Tools and Tips on How to Find Niche Influencers That are Actually Influential

Influencers rule the world, and there is no question about that. More than half of eCommerce brands collaborate with social media stars to promote their offers, yet two-thirds of marketers notice that they struggle to find the right people to represent their brands.

Indeed, finding genuine opinion leaders and accomplished bloggers in your particular field may be a fruitless endeavor if you aren’t sure where to look for them or how to vet them. This article will arm you with the proper tools and knowledge to claim your digital space and make your brand’s voice heard by speaking through devoted niche influencers.

Who are niche influencers?

Niche influencers are experts or seasoned bloggers who are known for their skills or knowledge in a particular area. This is an important concept for anyone interested in influencer marketing because niche influencers are the ones that help you bridge the gap between you and your target audience by becoming fans of your brand or even ambassadors. They share your brand’s values and live the exact lifestyle you promote.

Take Redbull, for example. They are exceptionally good at finding and supporting niche influencers. Caroline Marks, a young professional surfer, is one of them:

If you want to find an expert in a specific niche, you need to focus on so-called nano-, micro-, and, in some cases, medium influencers instead of reaching out to the top stars. Bloggers with smaller follower bases are likely to give you a more effective and predictable outcome, especially when their followers are your potential clients through and through.

Micro-influencers have better engagement rates than mega-influencers. How so? They don’t have a lot of fake followers, and their audience choice is more precise. Because they deliver niche content, people following them are generally more involved and active than those that just scroll through photos of Instagram models with no particular agenda.

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What are the benefits of working with niche influencers?

People have had enough of the Kardashians — now, they are more inclined to listen to relatable, down-to-earth influencers that have their authenticity intact. That’s only one reason to choose niche bloggers over the biggest stars, but there are many more.

• It’s less expensive. You can use barter instead of paying for the collaboration. Because these bloggers are from your niche, they’ll be naturally interested in testing, reviewing, and using your products. For example, if you sell toys and treats for animals, partnering with a petfluencer and sending them boxes with samples will make both sides happy.
• It helps you generate reusable content. Niche influencers will create unique, high-quality content for you that will never look out of place in your brand account. You can easily repurpose this content later without losing its relevance.
• It creates a steady stream of new subscribers. Bloggers from your area of expertise are more likely to keep your sponsored content on their page for a long time because it doesn’t contradict the main theme of their blog. On the contrary, influencers with no specific target group tend to jump from one style to another and, as a result, only keep branded content for short periods of time.

Now, let’s look at the top-performing content formats for influencer marketing:

The top three most effective content formats are Instagram posts, Instagram stories, and YouTube videos, so this is where our main focus will be. However, we’ll also talk about how to find influencers for your brand on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Medium, Spotify, and so on.

First, we’ll discuss how to find niche creators manually. Then, we’ll describe the most popular and reliable third-party tools to perform an advanced search.

How to find niche influencers on YouTube

Here are a couple of things you can do to discover new faces for your content marketing campaign by simply using YouTube search:

1. Search for specific keywords related to your brand, audience, and niche. This way, you’ll discover channels and creators that produce the most relevant content. Then, take a look at the “People also watched” section.
2. Search your competitors’ brand names with the hashtag “#ad.” This will help you find existing sponsored content from creators that you can potentially reach out to. Just make sure there is enough time gap, and you won’t run your campaign right over your competitor’s.
3. Once you’ve found a few niche influencers, check who they follow, mention, and collaborate with.

Tried everything? Then, scroll down to discover our list of advanced tools for finding YouTube influencers.

How to find niche influencers on Instagram

The simplest way to find popular Instagram accounts in your niche is to search for them using keywords. Hashtags are also effective — just open top-performing posts instead of recent publications, and you’ll quickly identify successful creators in that particular area.

There is another way to find Instagram influencers — by using the algorithms of the platform. Instagram finds similar accounts for you, so, by opening one sports coach’s profile, you’ll find many more by clicking on the arrow next to the “Follow” button:

If these methods are too time-consuming and don’t bring you enough relevant profiles, or you want to fine-tune your search criteria, pay attention to the influencer search tools that we’ve listed below.

How to find influencers on TikTok

TikTok is a unique and challenging platform in this regard. If you target a young and savvy audience, you’ll easily find rising stars that will be happy to work with your brand. If, however, you want to market something Generation Z won’t usually buy, you’ll have a hard time looking for creators ready to collaborate.

So, where to find influencers on TikTok? We suggest looking for trending hashtags related to your area of expertise and reaching out to the popular bloggers that use them.

However, if you need to find hundreds of TikTokers to promote your product on a large scale, manual search is not an option. Instead, scroll down and try the influencer search tools we’ve gathered for you.

How to find niche podcast creators

Podcasts have grown big. Mobile time spent listening to audio content is about to surpass time spent on social media, video, and gaming. And nearly two-thirds of podcast listeners take action based on ads they hear. All in all, you can’t miss an opportunity to mention your brand by sponsoring a podcast your potential clients listen to.

But most podcast apps aren’t great at helping you discover new voices. All they do is allow you to search based on language and keywords, but many podcasters give their creations whimsical names and descriptions that aren’t easily searchable.

