best way to find influencers–is using an influencer search tool.

That’s because it’s much easier to filter your search to find influencers who match your brand, niche, and goals for the campaign. Thinking of hashtags and sifting through posts takes a lot of time. So does keeping track of influencers, reaching out, and following up. And most of us don’t have that time when considering our other job responsibilities.

Plus, most influencer marketing platforms allow you to build campaigns from scratch and manage the entire influencer marketing process on their platform instead of trying to create systems to do everything manually.

Influencer search tools where the creators opt-in to be featured on the platform also often include a messaging feature, so reaching out is MUCH more direct than sending DMs and emails.

How to find influencers by platform

Are you still wondering how to find influencers online?

If you’re looking for how to find the best influencers for a specific platform (say, for instance, how to find influencers on Amazon or YouTube), you’ve come to the right place. In the following sections, we’ll give you a detailed rundown on finding influencers for any platform your heart desires.

How to find influencers on Amazon

Finding Amazon influencers is a different process than the one you’ll follow for most other platforms. That’s because Amazon is primarily a selling platform, and they focus on reviews and affiliate programs to drive sales.

That’s very different from video-driven social media platforms, which we’ll look at later in this article. So, read along to find out how to find Amazon influencers!

Amazon’s influencer program

Amazon has its own influencer program, which allows content creators to create customized Amazon storefronts. Influencers can recommend products and earn commissions when their followers purchase items through their links.

Here’s how to find influencers with Amazon storefronts: Search for influencers using hashtags like #FoundItOnAmazon or #AmazonFinds on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Many influencers post about things they’ve found on Amazon and then link to their storefronts in their bios or profiles.

Social media platforms

Amazon influencers are often very present on social media, so looking for them on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube is great. Here’s how to find Amazon influencers on each social media platform:

• Instagram: Search for hashtags like #AmazonFinds, #AmazonHaul, or #AmazonMustHaves. That’s how you’ll discover influencers promoting Amazon products–many influencers build their platform exclusively around Amazon deals!
• TikTok: Use the same hashtags as on Instagram to find influencers showcasing Amazon product recommendations.
• YouTube: Look for creators with Amazon product review videos. Many YouTubers include Amazon affiliate links in their video descriptions. So, most YouTubers are Amazon influencers, whether they think about themselves that way or not.

Product reviews on Amazon

Another great place to find influencers for your brand is on Amazon itself.

Search for related products within your niche, and look at the customer reviews. Many influencers leave detailed reviews and include links to their social media pages or Amazon storefronts. Some even post video reviews on Amazon!

You want to connect with influencers who can create traction, so look for top reviewers with high engagement. This means they need to get lots of “this was helpful” likes on Amazon.

Pay attention to any “Top Amazon Reviewers” or “Top review” picks. Many top reviewers are influencers in specific niches, so it’s a great way to find people who might appeal to your ideal audience.

Influencer marketing platforms

Finally, you can use influencer finders like Grin or Upfluence to find Amazon influencers. Tools that let you sort by Amazon content and further refine your search based on category, audience size, and engagement can save you a lot of time and help you find the right Amazon influencers.

How to find influencers on Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular social media sites for brands hoping to promote their products, generate sales, and create brand awareness. And as you’d expect, there are a LOT of influencers on Instagram, and there are many ways to find them.

We touched on a few above, but this section will give more details. So, here’s how to find Instagram influencers. ⬇️

Manual search

Here’s how to find influencers on Instagram to promote your product using Manual search:

• Open Instagram and head over to the “Search” section.
• Start typing in terms related to your brand. For example, if you sell pottery items, start with the hashtag #pottery and then move on to #potteryinfluencer or #potteryideas. You get the point–influencers will use hashtags related to your niche on their posts, and that’s how you’ll find them.
• If you run out of hashtags to look for, it’s a good idea to pay attention to what the influencers you’ve already found are using on their posts. What other hashtags are they using that might point you to influencers?
• Build a list of influencers using Excel or AirTable to keep track of their names, contact info, usernames, and other details.
• Contact the influencers via DM and email. You must use both when you’re reaching out because you never know which inbox they’ll happen to check.
• Keep your outreach messages short and to the point. No one reads long emails or DMs. This is cold outreach, so be clear about what you’re hoping to do and end with a question that prompts a response.
• Repeat this process until you get influencers to answer and you’re able to close deals with them.

