Influencer marketing has proven itself as one of the most effective digital marketing tactics of recent years – and all signs point toward a very similar situation in 2018. However, influencer marketing requires finding and contacting numerous influencers at a time, which can prove to be time-consuming and not always effective – unless, of course, you have the right tool to help. And if you need to find and connect with several influencers on a monthly basis, then you definitely need a tool to help. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to find and connect with influencers at scale.

How to find and connect with influencers at scale

How to use influencers to grow your business

There are multiple ways of using social influencers to your benefit. For example:

• Maximise your visibility: get links on top blogs, have influencers talking about your product, and so on, in order to maximise your businesses’ visibility
• Maximise your reach: reach a wider, targeted audience
• Boost your reputation: getting an influencer to endorse your business, or your products or services, can help boost your reputation
• Sell more: getting an influencer to promote your products/services can help you make more sales
• Drive traffic: by getting your links on top influencers’ websites and blogs (through guest blogging, for example), you can drive more traffic to your own website or blog

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to find and connect with #influencers at scale with @Upfluence” quote=”How to find and connect with #influencers at scale with @Upfluence”]

Use Upfluence to find and connect with influencers at scale

There is a plethora of tools out there that can help you discover influencers. However, if you’re really serious about your influencer marketing campaigns and plan to reach out to numerous influencers on a regular basis, it’s worth investing in a tool that can help you do both (finding AND contacting them).

Otherwise, you’re only going to lose a lot of time.

One of my favourite tools that does both of these things, is Upfluence. It’s a very powerful influencer marketing software with a huge database of influencers and a host of other useful features:

Search for social influencers  

One of the main attractions is the powerful search engine and influencer database. There are about 750k influencers already in their database, with more being added all the time. Plus, you can add any influencer you find online, as well – but, more on that later.

To start your search, you can begin by entering your keywords (as many as you want):

You can even decide how important each keyword is; it does not affect the number of results but it does change the way the results are displayed.

Furthermore, there are several useful filters to go through, most notably:

• Their language and country
• If they have an email or not
• If they have a blog or not
• And their exact location: pick a city, and select a radius to get super targeted results (this is particularly useful for businesses that only operate in very specific locations)
• Their channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and blogs

One of my favourite aspects is that you can also see an overview of the results you’ll get, which changes as you add more keywords and filters to your search:

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can see how many total influencers there are, as well as how many there are in each influencer category (power middle with 50k social followers, top 20% with 200k followers, and top 5% with over 1 million social followers), and a list of frequent keywords.

Once finished with your search, you’ll (of course), get a list of your results:

Next to each influencer, you can see some of their most relevant information at first glance: their location, their description, social followers, influencer score, relevancy to your search, and latest social media and blog posts.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to search for the right #influencers with @Upfluence” quote=”How to search for the right #influencers with @Upfluence”]

If you can click on any one of the influencers, you get more detailed information:

• A more complete list of their latest social media posts, as well as their engagement stats over the last 60 days, for each network
• A list of their latest blog posts and overview of their Alexa Rank and estimated monthly visitors, as well as the engagement on their blog for the past 60 days
• Their available information: location, email, etc.
• A place to make notes about that specific influencer

Plus, you can also see important information about what audience they are influencing, exactly:

See what countries they live in, as well as what their ages and genders are.

What’s even better (and something that I haven’t encountered with any other influencer marketing software), is that you can actually search for influencers based on who forms their audience:

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can search by their audiences using different criteria: their ages, their location, and their gender.

This is a very useful feature, as it allows me (and other users, of course), to find targeted influencers more easily. A good influencer marketing campaign requires using highly targeted influencers; after all, the goal is to reach your target audience, not just any audience, so that they actually take action as a result of your campaign (whether it’s raising awareness of your brand, buying a product or service from you, or whatever other goals you might have).

Once you’ve created your search, you can then select any influencer by clicking on their photo to export them:

• To a list you create:

• To set up a stream to monitor them
• Or to a .csv or .xlsx file

You can also add more influencers by using their Google Chrome extension. Once installed, whenever you find an influencer that you like online (whether it be on social media, on their blog, or other networks), you can simply click on the extension button to add them to the database and get their personal information:

Quick tip: When searching for influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s very important to evaluate their engagement and their relationship with their followers, visitors, and readers. In fact, it’s arguably more important than their number of followers. Focus on those influencers who have a close relationship with followers, who get comments on their blogs and on their social media posts and, generally, who have engaged followers.

Influencer outreach platform to connect with influencers at scale

Apart from searching for influencers, you can also email them at scale. Basically, you can stop emailing each individual influencer, one at a time, losing time.

To get started, you can use one of the lists you created to start an email campaign:

Once done, you can set up the campaigns’ email template:

Give it a subject line, attach a file, and customize it as you wish.

When you send an email template to multiple influencers, it’s extremely important that they are still personalised. Thankfully, you can create multiple customizations automatically, and not just their name, but also their location, your brand value proposition, and more.

Once you’ve sent your first email campaign, you can keep a close eye on its results:

As you can see above, you can check who has opened or replied to your emails, who has engaged with you, as well as an overview of how many emails you’ve sent and scheduled. For example, if you want to quickly see who has opened your email, you can click on “opened” to get the list of influencers.

(another) Quick tip: Always personalize influencer outreach emails. Influencers get so many different emails every day, all asking for the same things, so you need to make yours stand out. By personalizing, you show that you are truly familiar with them and their work, that you respect their time, and that you are serious about working with them.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to do #influencer #outreach at scale with @Upfluence” quote=”How to do #influencer #outreach at scale with @Upfluence”]

Monitoring and reporting

Another useful feature from Upfluence is that you can listen and get reports of your monitored influencers.

Earlier on, I showed you how you can pick and choose social influencers that you’ve found to export to a monitoring stream. Once you’ve done that, the tool will start pulling relevant data so you can get a better idea of the influencers’ online success, their engagement and so on.

And as I mentioned before, engagement is quite important when choosing an influencer to work with. Of course, the level of importance depends on your end goal.

For example, if you were to create a campaign with a single influencer, promoting a product or service over multiple blog posts and social media updates, it’s extremely important to focus on highly engaged influencers.

On the other hand, if your campaign is mostly focused on numbers – link building, driving traffic, boosting overall reach and visibility – then you might not need to pay as much attention to their engagement (although, you still should – just to a lesser degree than with my previous example).

Anyway, back to Upfluence’s monitoring and analytics feature:

One of the really cool features (and something that’s not present with many other social listening tools) is that you can find out what the specific influencers that you’re interested in, are saying about certain keywords (which, of course, you set):

So, for example, you can monitor all the influencers you’re interested in to find out what they’re saying about one of your products or services, or about similar products or services.

Plus, this feature is also very useful for actively monitoring your live influencer marketing campaigns and getting instant analytics to use to calculate your (or your clients’) campaigns’ ROI and success.

Conclusion

Upfluence not only simplifies the entire influencer marketing research process – as well as the actual influencer marketing campaign – but it also helps you make better-informed decisions so that you can get improved results from your campaigns.

Use it to research and find the right influencers for your needs and campaigns, as well as to monitor them and your brand reputation, and to reach out to them. Some of my favourite features are:

• The complex search and filtering options
• The very accurate geolocation feature
• The fact that you can easily reach out to multiple influencers, while still keeping things personal
• The monitoring features for specific groups of influencers

Have you tried Upfluence? What are your influencer marketing plans for 2018? Leave your comments below and please share ☺