How to Find Local Influencers for Your Brand – 7 Ways

Don’t you still believe in the value of local influencers? Mini Cooper company turned to the Chinese influencer known as Becky Li and she has sold 100 cars of the limited edition for 5 minutes only. It is only one bright example of how effective can be local influencers for increasing brand awareness or sales. Therefore, every company or individual looking for leads should be aware of the ways how to find local influencers and let your brand benefit from them.

What is a Local Influencer?

Influencer marketing (IM) is one of the marketing channels when advertisers use someone else’s reputation for marketing products or brands. Influencers are usually divided into groups by the number of followers, but there is one unique group of influencers who engage with the audience of a certain location.

For example, you are opening a coffee shop and want to attract a bigger number of leads. Is there any sense to hire macro-influencer and spend thousands of dollars to advertise your coffee shop to the audience spread all over the globe? Naturally, you are interested in people living in the same city, and if to be more accurate, in the same area. Consequently, it is necessary to find an influencer who united people living or working in this area and this is exactly a local influencer.

It goes without saying that local influencers are a more specific niche and it can be more difficult to find them, but everything is possible if you are armed with several effective strategies.

How Local Bloggers Can Help Your Business Grow

It is not a secret that many companies confirm that influencer ROI is one of the best ones, so more marketers try to use their services for boosting brand awareness and sales. However, there is still a viewpoint that only a large business can benefit from IM. Fortunately for small and middle-sized businesses, it is not true since local influencers can provide a much more effective promotion than TV or print ads. They have united the audience you target, so there is no sense to spend extra costs on advertising campaigns. Their main contributions to your business growth can be the following ones:

1. Reaching the audience of the particular area for brand promotion. It is especially important for new brands that have been just opened. Information about the company is spread to the audience who can be potential customers of this business.
2. Changing an image of your brand. Even if there were clients not satisfied with your company’s services or products and who shared this information with the public, it is possible to change your brand image thanks to an influencer. 99% of respondents admit trusting influencers and any good impressions of one person can convince hundreds of others.
3. Generating leads. Every business needs clients and quality content from an influencer can help to attract many new customers. It is enough to remember the efficiency of promo codes or words when people get discounts thanks to their influencers. And if you manage to attract these people with the highest quality of your company services, they will gradually turn into regular customers.
4. Creating more engaging and appealing content. Experienced influencers have already learned the tastes of their audience and know how to make content more appealing to them. Their pieces of advice can help in making advertising campaigns more efficient too.
5. Increasing sales. Naturally, businesses grow when they sell their products and services. Influencers can boost sales by giving their own example of using your company services. Over 80% of followers consider influencer advice important and believe in it.

Where do You Look for Local Influencers?

It is natural that you will not find influencers catching every person by hand in the street. Since you plan to use digital services, it is necessary to start your search online too. In fact, there is a minimum of 2 sources where you can look for local influencers:

1. Google search. The most popular engine that provides the best results can give you information about people and websites that mention your business. Thanks to the fact that Google uses IP addresses for search results, you will get more chances to find local people and check if they can be influencers.
2. Social media platforms. It is predictable that you will find Instagram influencers directly on the platform and the same goes for all other social media platforms. It is important to decide what websites are the best fit for your brand promotion and looks for influencers on them.
3. trendHERO catalog. The easiest way to find a necessary influencer is to use a catalog feature offered by trendHERO service. When you register on the platform, you get access to the search of influencers according to certain parameters. It is possible to filter them by location, number of followers, language, engagement rate, post frequency, follower growth, etc. If you want to find efficient influencers, it is better to consider the following tips:
   • A regular monthly follower growth of the account is 5% and more;
   • A recent post was added earlier than 30 days ago;
   • Enter the location;
   • Provide keywords describing your business (try to enter as many examples as possible; if you run a coffee shop, you can enter not only ‘Coffee’, ‘store’ but also many other words associated with it: cappuccino, latte, barista, cold brew, etc.;
   • Prefer to look for influencers by segments (select different ranges of followers: e.g. 5-10k, 10-50k, 50-100k) to find similar influencers and compare their accounts.