Influencer platforms

Most influencer finder platforms have search capabilities to help you narrow down your results to find the influencers you’re looking for. And they all have Instagram influencers.

This is one of the main advantages of using influencer search tools rather than manually finding influencers–you can actually filter your results, so you come up with helpful answers faster.

For example, on Social Cat, we have filters like audience age group, location, engagement rate, nich, and more. These help you narrow down potential candidates to work with so you can find influencers who align with your brand.

On top of this, platforms (including Social Cat) have campaign features where you can publish campaigns and attract the type of influencers you want. They apply to work with you, so you may not have to do any influencer outreach because influencers decide if they want to work with you.

I think we can agree–that’s way, way better than trying to email and DM hundreds of influencers and being ignored.

We’ve already discussed some of the best influencer search tools above, but we recommend starting with one that has a free trial so you can test the waters before diving in. At Social Cat, we have a week-long free trial, which brands find super helpful.

How to find YouTube influencers

YouTube is another popular influencer platform, although the long-form videos on it make YouTube influencers a bit of a different breed.

Here’s how to find influencers on YouTube. You have a few options:

Manual search

Use the YouTube search function to find influencers–it works similarly to Instagram’s search. However, you might find it even more intuitive because it’s not solely dependent on hashtags. Just plug in keywords related to your work and explore related search terms. That’s how you’ll find relevant YouTube creators.

Simple, right? But here’s where you’ll run into your first hiccup: YouTube doesn’t allow you to message its creators.

So, you’ll have to get their email addresses from their profile and shoot them an email.

In addition to searching, you can also find influencers for free on YouTube by simply heading over to the YouTube Trending tab. Find trending videos in your niche, and you’ll find influencers creating popular content.

Other social media platforms

YouTubers are often active on platforms like X, Instagram, or TikTok. They’ll talk about their YouTube channel in their bio–so keep your eyes peeled! You never know what kind of YouTube gem you might come across.

Influencer marketing platforms

Only some influencer marketing platforms include YouTube influencers, so check before choosing a platform. Some platforms we’ve already covered in this article that have loads of YouTube influencers are Modash and Upfluence.

How to find TikTok influencers

Finding influencers on TikTok is the same process as finding influencers on Instagram. If you’re wondering how to find influencers for free, use the manual search process and look for hashtags on TikTok.

If you’d rather pay a little bit of money to make your search results way more effective, influencer search tools like Social Cat and Modash can help you filter your results and plan TikTok marketing campaigns.

The main difference between TikTok and Instagram influencers isn’t how you find them–it’s who their audience is. TikTok influencers tend to cater to younger audiences and usually have higher engagement rates than Instagram influencers.

How to find local influencers

If you’re hoping to create some local buzz, here’s how to find influencers in your area:

Search local hashtags

Use social media platforms to do manual searches, but include your location as part of the hashtag. For example, if you’re in Texas and own a wellness brand, a good starting point would be #texaswellness.

Just be aware: This method takes a LOT of time, just like any manual search. Thankfully, you have other options. ⬇️

Attend local events

Local events are a great way to meet influencers–so if something is happening in your area where influencers are either expressly invited or might hang out, make sure to attend. If you have the resources to make it happen, you could even host your own event!

Finding local influencers at in-person events is even better than connecting with them online because you can make a real-life connection.

Platforms that allow local searches

If you’re still wondering how to find influencers on Instagram in your area, never fear! We have one more solution to suggest: Use an influencer search tool that allows you to filter to your local area.

For example, at Social Cat, we allow you to filter by postal code (zip code for those in the US), state, or city, so you can always find local influencers on our platform.

How to find influencers for free

We know only one way to find influencers for free: the manual search options discussed above.

All social media tools have a search function, but it’s not built to help you find influencers for your brand. It doesn’t have the features you’ll need to quickly find the people you’re looking for, with the right audience, great content, and excellent engagement rates.

That’s why, if you go this route, you must build extra Excel lists with all the influencers you find, contact, and respond to.

You need some way to stay organized, and some brands do this if they’re determined to find influencers for free.

