Finding Instagram influencers to collaborate with your small business can be a difficult task, especially with over 1 billion active monthly Instagram users. However, with a proper system to find the right people, you can develop an efficient influencer marketing plan to help your company grow.

This step-by-step guide will show you how to cut through the clutter and find the best Micro/ Nano Influencers for your business.

How to Find Micro/ Nano Influencers on Instagram

There are a number of different ways to find influencers in your niche. Below are a few of the most effective ones:

1. Begin with your own customers

Make sure to use one of the best resources at your disposal: Your customers.

They can be your brand’s strongest advocates.

Go through your customer base, looking for Instagram profiles with a sizable following and high engagement rates. Reach out to see if they’d be interested in working together.

You can also filter them as per required demographics. Millennials are often the biggest content drivers, contributing over 70% of all influential content online.

2. Analyze the comments

While looking for influencers on Instagram, it can be a good idea to look for people who already engage with your brand.

To search for these influencers, take a look at your tagged posts and comments. It’s one of the best ways to find influencers organically.

Since they’re already talking about your brand/products online, they’re more likely to be interested to collaborate with your brand.

3. Check your follower list

A look through your follower list can result in potential influencers for your brand.

Examine their profiles. What content do they typically post?

Potential influencers are often creators with a decent follower count, relevant content, and most importantly good engagement rates.

4. Hashtag search

Keeping track of your brand’s hashtags or other related hashtags can help you come across influencers fit for your brand.

If you’re not an established brand yet, go through hashtags related to your industry. Looking through all the shared content under these hashtags could potentially turn up influencers already working with brands in your niche.

5. Research your competitors

You might be able to uncover influencers in your sector by researching your competitors’ Instagram handles. Go through your competitors’ followers, posts, and also their brand or campaign hashtags to find influencers they work with.

It can not only help you identify potential influencers to set up your own campaign on Instagram but can also provide you insights on which type of content works in your niche.

6. Organize contests for your niche

When compared to regular content, Instagram contests receive 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes. Hosting contests relevant to your niche can be the easiest way to increase engagement and attract relevant micro/ nano influencers to your brand.

Here are some things to keep in mind when planning your Instagram contest:

• State clearly the rules of the contest.
• Follow Instagram promotion guidelines while hosting the contest.
• Choose a prize your users would love.
• Be transparent while announcing the winner and follow up.

7. Research the influencers you know

Influencers tend to follow other creators and content related to their field. Go through their follower list and posts to find other potential influencers you could work with.

If you already follow relevant hashtags, checking out the explore page on Instagram can help you identify popular influencers in your niche.

8. Use tools/ platforms

Brands today have a multitude of tools at their disposal that can ease the process of finding influencers and managing Instagram influencer campaigns.

Platforms like Happine can even help you turn your most satisfied customers into nano influencers. Unlike other influencer marketing tools, they’ve taken a leap forward to empower brands by focusing on organic customer collaborations rather than paid collaborations.

Here are some of the key features they provide:

• A dedicated team of specialized professionals to help reach out to potential influencers.
• An AI-powered dashboard to easily manage your campaign.
• Performance analysis to keep track of KPIs (key performance indicators).
• Automated system to reward influencers.

7 Common Mistakes to Avoid in an Influencers Campaign on Instagram

While working with the right influencer can make your influencer marketing campaign successful, knowing what mistakes to avoid can make all the difference.

Marketers and brands often put their efforts in jeopardy by making the following mistakes:

1. Working with the wrong influencers

The effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign is only as good as the influencers involved.

Make sure to work with influencers who are relevant to your niche or sector. Their core audience must match the key demographic you’re trying to reach. Also, collaborating with the wrong influencer can potentially ruin your brand’s reputation.

2. Posting irrelevant content

Now that you have chosen the right influencer to represent your brand, you need them to post content that resonates with your brand and provides value to the audience. Instead of spamming your potential audience with irrelevant content, try posting Q&As, tutorials, contests, and other authentic forms of content to reach people in your niche.

3. Copying from others (Inauthentic content)

Unique and authentic content is the key to a successful influencer marketing campaign. Too many brands today think they can shortcut sizable reach by copy-pasting content. Consumers can get fatigued by copied, ordinary content from these campaigns.

Make sure to create unique content for your influencer campaign if you want to build long-term trust and connection with your customers.

4. Poor hashtag selection

The proper use of hashtags and post descriptions accounts for most of the effort in any successful influencer marketing campaign. Try to add relevant brand and campaign hashtags to ensure new followers can find you. But make sure not to overload your post’s description with hashtags.

5. Too much sponsored content

At the end of the day, the important thing is the value you provide to your audience, regardless of your brand’s marketing objectives.

Most brands make the mistake of assuming that what is valuable to them is also valuable to the customer. Instead of providing value to their audience, they focus too much on sponsored content. This will ultimately result in customers losing interest in your brand.

6. Not following FTC guidelines

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) mandates that brands and influencers disclose their partnership. Ensure that every influencer’s social media post includes the hashtags #ad or #sponsorship. It is important for influencers to clearly state when a brand is sponsoring them.

Instagram has a “paid partnership” tag that can be included along with posts, making it easy for everyone to recognize a paid collaboration.

7. Fake engagement

Brands often run into problems when they choose to collaborate with influencers on a  campaign who have bought their followers rather than earned them organically. These influencers often have no real influence over their audience.

These are a few things you should keep in mind while vetting influencers for how influential they really are:

• An odd follower-to-engagement ratio on their account.
• Use of the “Follow-for-follow” approach to gain followers.
• Inconsistent activity on their feed.
• Irrelevant spam comments under their posts.

Bottom Line

So there you have it. You now have a method for identifying micro/nano influencers who can help you in promoting your brand. With a shortlist of influencers, make sure to look at specific KPIs to see who can provide your brand the most exposure and reach.

A fully-fledged influencer marketing campaign can be overwhelming for a small business since it requires coordination with a large number of influencers. That’s where influencer marketing platforms like Happine can help you with the heavy lifting of contacting and coordinating with influencers.