There are many opinions around influencer marketing. Some people say it’s going to die. Others praise the channel.

In the end, if your audience is spending time on Instagram, you must be present there. And just having an Instagram brand account isn’t enough.

So how can you find and engage your audience. The way is to find people talking genuinely about your product.

Optimally would be that you have such a great product that leads to a word of mouth effect. Customers talk positively and spread it.

The problem is that you cannot control and scale it. That’s why we see successful DTC brands scale with influencers.

We can see brands like Gymshark, Glossier and Fashion Nova grow their community on Instagram with the help of influencers. How? They manage to efficiently find their audience and build a “word of mouth” machine.

The word of mouth effect is created by people loving your product. That’s why it’s important to find influencers that actually love what you do. A good start is to go through profiles that already follow you.

3 ways to find your audience

1. Find profiles that mentioned other brands with similar audiences. As an example, your customers also love Glossier. Then pick Glossier influencers.

2. Pick profiles with shared followers. Your brand and the influencer share followers which could mean you have a similar audience.

3. Do barter deals to make sure they actually like your product.

By following the steps it will probably lead to smaller profiles. This means you’ll have to gather many profiles.

The goal is to create a “feeling” that everybody talks about your brand. In practice, posting stories, images, mention you and your hashtag.

Now you’re thinking; “Great, let’s contact a bunch of micro profiles and give out our product”... well yes you have contacted many profiles, probably over a thousand.

But don’t forget, we want to create the “hype” moment and that’s hard to do if you collaborate with one profile from Nebraska, another from LA and one in London. Those profiles have no connection.

So how can you create this feeling within a social cluster at scale?

Social cluster

The idea is to tap into a social cluster. Find 100 profiles where all of them are in some way connected.

It’s like “showing up” in their own bubble. An example would be to promote your brand at a college where you want all college students to know you. All college students have something in common, they all study at the same school.

How you can do it manually on Instagram

1. Find 1 profile you think is relevant

2. Check who she/he is following

3. Look up for friends in post and check their profiles

4. Check comments

5. Look for suggested accounts

As you probably can understand this tactic would be time consuming. But you will create a social cluster. In the end we want to find people that are connected to a list of people.

How to find similar people at scale?

Instead of doing the manual work, find 15 profiles that you know have something in common. That could be they all love Glossier and are from New York. Add them in Scope, a search engine to find influencers, and create a so called Lookalike. Then Scope will find similar influencers for you.

Summary

A word of mouth effect is very powerful but hard to achieve. With the help of relevant influencers it could boost the chances of getting there. A great product with a well formed influencer strategy will be the key.

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