How to Find the Right Local Influencers for Your Business

60% of marketers consider it difficult to find suitable influencers. However, it may be much more challenging to search for a person who is not only from a similar niche but also has the audience united by one location. Consequently, it is necessary to conduct a detailed analysis of every profile not only for the content quality, bio, frequency of promo posts, engagement, number of followers but also the location of both an influencer and people subscribed to this account. Aren’t you sure how to start this search? Here are some tips to consider.

Make all local listings completed

Even if a business to be promoted by an influencer is new, it has a small circle of first clients who have already visited or tried it. Consequently, these people might share their impressions with others and it is your obligation to provide them with this opportunity. It is very important to add your company or brand to such popular services as Google Maps, Facebook, Google My Business, TripAdvisor and others. It is also important to ensure that there are no companies with the same names or duplicated reviews. Such online presence will encourage your clients to leave their reviews and you will respond to them too.

How can it help with influencers? You will be surprised to learn that some reviewers are influential and do that at the professional level. As a result, you may consider their personality for cooperation too.

Check people talking about your business

Not only reviews but also any kind of discussions on forums, blogs, comments may help you to determine people working in this niche and area. It often happens that such people have the same usernames or register on other platforms using their Facebook account, so you can easily find a way how to learn more about them and contact them directly.

Search for relevant blogs

Bloggers are people to also take a certain niche and promote their articles, images, and videos on popular social media platforms. It is enough to use Instagram Locations or Google Search to find local bloggers. Many bloggers tag their locations and get surrounded by people living in the same area. Consequently, searching for a query ‘theme + blogger + location’ you are very likely to find an influencer. Of course, you should compile a list of suitable bloggers, check their social media accounts and content, consider the engagement rate and contact only influential individuals.

Take advantage of hashtags

A hashtag is a great thing when it comes to the search for posts of the special niche. But how to enter your location? In fact, many hashtags combine several words within one hashtag and you can enter both the city name and the theme close to your business niche. Even if you are not sure what hashtag you can use, it is possible to start entering the first letters and scroll the list of hints given by the service. Probably, you will find a necessary hashtag there and check a post.

The second step you should make is to tap the username of the account to open its profile page and bio. You will be able to learn more about this person, the style of posts, how engaging they are and decide if it can be your potential brand representative.

Use services

There are influencer marketplaces that have numerous lists of influencers by niche and location. It is enough to learn the username and check the profile to see if this person is suits for your campaign. Use trendHERO tools to check the selected bloggers to make both parties satisfied with the cooperation.

Benefit from marketing tools

A good way to get a local influencer is to make use of modern tools. There are even apps and software created especially for their search, while others can help to understand if there are no underwater stones behind this person. Google Alerts can help you to track your brand mentions, while BuzzSumo is great for searching accounts by a sphere of interest.

BrandMentions helps to determine potential influencers providing their follower number, performance, and engagement, while such popular platforms as Yelp or Reddit provide active users with badges and it is a key factor to consider thinking of an influencer service.

Look through the profiles of your fans

Every company has a list of fans who have already appreciated its benefits. Could you think that your potential influencers can be among them too? Even if people who follow your account on social media websites do not have that level of impact you want, they have friends and acquaintances interested in the same niche and they can become your assistants in the promotion too.

You Find the Right Person. What’s Next?

You can sign with relief when one or several of the following ways will take you to the pages of potential local influencers. However, it is not time to relax. It is not a secret that some accounts buy followers or have attracted a certain number of people and stopped posting regularly making the engagement rate incredibly low. Naturally, these are not people you would like to associate your brand with. Therefore, the first step you should make before contacting this person is to check the account with the help of trendHERO. It will inform you about the efficiency of the account and then you will decide if you should send a message to its owner.

Conclusion

It is natural that 60% of influencers searched nowadays are people well-known in a certain niche, however, it may be not enough if you own a small or middle-sized business. Location can be of utmost importance too, so only a small percentage of influencers working in a certain sphere is suitable for such companies. Therefore, it is important to put twice more effort into the search and use only those ways that will help you to meet both requirements to an influencer – niche, and location.