How to use SparkToro to find influencers for your brand

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As a marketer or founder, you want to ensure that your partnership with influencers doesn’t just result in social buzz, but also generates revenue.

That's why simply Googling the Instagram accounts with the highest followers or names suggested by your friends or family won’t work. You need to find influential creators, not just popular ones.

You need influencers that create quality content, have high engagement rates, and, most importantly, have the audience that you want to attract to your brand.

Finding people whom your audience listens to can have a great payoff, but finding good influencers is hard:

• Picking the right ones takes manual research, which means lots of time and effort.

• Customer surveys to find influencers are cool, but limited.

• Search engines for influencer search are expensive, and might not have accurate date.

There is hope at the end of the tunnel though, that’s Sparktoro. It tells you the hashtags, social accounts, websites, podcasts, which your audience is interested in.

Simply enter the keywords related to your brand, and SparkToro will look for profiles that match your search criteria. It reduces weeks of research into minutes of automatic work.

Think of it like your on-demand, always-on assistant for finding influencers.

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Let's check out how you can use SparkToro to find the perfect influencers for your brand.

Find influencers for your brand with SparkToro

SparkToro offers 6 ways to do audience research. If you can do basic research on topics, hashtags, websites that your audience follows, you can find the sources of influence for your audience.

Out of these 6 options, we'll explore the 3 most popular ways using diff

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Out of these 6 options, we'll explore the 3 most popular ways using different hypothetical scenarios.

Method #1 — Topics of interest

Whatever product you sell, your audience will have specific topics they are interested in that set them apart from everyone else. For example, if you are a company that sells bracelets, necklaces, hairbands, etc. (like Pura Vida!), your potential customers would be interested in fashion accessories.

Type that into the SparkToro dashboard and hit Search.

You will first get a high-level overview of each section. From the menu on the left, you can select the one you want to dig deeper into.

You can start by searching social media accounts under the 'Social' menu option.

You will find a mix of personal and business accounts.

There are also links to the other channels for each social profile, such as the website, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, etc.

The social section is crucial especially if you’re looking to set up a typical influencer marketing program with social media influencers. Don’t miss the SparkScore that depicts engagement numbers across channels.

Returning to our example, we can see that Rachel  Zoe might be the right influencer for our fashion accessory brand. In SparkToro, an engagement rate of above 50 is generally considered good.

Use the 'Lists' feature to store what you've found for later reference. If you want to use a sheet, you can also export your selections in a CSV.

Method #2 - Popular hashtags

Successful creators know that using the right hashtags will help users discover their content easily. So find creators who use the hashtag relevant to your brand.

Let’s take the example of a Keto meal prep service for this example. You can simply enter one of your core hashtags (such as #keto) into the search, and Sparktoro shows you more insights about your audience.

Doing this research yourself with hashtags on social media takes hours, with Sparktoro it’s just a search away!

You can narrow down the list by selecting 'Filters' and choosing your criteria.

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One tip to get the most value out of SparkToro is to be as specific in your research as possible to find the right creators quickly. In our example above, you can find ideas for more hashtags in the 'Top Hashtags Used' section.

Once you search with a hashtag, look for other hashtags suggested by SparkToro and see if there's a more specific hashtag you can search with. The most popular words and phrases (and hashtags) are less useful than the more specific ones further down the lists.

For example, words like “fitness” or “nutrition” are broad for a company selling only Keto meals. So instead, you can find more value in the hashtags #ketodiet.

Method #3 - Competitor search

One of the easiest ways to find influencers to promote your brand is to see who’s promoting your competitors, alternatives, or similar products.

Let's say you are a marketer working at Lululemon. Your audience is slightly similar to that of Gymshark, and they might be following Gymshark on social media. Let's use this small insight to find influencers for a fitness apparel brand.

Choose the 'My Audience follows the social account' and type in your competitor's name.

You will see a list of accounts that are followed by people who also follow Gymshark, along with their engagement scores. We can see a few notable names in the fitness industry to validate that this research is going in the right direction.

As I mentioned earlier, save them to lists, and send them an email asking if they’re be open to working with your brand. Don’t just try to do paid placements with them - it’s not a Facebook ad! Build a relationship, see if they’re interested, and work something out that’s long-term favorable for you and for the influencer.

If you want to have a better experience managing all your relationships with influencers, import the CSV into relationship management tools like SARAL and keep track of everything in there.

Final Thoughts

SparkToro crawls over 80 million social profiles and web pages to find what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online. It is a great tool to get started with and find creators because of its simple, intuitive design.

If you use Google or any other search engine, you’re wasting countless hours. Just try SparkToro’s 5 free credits and see the difference yourself!

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