Nine out of ten marketers now use influencer marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. The great thing about working with influencers is that you don’t need to be a huge corporate brand to successfully leverage their power.
Small businesses can effectively use influencer marketing to increase their brand awareness, enhance engagement with their audience, and improve conversions.
While working with famous influencers who charge high rates may be out of your budget, working with macro, or local, influencers who are willing to create content in exchange for a small fee or product is much more viable.
So, how can you find influencers in local area? Here, we break down how to find local influencers to promote your brand, products, and services, and how to successfully engage with them.
How to find Instagram influencers in a certain city
Influencers with a smaller following than others can still generate an impressive return for your small business due to their higher engagement rates. So, where do you start to find influencers in local area? Let’s take a look.
- Search your own social following
If you’ve already got followers on social media, a quick scan of them may reveal that they’re local to you. However, you need to check their profiles to see if they create content within your niche – for example, a fashion blogger probably isn’t going to give you results if you’re a brand in the survival sector.
- Search local hashtags
Researching local hashtags can reveal influencers local to you. Try searching Instagram, Twitter, and Google, to find local creators. Searching for your city and niche will enable you to find creators relevant to your industry. For instance, #newyorkfashionbloggers highlights fashion creators local to the area.
Searching for hashtags on Instagram also brings up top posts and recent posts, so you might be able to see who is working with similar brands.
- Use Influencer platforms
Influencer platforms like Insense help small businesses to find influencers in local areas. You can find micro creators tailored to your niche and budget by using the influencer marketplace.
Let’s take a deeper delve into Insense in the next section.
How to find influencers by location on Insense
Using Insense helps you to find creators by location, whether that’s city, state, or country. Each state has some specifications, such as lifestyle, to help you narrow down your preferred influencers of choice.
Once you’re signed up to Insense and have created a campaign brief, you can search our database of over 8000 vetted influencers to find your preferred creators. If you can’t find any creators you desire, head to automatic search at the bottom of your campaign brief:
Click on location and type in your country or city of choice. You can also add any hashtags relevant to your campaign. When your brief is sent to review and accepted, we’ll find your creators for you.
The great thing about local influencers is that you can form long-term relationships with them – if you’re planning on hosting an event for your brand, you can ask local influencers to attend.
With Insense, you can even ask creators to attend your store or event to create content for a marketing campaign. In the campaign brief, head to the optional section and make sure the below box is ticked:
How to engage with local influencers
Once you’ve found your chosen influencers, what’s the best way to work with them?
- Negotiate suitable compensation – with Insense, you can converse directly with an influencer to negotiate a suitable fee or product in exchange for creating content.
- Ask influencers to make an honest review – if your marketing campaign focuses on one of your products or services, it's important to ensure that creators' content accurately reflects them. When an influencer is passionate about a brand, it can encourage their audience to make a purchase. Remember, integrity is vital to any business, and showing both pros and cons of your product/service reflects an ethical approach to review style content.
- Use ‘how to’ video content – statistics show that ‘how to’ videos are the most popular form of video content. If you’re incorporating video into your marketing strategy, ask creators to make a ‘how to’ style of video featuring one of your products or services. You can also use Insense to edit creator videos. You can trim and fit video content, or generate 3 new videos from one video and send direct to Facebook Ads Manager.
- Specify a date for completion - creating a suitable deadline for a campaign means creators know when they need to submit the requested content. With Insense you don’t need to worry about not receiving content when you’ve paid as we act as a ‘middleman’ and only release payment to the influencer once the content has been received by you.
Start to find influencers in local area now
Hopefully, you’re now able to use our top tips to find influencers in local area. Remember, by learning how to find local influencers you’ll be able to expand your brand awareness, increase trust with potential customers, and boost your conversions.
Start working with local influencers today by searching for them via Insense.