As you're getting started, it’s an excellent method, but you can’t use it to scale your brand’s marketing. It takes too much time and lacks the features you need.

That’s why we don’t recommend using manual search long-term. Eventually, you will want to switch to one of the influencer search tools we’ll discuss in detail below.

How to vet influencers

Now that you know how to find influencers, you must also learn how to vet them.

Because let’s face it: You don’t just want to find any influencer. You want to find influencers who can make a difference when they promote your brand. So here’s what to look for:

Engagement metrics

Check their engagement–evaluate the number of likes, comments, and shares their recent posts receive. Here’s how to know what you’re looking for with each platform:

A healthy engagement rate for TikTok is 5%- 10%. To calculate this, take the number of likes, comments, and shares relative to the total number of followers on the account or views on the video. This can vary based on niche and audience size, so it’s probably a good idea to check a few well-performing accounts in your industry to establish a baseline.

As we discussed earlier, micro influencers often have better engagement rates than macro or mega influencers, so be sure to consider the influencer’s following when deciding whether or not you like their engagement rate.

A reasonable engagement rate for Instagram micro influencers is 3%- 10%. To calculate this, take the number of likes, comments, shares, and saves and divide that by the influencer’s following or the number of views on the post if you can get those.

If you want to work with Instagram macro influencers, 1% to 3 % is a reasonable engagement rate.

For YouTube, on the other hand, you can be happy with anything from 1% to 5%. Sometimes, smaller, more niche channels can get rates higher than 10%, but most healthy influencer channels fall between 1% and 5%.

Quality of the content

No matter which platform we’re talking about, you need to evaluate the quality of the videos the influencers produce.

Do you like their videos?

Are their photos and content great overall?

Does their vibe fit with your brand?

Pay attention to how they speak to the camera, the quality and composition of their shots, and their feed. You’ll use some of the content they produce for you on your social media channels, so it has to be spot-on.

Audience demographics and authenticity

Finally, double-check their audience demographics to see if they’re similar to yours.

Just because someone is in your niche doesn’t mean they’ll have the right audience for your brand.

Second, make sure to double-check their comments and likes.

Is there fake engagement from comment-for-comment loops?

Do they have many fake followers making generic comments on their stuff?

If their followers and engagement aren’t real, they won’t be able to create real momentum for your brand.

Best tools and platforms to find influencers

Here are some of the best influencer search tools on the market. We’ve discussed many of them in-depth earlier in this article, so we’ll keep these descriptions short:

Social Cat

Social Cat helps brands and influencers start conversations and organize their relationship in one simple platform. With Social Cat, you can raise brand awareness, get licensed UGC, and boost sales by collaborating with their vetted micro influencers.

Access to Social Cat starts at $99/month. Licensing is included with all of their videos.

Insense

Insense allows you to upscale your paid social ads with creators. You can collaborate with multiple vetted creators, get a steady flow of UGC, and increase your ad performance with whitelisted ads.

Insense starts at $500/month.

Modash

Modash is everything consumer brands need to build influencer marketing programs. You can search their database for creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, then evaluate their audience, performance, and content. Finally, you can collect and track the content on Modash’s platform.

Modash starts at $299/month.

Upfluence

Upfluence bills itself as an all-in-one marketing platform for e-commerce. You can recruit influencers, automate campaigns, and scale and ship products. They have over 8.7 million profiles you can swipe through in their database.

Upfluence doesn’t publish their prices–you have to book a demo and talk to one of their sales reps–but according to sources on the web, it typically starts around $1,200/month.

Grin

With Grin, you can find “brand champions,” aka influencers, manage all your influencer campaigns in one place, access data about your current campaigns, create unique discount codes for your influencers to use in affiliate marketing, and get coached by Grin’s strategists.

Grin also doesn’t publish its prices online, but we’ve read that they start at $1,000-$2,500/month.

Tribe

Tribe leverages AI to help you find influencers, pitch campaigns, automate tasks, and generally keep track of your campaigns on their platform. All of their influencers opt to be featured on Tribe, so your response rates will be better, and you can have them come to you and apply–just like on Social Cat!

Tribe creates custom packages for each customer (similar to some other companies on this list), so they don’t publish their prices online. It depends on all the functionality you want, but according to the internet, their annual fee starts at $499/month, plus they charge you an additional 30% on whatever you spend on influencer campaigns.

