Find the Right Influencer – From Keyword to Community

How do you find the right influencers? This tutorial will answer the question – with the SISTRIX Influencer Search Engine, you can discover exactly the influencers that match in a database of millions of potential contacts.

Influencer marketing, sometimes also referred to as multiplier marketing, has firmly established itself as a channel in online marketing. Once you have decided to start an influencer campaign, the big question arises: how do I find the right influencer for my project?

Let’s run through this tutorial with a fictional example: Imagine we are a dog food manufacturer, and not just any dog food, but special food for dachshunds. This is a food that underlines the graceful beauty of these animals, strengthens their special physique and makes their fur shine!

Finding the first influencer

In order to make this premium feed known to the public, we would like to start an influencer campaign. Naturally, we are looking for the right influencers for this so let’s jump directly into the tool and use the SISTRIX Influencer Search to find exactly the right influencer. In the first step we enter our main keyword (here “dachshund”) in the keyword search:

The SISTRIX Influencer Search regularly monitors the key figures of more than 90 million influencer accounts on the three most important networks: Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

As soon as an account has more than 10,000 followers (or on YouTube subscribers), we import these accounts into the search and make current and historical posts searchable. All account data is updated at least once a week, for large accounts even daily.

Expand the Influencer selection

Our search for “dachshund” in this case unearthed 91 potential accounts. Not bad, but we want to keep the funnel of accounts as large as possible, especially at the beginning of the influencer search: We can still filter and narrow down.

To find more accounts, we use the “Suggest Keywords” function. This feature analyses the accounts that have already been found and suggests additional keywords that match your target. In our example we select four more keywords.

We now have over 10,000 potential influencer accounts in the SISTRIX influencer search. So far, the aim has been to discover as many relevant accounts as possible from the area, the next step is to remove irrelevant influencers from the search results.

Filter to see the most relevant influencers

Now we use the numerous filter options to exclude irrelevant hits from the search result. We have access to a large number of filters and data fields that can be combined with one another as required. For our example we set the following filters:

  • Followers: 10,000 to 500,000 – for our premium dachshund food we are not looking for meta-influencers with many millions of followers or accounts that are too small with only limited reach. A number of followers between 10,000 and 500,000 is ideal.
  • Engagement: the engagement rate measures how many of the followers of an account interact with the posts. We’re looking for influencers with a solid engagement rate between 1% and 25%. Higher values quickly indicate unnaturalness, but it shouldn’t be less than 1% either.
  • Refine Matches: this filter is a very special filter! We are looking for real dachshund aficionados, not free riders. With the Narrow Keyword Hits filter, you can select accounts from the results list that have sparingly used the keywords.

At this point you may still have too many results. (In our case we saw 1745 candidate accounts.) Consider optimising the target keywords. Perhaps “puppy” and “dogsofinstagram” were too generic for our requirements. By removing them we end up with a manageable list of 116 accounts across all networks. (Tip: Remember that YouTube keywords are sometimes written with spaces, unlike hashtags on Instagram and TikTok.)

The remaining filter options are unused in this tutorial; the gender of the influencer is not important to us, as is the age and the language most frequently used in the account. After all, we want to conquer the world with our premium dachshund food.

Influencer profile – the important details

Although the initial steps in our influencer search were done with just a few clicks, the whole endeavour still requires some work. Look at the filtered accounts, evaluate them and decide whether they should be contacted as influencers that can help promote the premium dachshund food.

In the search results table, you can already see a preview of the most important metrics for evaluating the influencer. To get deeper, you should also take a look at the influencer profile. To do this, click on the influencer’s name:

In the influencer profile, you will see other key figures for this account in addition to the already-known metrics. There you also have a quick overview of the influencer’s most successful posts and see the follower growth over the last few months.

In order to get even deeper into the composition of the followers of individual influencers, there is the audience analysis. Here we evaluate a statistically relevant part of the influencer’s followers in order to be able to tell you how these followers behave and what characteristics they have.

Collections – Manage your influencers

Once you have decided that an influencer is an option for working with you, add it to a collection. SISTRIX professionals already know the collections from other SISTRIX areas as lists. In the SISTRIX influencer search we have optimized it for the collection and management of influencers.

Steve Paine
11.02.2021