Your agency has just won an influencer marketing brief for a major fashion brand. What a result!

There’s some well deserved jubilation and then the hard work begins.

Perhaps you’ve got an idea of the sort of campaign you’re going to run, or maybe it’s over to the jamboard campaign ideation. In either case, once you’ve got a fair inkling that you’re going to need influencers. You know that influencers with smaller follower counts get better and more meaningful engagement rates, so underpinning the campaign with an army of them sounds like a great strategy.

All of the heads in the virtual room turn to the intern - which in the new world of Google Meets, Zooms and Teams calls basically means everyone just looks exactly the same so doesn’t particularly work any more but you probably get my point.

It’s time to hammer Instagram’s search functionality. And YouTube. And TikTok. And Twitch. And...

The influencer marketing landscape, as told by Google

We know that this is what happens in agencies not only because you tell us it’s what you have to do to engage with micro influencers, but because Google tells us exactly what’s going on in search engine land.

Monthly searches for top fitness, travel, fashion, marketing and beauty influencers all clock in at around 1,000 in the US and 150-650 bracket in the UK. That indicates a lot of global searches for what really are quite niche search terms.

Someone is out there almost constantly looking for a specific group of influencers. And yes, you guessed it: it’s your intern.

Which, of course, is absolutely to be expected and is likely to get your influencer marketing campaign off to a reasonable start.

The problem is scale.

Scaling micro influencer marketing: the real challenge

The problem is that Googling ‘top ten fashion micro influencers’ is not going to allow you to run a campaign at scale, nor is it going to allow you to run a campaign for very long.

Each result for that term gives you a handful of influencers to target, but not all of them are going to be a match for your campaign, nor are they all going to want to work with you. And unsurprisingly, they’ve already ended up on a LOT of influencer campaign managers’ radars already so for a start they’re probably already working on a campaign and they also probably won't be a micro for very long as their audience count grows with irrelevant followers thus ruining their engagement stats (but that’s another story we’ll be asking our influencer team to write about later.)

Even if they do work out for your campaign, it’s only going to be a matter of time (one campaign or two, perhaps), before you saturate their followers with the sponsored content they create to promote your client. A large brand we work with consider themselves to saturate a micro influencer’s followership in just three months of working together (in fact they pretty much exhaust entire platform databases after three months but again that’s another story which I’ll write about later). After that it’s back to Google and Instagram searches, trying to figure out how to find more micro influencers.

Solving the challenge: a few options

Solution one to this problem is relatively obvious: hire more interns and have them carry out more searches across more platforms to find more micro influencers.

It’s the old solution of throwing people and time at a problem and, by and large, those people and that time will probably find hitherto unheard of influencers to help you on your campaign.

Solution two is us at Influence Network. 

We call the process the intern is carrying out for you ‘discovery’ and we do discovery a little differently.

The Influence Network platform is like your very own AI-powered super intern, because we recognised a while ago that a) finding and analysing influencers is tough, b) finding and analysing micro influencers is super tough and c) interns don’t really get a lot of job satisfaction or learning from reading ‘top ten’ influencer articles.

During discovery you tell the AI everything that’s important to you about the micro (or any other tier) influencers you want to find.

Are you looking for plus-sized fashion influencers, with an audience who are likely to buy from mid-range brands, located within Europe, who particularly like to post about hats and have a completely ‘clean’ social media history? Just tell the AI and it will come back with a list of influencers who match your description.

This works for any specific requirements you want to pass to the AI and the AI looks at all accounts; not just a closed database of influencers like everybody else does..

Each time you pass your requirements to the AI it goes off and analyses influencers, scores them and then produces a list of all of those who match what you’re looking for. 

Discovery couldn’t be more simple!

Solving influencer marketing problems, one step at a time

And there we go, just like that a major influencer marketing issue is solved. When you next need it solved, you just need to run another search. It really is that easy and infinitely more useful than a list of top ten influencers.

If you want to get your discovery moving in the right direction, at scale, then our details are below - we’d love to show you what we can do with a free influencer search.

Written by Alec Harden-Henry

Commercial Director, Influence Network

Influence Network is an influencer platform which identifies the most aligned micro-influencers from the entire social web, then rapidly deploy and manage campaigns at an unprecedented scale, before reporting on trackable engagement and ROI. We’re the Double-Click of influencer marketing and we’re here to solve your influencer problems. Sound interesting? Get in touch on INFO@INFLUENCE.NETWORK or 0203 918 8582