Apple Podcasts has a list of podcast categories, which you can use to narrow down your search.

Many shows in the Apple Podcasts directory include a “Listeners also subscribed to” section that lists related shows based on overlapping audiences. Podcasts Tracker for Android also has a convenient category-based search function.

Another proven method to find niche podcasters manually is to use Listen Notes:

While you don’t receive all the analytics that advanced platforms usually offer, you dig a bit deeper nevertheless. In addition, Listen Notes offers a premium membership with more advanced search features. The platform also enables you to see when podcasters are open for sponsorships.

Why do you need influencer search tools?

Manually hunting for potential collaborations can only get you so far. There are many advanced tools for finding influencers — and don’t let their prices scare you. To understand why they are well worth the investment, let’s list the main advantages of automating that laborious process in the first place.

By entrusting professional AI-based services with the task of finding influencers for you, you get a lot of additional data:

• their advertising potential;
• the fraud risk;
• the number of real followers and likes;
• their reputation;
• their engagement rates, and more.

The right influencer search tools will save you tons of money by helping you find authentic creators thinking out of the box. You will also avoid unwanted partnerships that can hurt your brand and disappoint your existing audience.

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Top tools and platforms for finding influencers

Influencer marketing is an exceptional case where one size fits all, or, in other words, one platform helps you find influencers on different channels. However, mono-channel tools are no less useful.

Influencity

This platform offers what seems to be the most elaborated search option with more than 100,000 ways to combine filters. Influencity helps brands and agencies find the right fit by choosing from more than 70 million influencers. You can discover like-minded bloggers who speak the same language, translate the same values, and love the same brands as your target audience.

Influencity has some interesting features that will help you search with laser precision. For example, you can:

• set the preferable number of followers and focus on local celebrities and yet-to-be-known experts instead of big stars;
• go with a bang by choosing influencers with the highest engagement rates;
• discover look-alikes when your favorite influencer is too busy to take your offer;
• pinpoint bloggers writing about specific topics;
• look only for those with verified accounts.

With Influencity, you can search on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The platform offers a 7-day trial. After that, you can start using it for $48 a month, but to unlock its full potential, you’ll need a plan for at least $298 a month.

HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor’s unique selling point is its superpower to find fake influencers, followers, likes, comments, and engagement. Aside from that, the platform also does a great job of helping marketers, brands, and agencies discover their perfect match. HypeAuditor offers a database of 20 million profiles and over 20 helpful filters to optimize the influencer selection process.

Finding influencers with this platform is a piece of cake. Just type in any keyword in the search bar to filter niche influencers. You can also apply the category filter and choose a specific content topic. Overall, HypeAuditor has over 35 in-depth metrics to confidently spot fake celebrities and bring new opinion leaders to light.

With the help of HypeAuditor, you can analyze Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch influencers. Their plans cost around $299 a month — depending on the number of reports and features you need. You need to contact sales to get the best offer. They have a free-forever plan, so you can take a good look around before buying it.

Post For Rent

This is a platform for finding, comparing, and analyzing influencers and their audiences before collaborating with them. Post For Rent has a 90M+ influencer database and advanced filters to cut through the noise and find your dream influencer. Also, you can save the complete influencer profile analysis as a PDF document.

It gives you an estimated forecast of your selected influencers’ performance and a summary of their audience demographics. Moreover, you can compare niche bloggers side by side and decide who suits your campaign better. The platform even shows you suggested fees that bloggers may charge.

The platform covers all major social media platforms. You can run a quick analysis without even registering. However, you need to create an account to access all the features. Running an in-depth analysis costs $5 per profile. Using the Discover tool costs $99.

Mention

This platform is a different breed. Mention is built for finding, unsurprisingly, tagged and untagged brand mentions and, in our case, influencers who talk about your brand. It’s a smart approach because you won’t need to win over those opinion leaders — chances are they are already fans of your brand or have a genuine interest in it. Mention helps you establish, nourish, and preserve those relationships.

Mention enables you to reach out to niche influencers on Twitter, Instagram, and various other blogging platforms. You can request a demo or start a free trial and explore their features first hand. The pricing plans start at $25 a month.

AdvertiseCast

This is the first podcast advertising network representing 1,500+ podcasts. It’s a full-service solution, but you’re still entitled to decide which niche podcast to choose for your sponsorship. There are 20+ categories, from business and tech to arts and history.

In the preview of every show, you’ll see its potential reach. Once you’ve opened the description of a show, you’ll also notice Similar Listings. AdvertiseCast also encourages users to contact their sales team in case they can’t find the right show. All you need to do is fill out a short form.

Before you go

Now, you’ve learned not only where to find influencers but also how to vet them. We recommend using multiple tools. Some platforms analyze Instagram API and have vast databases but give you limited information about those bloggers. Other platforms have influencers registered and open for collaborations — it makes the whole communication process easier but limits your choice. Try both approaches to understand what gives you the best result and ROI.

You can use SendPulse in addition to your content marketing campaigns. It will help you nurture leads that you capture with sponsored content and ads on social media. Organize your contact lists, analyze the activity of your subscribers, send personalized emails, and more. Just create an account, and you’re ready to start!