How to find influencers to drive sales and brand awareness

If you’re wondering how to find influencers for your brand, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ll cover the basics, like the types of influencers you’ll find on social media, plus how to find influencers to promote your product in 2024.

But that’s not all– if you read to the end, we’ll share 3 secrets that no one in the industry will tell you when you start working with influencers.

Let’s get started!

Types of influencers– what you need to know

Before we dive in, let’s talk about the different types of influencers and what you need to know about working with each.

If you’re familiar with this already, feel free to skip this section and head straight to how to find influencers.

Nano influencers

Nano influencers are starting their influencer journey on Instagram or TikTok, and have up to 5,000 followers.

If your main goal is to obtain affordable UGC for your marketing channels, a nano influencer is a great option. Try to find nano influencers with portfolios that show good content creation skills.

Nano influencers can also generate sales and targeted brand awareness in specific niches, but if this is your goal, you’ll want to look at other influencers, too. Like–

Micro influencers

Micro influencers have 5,000-50,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok.

They’re more experienced with brands and often do a mix of gifted, affiliate, and paid collaborations (depending on their metrics). You can choose to work with them for UGC, awareness, and sales– and they’re relatively affordable.

If you’re wondering how to find micro influencers, aka the holy grail of influencer marketing, look no further.

Macro influencers

Macro influencers have 50,000-500,000 followers on social media.

When you find influencers at this level, they usually have a following across multiple networks like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or even Pinterest.

Macro influencers are more expensive– with greater reach comes greater prices. Generally, influencers who have built an audience of this size are good at generating brand awareness and sales.

However, if you want to work with macro influencers, make sure you check their engagement rates. It’s common for influencers with more followers to have less engagement because people feel less connected to them.

If you’ve never worked with influencers before, we recommend working with nano and micro influencers first. Learn the ropes with influencers who have higher engagement and smaller audiences, before you shell out a ton of money to work with a macro influencer.

Mega influencers

Mega influencers have more than 500,000 followers. And, we’re just going to say it– Mega influencers are usually super hard to reach.

At this level, they have ongoing big brand deals, and choose who they work with. If you’re a small to medium-sized brand, it’s hard to get their attention– or to pay their prices.

Celebrity influencers

In the case of celebrities, the number of followers is irrelevant. If you have a chance to work with Kim Kardashian, you’re not going to ask how many followers she has– you’re just going to do it.

Unfortunately, celebrities are even harder for small and medium-sized businesses to reach than Mega influencers are.

A note on categories

Don’t get confused if you see different categories and follower counts of influencers. There’s no central authority on this information, so we’ve made the list above based on our experience. You may find occasional outliers, but this is a decent starting point.

How to find influencers in 2024

Now that we’ve covered the types of influencers you can expect to find on Instagram or TikTok, let’s talk about how to find influencers in 2024. If you’re wondering how to find local influencers, each of these options should allow you to filter by city or country– you may just have to get a little creative!

With Social Cat, it’s easy to find Instagram influencers and TikTok influencers because they apply to work with your brand. You can also search our database if you’d like to find them yourself.

We’re biased, but there’s a LOT to love about working with Social Cat to find Instagram and TikTok influencers. Here are some of the highlights:

Convenient: You publish a campaign on Social Cat’s platform, describing the influencers you’re looking for. If you’re unsure what kind of influencers you’re looking for, don't worry– we have guidance at every step.
Easy communication: After your campaign is live, give it up to 72 hours. Then, come back and see which influencers applied. Usually, they send you a message on why they want to work with you and tell you what they want to make for you: reels on Instagram, TikTok posts, etc.
Clear pricing: Influencers will also tell you upfront how much they charge– whether it’s a gifted campaign, paid amount, affiliate deal, or some combination.
Fast: You don’t have to spend hours searching manually for influencers, sending them emails, or following up.
Search: Use our prospecting feature and filter through our database of 30,000 verified influencers for things like location, followers, engagement rate, and gender.
Messaging: You can communicate directly with influencers on our platform. There’s no need to send them a DM that might end up in their message requests, or pay for expensive emailing tools.

One thing to note: Currently, Social Cat doesn’t have YouTube influencers. So if you’re looking to break into that market, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Overall, the benefits of working with a platform like Social Cat are far greater than other options, especially if you’re trying to find TikTok or Instagram influencers.

Manual search

If you’re wondering how to find influencers on Instagram and TikTok, many brands do it manually, by searching. This may seem like the best option (especially if you don’t want to pay to find influencers), but let’s walk through the process to see what’s involved.

