How to Find Influencers for Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Influencer marketing campaigns can benefit greatly from the inclusion of influencers. When an influencer recommends your product, those who follow them might interpret it similarly to how they would a friend's or relative's recommendation. That can greatly benefit your business.

This article will show you how to locate and work with influencers for your affiliate marketing campaign.

Tips for Finding Influencers

Before you can start benefiting from influencers, you first need to find ones that are interested in working for your brand. Here are three tips that can help you find influencers who might want to work with you.

Browse around some popular social media apps

The first way to identify potential influencer marketers is just to start browsing around popular social media apps that you want to use for influencer marketing. Look for hashtags that relate to your brand and aim for individuals who have both a decent number of followers and a fair amount of engagement with their content.

Let's take an example where you wish to promote your soap business on TikTok. One way to get started would be to search for videos with various hashtags connected to cleaning. If you come across a video that has had over a million views, you may visit the creator's page to find out how many followers they have and how many views they often receive for their work. You could get in touch with them about being an influencer for your business if they have a high level of engagement and aren't already partnered with a soap company.

Look at who your competitors are using for influencer marketing

If you’re really struggling, then you might start by looking at the people your competitors are using for influencer marketing. It’s unlikely that any of those people will sign up to be your influencer, as their connection with your direct competitors will likely preclude them from partnering with you. However, you can use their content as a jumping-off point to find other people.

For example, imagine that you were trying to advertise your stuffed animal business on Instagram and were having a hard time finding influencers. The hashtag “#stuffedanimal” brings up people who are selling their own stuffed animals, whereas the hashtag “#teddybear” brings up people talking about their dogs, who look like teddy bears. Instead, you could go to one of your competitor’s partnered influencers, and it turns out that they own an arcade and stock your competitor’s stuffed animals in one of their arcade machines. This opens up a completely new avenue for you to start researching to find your own influencers.

Incentivize referrals from your existing affiliates

Finally, one of the best ways to discover influencers is to give your affiliates a bonus if they refer someone to your program and you accept that person into it. Content creators, influencers, and publishers often make friends within their circles, which means they might know other influencers who could be interested in signing up and helping you push your brand.

This is one of the key reasons you need to develop affiliate relationships. If your affiliates feel like you’re really interested in helping them build their own business, then they’ll be more likely to recommend you to their friends. If you don’t focus on building those relationships, then you’re more likely to lose them to another affiliate program.

How to Get the Most out of Influencers in Your Affiliate Marketing Program

So, you’ve gathered some influencers into your affiliate marketing program. How do you make sure you’re using them to their full benefit? Here are four tips to help you use influencers effectively in an affiliate marketing program.

Manage and track influencers just like the rest of your affiliates

Influencers direct potential customers to your business just like any other affiliate. While the process of finding and working with influencers may be different, understanding the data associated with their account will be largely the same. The Refersion platform can help you track all of your affiliates, giving you the data you need to capitalize on influencers and affiliates.

Stay in contact with influencers as much as possible

Even more so than many other types of affiliates, it’s important to build a relationship with influencers. Remember, the people who purchase from an influencer partnership want to feel like they’re getting a referral from a trusted friend. That means you need to show influencers that your product is something they would genuinely recommend to a friend.

Consider personalizing the referral structure for influencers

If your current affiliate marketing program works largely through links, then you might want to consider changing the structure for influencers. It’s common for influencers to instead use personalized coupon codes or referral codes. On many social media websites, it’s difficult or impossible to embed a referral link into a sponsored post, so coupon codes have become the go-to for influencers.

Make sure the influencers you’re working with reflect your brand

The influencers you collaborate with should, above all, be a logical extension of your brand. It could be quite confusing to partner with an influencer who is well-known for cooking large portions of meat on the weekends if you operate a vegan cuisine website. If you can't integrate it organically into the influencer's content, this may really have a detrimental effect on your brand identity. Try having direct conversations with your influencers about how to establish a cooperative relationship that benefits both of you.

An affiliate marketing program is a terrific approach for a lot of businesses to reach new customers while only needing to pay when a sale is made. Influencers are a fantastic complement to that program.

Once influencers are part of your affiliate marketing network, you can utilize Refersion to monitor client-related data.