Shopify Collabs

Shopify Collabs is Shopify’s way of connecting Shopify shop owners with influencers. They pitch it as a way to save money because it’s free to install if you’re already a Shopify user, and you can use it to run affiliate campaigns with creators, send products, and automatically pay influencers.

Shopify Collabs is free if you’re already part of Shopify. You just have to pay a 2.9% payment processing fee on top of the commissions you pay to creators.

Heepsy

Heepsy helps you refine your influencer searching–and do bulk outreach, which can save you time. You can also use their dashboard to analyze the creator’s authenticity and brand fit, organize your workflow, and look at reporting on posts.

Heepsy starts at $89/month.

Later Influence

You might not know this, but Later (the social media scheduling tool) also has an influencer marketing platform. They focus on helping you find and recruit influencers who can deliver full-funnel results. If you want the full-service option, you can also hire their team to run your influencer marketing campaigns.

Later Influence doesn’t publish their prices for this service online, and it’s tough to find discussions about it because most of the conversation centers around their social media scheduling tools.

However, based on the prices of other similar services, we’d guess that you’ll have to pay at least $1,000/month–but don’t be surprised if it’s more.

Types of campaigns you can run with influencers

Once you’ve found your influencers, here are the types of campaigns you can run with them:

Gifted campaigns

Gifted campaigns–sometimes called product seeding–are a trade. You give the influencer products, and they make content for you in return.

The idea is that everyone gets something, and you don’t have to pay extra for the content. It can be a great way to get started with influencer marketing when money is tight, test out an influencer and see if they’re a good fit for your brand, and get product feedback.

Gifted campaigns are Social Cat's bread and butter–in fact, mainly using gifted campaigns, our clients, The Deadbolt Mystery Society, generated over 240 pieces of UGC in one year. Just think of the ads you could run with that kind of UGC library at your fingertips!

Paid campaigns

Paid campaigns are what most people think of when they think about influencer marketing.

With paid campaigns, you pay influencers a fee for creating the content on top of the products or services you give them for free. Although influencer platforms can be expensive (as some of the prices in the previous section will show you), influencer fees can be even more–especially if you’re talking with macro or mega influencers.

We also do paid campaigns at Social Cat. Because our influencers tend to be micro influencers, they’re on the less-expensive side but have highly engaged audiences.

Affiliate campaigns

Affiliate campaigns are a hybrid between paid and gifted campaigns. Instead of paying the influencer a predetermined fee, you agree to pay them a percentage of the sales they make for you. To do this, you’ll need to use software that generates trackable, customizable, and unique discount codes.

Brands often like the idea of affiliate campaigns–and you can run them using any influencer marketing platform as long as you can get custom discount codes. But make sure you watch your profit margins.

When selling your product at a discount and giving a cut to an influencer, there’s not always much profit left.

Influencer success story

While we’re discussing how to get influencers to promote your product, let’s look at a success story involving influencer marketing: 1-800-Flowers. As they launched new products, they needed a steady stream of content. Do you know where they found it?

Yep–influencer marketing through Social Cat.

In just a few months, they managed to acquire over 100 pieces of content that they can reuse on their marketing channels.

Collaborating with influencers has been a game-changer for their brand, and Social Cat made it easy for them to find the right influencers to promote their wide range of products.

Conclusion

So now you know how to find influencers! You can find them for free using manual search, and when you get tired of that, you can use influencer marketing platforms to filter your results and manage your campaigns.

➡️ Usually, it’s worth spending a little so you don’t have to waste your time finding and pursuing influencers who will never respond.

Of course, how you’ll find influencers will vary based on the platform you’re hoping to advertise on.

If you sell through Amazon, finding influencers on Amazon is much different than finding Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube influencers. But, with the platform and knowledge of your niche, you can find influencers for any platform!

We’ve done our best to make this article as fair as possible and represent a wide range of influencer search platforms.

But if you’ve made it this far, we’re sure the choice is clear: Social Cat is the best value for the money. The combination of our manually vetted influencers with super reasonable pricing makes us the best option for your brand’s influencer marketing needs.

So why not start a free trial today? The best (and least expensive) influencer collaborations of your life are just a click away!