First, search hashtags related to your niche. For example, if you are a skincare brand, search “skincare” on the social media platform of your choice, and look at the results. You’ll find posts from influencers of all levels.
Next, brainstorm related hashtags and search for those too.
Finally, compile your findings from these searches into a miniature database of influencers to contact.
Rinse and repeat.

The problem with this process is that it’s inefficient. It’s not a good idea to try to find all of your influencers manually if you’re looking for more than 3 influencers.

Try testing it out for 10 minutes. After that, you’ll probably see it’s not worth the time, even for a few influencers.

That’s why we don’t recommend using manual search to test out influencer marketing. You can test out Influencer Marketing for FREE with a free trial from Social Cat, without wasting hours of your time.

Influencer databases

Another option is using an influencer database, where a company imports influencer profiles and gives you access to their records for a fee.

This is a popular method, even in 2024– which is a little surprising because it comes with challenges:

First, you need email tools to contact influencers, since these databases only give you profiles and publicly available contact information. These email tools are expensive and separate from the fee to access the database.
Contact information is often missing or wrong– they’re drawing from publicly available information, after all.
The metrics are inaccurate, because they come from public data, not from an integration with Meta or TikTok. At Social Cat, we integrate with social media platforms so you always have accurate and up-to-date metrics on influencers.
Finally, it’s time-consuming. You have to filter through options, find influencers you want to contact, export leads, and do the influencer outreach yourself. You’ll work on the project for weeks before ever hearing from an influencer.

Influencer agencies

They’re expensive and have many products competing with them, but influencer agencies are still going strong with brands trying to find influencers in 2024. There’s one clear reason for this:

Many brands prefer to outsource their influencer marketing to an agency, so they don’t have to think about it.

This is a solid approach: Agencies have processes in place to connect brands with the right influencers, they are paying tools that would be expensive for you on your own, and they have a team who know what they’re doing– they do this full time.

The only downside is that working with an agency costs tons of money. You can spend thousands of dollars just for the agency every month. And you’ll have to spend even more when you work with influencers!

3 Influencer tips no one tells you about

Before we finish this article, we wanted to let you in on some secrets– things no one will tell you about influencer marketing, because they’re too focused on trying to teach you how to search (yawn).

So let’s talk about the stuff you need to know when you start working with influencers:

#1: Influencer pricing is way too unpredictable

No one regulates prices on influencer marketing. There’s no clear authority saying, “Here’s what you should pay an influencer with X followers and X engagement.” So, influencers are free to set their prices.

This is why you’ll see influencers with less than 10K followers and low engagement asking for $1,000 for an Instagram reel.

Another reason prices are over-the-top is that companies with bigger budgets often pay influencers whatever they ask, with no negotiation. As a result, influencer prices can be bloated– especially if they work with bigger brands.

#2: You can opt for gifted collaborations with micro influencers, at least in the beginning

To learn how the process works and get maximum results with a smaller investment, try gifted collaborations. If you’re unfamiliar with gifted collaborations, they’re where you give an influencer one of your products, and in exchange, they make content for you.

Gifted collabs are inexpensive, and often have the same results as paid collaborations. This depends on the influencer, of course, but generally, you can get high-quality content for the cost of shipping your product to the influencer.

Most professionals won’t talk about this– mostly because there’s some debate as to whether or not it’s fair to do gifted collaborations– but micro influencers often LOVE getting free products. It’s a great way for your brand to get started with influencer marketing.

#3: You can get affordable UGC from influencers (especially from gifted collaborations) if you play your cards right

If you decide to try some gifted collaborations using Social Cat, you can get licensed UGC (Not sure what UGC is?) for your social media channels at a fraction of the price of everywhere else.

Usually, influencers charge extra fees for licensing– either a subscription they charge every month, or a static fee that covers a minimum of 6 months. But with Social Cat, licensing is included.

This means that in a short time, you could be sitting on a gold mine of UGC. Don’t believe it? Check out how this brand got 100+ pieces of UGC from us.

Ultimately, how you find social media influencers comes down to two questions:

➡️ Do you want to spend hours looking for them, reaching out, and hoping they respond?

➡️ Do you want to spend a fortune, with no guaranteed reward?

If your answer to both of these questions is “NO,” then there’s one clear answer: Social Cat.

Choosing Social Cat means that influencers will come to YOU– you don’t have to seek them out. And, our pricing is straightforward and requires no extra software– you can message influencers, negotiate, create contracts, and receive your videos all on our platform.

Try Social Cat for FREE today.