How To Find and Pick the Right Nano Influencers For Your Brand

When brands start with influencer marketing, they naturally fall into the trap of wanting bigger and more popular social media influencers like macro influencers, mega influencers, and celebrity influencers to promote their products.

We all want clout and popularity, it’s natural. But it won’t get to sales and it will be massively unprofitable when you’re starting out. It’s wiser to smart way small and build from there. This is where nano influencers come in.

What is a Nano Influencer?

The definition of Nano influencers is that they are influencers with small, highly engaged, and niche audiences. A nano-influencer follower count might be up for debate but we consider any influencer with a following of 3k-20k in the nano-influencer category.

With nano-influencers, it’s just not about the follower count as a nano influencer has a highly engaged audience and this audience is super niche, hence likely to be early adopters of your product. Even big brands know their importance and are partnering with more nano influencers each passing month.

Benefits Of Working With Nano Influencers

1. No Gatekeepers or Agencies:
Reaching out to large influencers (75K+ followers) often leads to dealing with agencies, long media kits, and inflexible four-figure rates. Negotiations are tough, and the response is usually, “These rates are non-negotiable.” With nano influencers, it’s the opposite. You email them, get a quick reply, and set up a partnership without jumping through hoops.

2. Authenticity and Emotion-Driven Content:
Nano influencers actually use and love the products they promote. Their posts aren’t polished ads—they’re genuine stories and experiences. The content feels emotional and real, which resonates more with their followers and often leads to higher engagement and trust.

3. Stronger Connection with Their Audience:
Nano influencers typically know their audience on a personal level. They respond to DMs, reply to comments, and often have real conversations with their followers. This kind of interaction creates deeper trust—and more influence—than most large influencers can achieve. Remember, it’s about influence marketing, not just influencer marketing.

4. High Engagement Rates:
Despite having fewer followers, nano influencers often outperform macro and mega influencers in engagement. Their smaller communities are tighter and more loyal, making every like, comment, and share more meaningful and impactful.

5. Cost-Effective Partnerships:
Working with nano influencers doesn’t require massive budgets. Many are happy to collaborate in exchange for free products, small payments, or affiliate commissions—making it ideal for small and growing brands.

6. Authentic UGC (User-Generated Content):
The content created by nano influencers often doubles as authentic UGC. You can repurpose it in ads, emails, or product pages—adding social proof and a human touch to your marketing.

7. Easier to Build Long-Term Relationships:
Because they’re not overloaded with brand deals, nano influencers are more open to longer-term collaborations. This allows brands to build a consistent presence in their content and foster true ambassador-style partnerships.

Two Examples of Successful Nano-Influencer Marketing Campaigns:

First great example is Glossier. Instead of focusing on big celebrities, they leaned into their community of everyday users—people with a few hundred or a few thousand followers who genuinely loved the brand. These nano influencers shared authentic posts about their skincare routines and favorite Glossier products, which made the brand feel personal and trustworthy. Because their audiences saw them as peers, not promoters, engagement was high and word-of-mouth spread quickly, turning customers into loyal ambassadors.

Another standout is Daniel Wellington. They launched their watch brand by sending free products to tons of small creators with modest followings and asking them to post a photo wearing the watch with a discount code. These nano-influencers weren’t famous, but their posts felt real and relatable. The campaign was a success, and suddenly the brand was everywhere—without spending big on ads. It’s a classic case of using scale and authenticity to create buzz organically.

How To Negotiate With Nano-Influencers?

Brand partnerships are not a primary source of a nano-influencer's income and they are more likely to accept affiliate-only collaborations. You can even get usage rights for the content for just a small fee. This content can be used as ad creatives for amazing FB and TikTok ads for your paid media efforts. That’s two birds, one stone.

Coming to the fee, it’s another great thing about nano influencer marketing. The nano-influencers are most likely okay with working on affiliate commissions if they like your product and think it’s a fit for their audience (which it should be by default since you’re vetting them for fit before reaching out)

Even if the nano-influencers do charge money, it would be a nominal $50-$100 in addition to a sample (i.e. your COGS). You can also ask them for usage rights to repurpose the influencer content for this amount to improve your influencer marketing ROI.

The best part about a nano influencer is that they grow over time, sometimes fast. So if you get in early, they’ll love and recommend you for life, even when they become huge influencers, creating a strong long-term relationship.

How to Find Nano Influencers and Pick the Right Ones?

It’s just not about partnering with nano-influencers but about partnering with the right ones. How do you figure that out?

There are some rules of thumb that we follow here at SARAL.

• The nano-influencer should be niche specific in their content. If you go for a general nano-influencer who posts about everything then you will have a hard time getting any conversions. Instead, if you are promoting your beauty product and go for a nano-influencer who talks about skincare, and beauty then you can expect more engagement from their target audience.

• Avoid nano-influencers who have already partnered with big brands. The reason is that the nano influencer inflate their upfront flat fee price once they have partnered with a couple of big brands. Their price would suddenly go up from $100 to $500 but the value (to you) remains the same. It doesn’t hurt to reach out though.

• Check the engagement rate. For nano influencers go for at least 3-5% engagement. More than 7% means you’ve struck gold!

• The comments-to-likes ratio is the most important influencer metric to gauge the engagement of the nano-influencer's audience. Ideally, it should be 1:15. They should have 1 comment for every 15 likes. You can always check this metric easily with the SARAL FREE Chrome Extension.

Steps To Build Your First Nano Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re looking to launch your first nano-influencer campaign, don’t overthink it—it’s all about finding the right people and building genuine relationships. Here’s a simple step-by-step breakdown to get you started:

1. Define your goal: Are you trying to increase brand awareness, drive sales, or collect influencer UGC? Your goal will shape the rest of your strategy.

2. Identify your ideal customer: Know who you’re targeting so you can find influencers whose followers match that audience.

3. Find relevant nano-influencers: Look for everyday creators with 1K–10K followers who already use or align with your product. Tools or manual Instagram/TikTok searches work great. SARAL's Influencer Search Engine can help you here.

4. Reach out personally: Keep your message casual and genuine. Show that you’ve looked at their content and explain why your brand is a good fit.

5. Offer value: Whether it’s free products, early access, or affiliate commission, give them a reason to be excited.

6. Track performance: Monitor engagement, reach, and any sales or sign-ups that come from their posts.

7. Build long-term relationships: Stay in touch with top performers—they could become long-term brand advocates.

Engaging with Nano influencers and Getting Results

‍Here are some best practices to be mindful of when engaging with nano influencers.

• Discuss the deliverables in detail with the nano-influencers. Nano influencers know best what works with their audience. If the nano influencer is telling you to do a post followed by 3 stories then that’s what you should test out at least for the first time. The foundation of every great influencer relationship is trust. So trust the nano influencer here as they know what will work best instead of creating a 10-page long creative guideline document.

• Give the nano-influencer creative freedom to create the content. The important part is that the nano influencer's content with your product should look natural and resonate with the audience.

• Do at least 2 to 3 promotions in a month with the same nano-influencer. This is how you will get the best engagement from the nano-influencer's audience. This way, you may also be able to bag a discount on their flat fee for a combo deal. Marketing works when customers see it over and over again.

• Maintain a level of decorum in your communication with the nano influencer but don’t be too professional or corporate sounding. Nano influencers are giving you access to their audience so they should be treated as brand partners and nothing less.

• If you didn’t already, discuss the possibility of usage rights with the nano-influencer - especially if the piece of that influencer UGC got good comments. This way, it’s more likely to be a hit on paid media channels too.

• Partner with at least 10 nano influencers each month. More nano-influencers you partner with create more buzz and you are more likely to see exponential growth in your sales each month.

Conclusion:

‍The right product in front of the right audience is the key to any form of marketing. Teaming up with dozens of nano influencers month by month can drive a tremendous amount of sales for your brand. Most brands frown upon working with influencers with a smaller audience. They see a 5k, 7k audience and think they are not big enough to make any impact.

But they are WRONG, it’s literally five thousand people, that’s an auditorium full of potential buyers! Imagine getting your product in front of all these prospects. This is why nano influencers are important. Don’t wait, capitalize!

But, if you are spending hours and hours scrolling social media platforms to find the right nano influencers, manually reaching out to them one-by-one, and managing them all on time-consuming spreadsheets - that's where SARAL can help you.

SARAL is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform excels at what matters most:

• Automating repetitive tasks (emails, follow-ups, tracking)
• Finding and onboarding nano-influencers
• Organizing creator relationships in one place
• Simplifying performance tracking
• Running all types of campaigns (gifting, seeding, affiliate, ambassador programs, etc.) from one tool

...and so much more so you can focus on things that can't be automated, like building relationships. Let's show you in person.