5 Ways to Find Influencers on Aspire

How is your brand currently finding influencers? Do you search manually by looking up hashtags or scouring the Instagram Explore page? Perhaps you’re using some of the tips covered in our blog? 

While these techniques can be a great way of understanding the basics when you’re just getting started, if you’re ready to scale your brand and your influencer marketing programs, it’s time to upgrade to an influencer marketing platform.

After nearly 10 years in the influencer marketing space, we’ve crafted a platform that covers everything a high-growth ecommerce brand would need to enable you to find the perfect partners at scale.  

Let’s run through them.

1. Branded Application Pages

As the lines continue to blur around who is most influential to brands, we make it possible to invite anyone to join a campaign – from influencers and ambassadors to customers and employees through custom application pages. 

The application page is where influencers can read about your brand, explore the details of the campaign and sign up through a form.

Once they apply, all of their data from the form is organized in an influencer CRM so you never lose track of who has reached out!  

Use this branded application page to: 

• Promote your campaign on your social media channels and add to your link in bio
• Add the page to your website so that people can apply at any time - (perfect for always on ambassador campaigns)
• Collect relevant information from your potential partners which will automatically populate in our influencer CRM

• Share on our Creator Marketplace and watch our active influencers sign up

“I like that with Aspire, influencers are easily accessible. People can apply to our campaigns and I can search through dozens a day. It’s a lot easier than finding them off on your own.” 

– April Bobadilla, Social Media Manager at Ovation Hair

2. Influencer Search Engine

Imagine being able to Google search for influencers. That’s exactly what our influencer search engine allows your brand to do. Our powerful search engine allows you to explore the entire influencer universe across TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest, and unauthenticated opt-in creators from Instagram and Facebook.

Once you find an influencer who catches your eye, you can click into their profile to gain deeper insights into their engagement metrics, follower growth, comment sentiment, audience interests, and more, before inviting them to join your campaign. 

Added benefits of our influencer search engine include: 

Influencer Vetting & Authenticity Score

Unlike most influencer platforms, Aspire vets the influencers that appear in our search engine to hide any inactive, suspicious, and non-influential accounts to ensure that you will only see high-quality potential partners in your search results.

Aspire also provides a follower authenticity score, which determines a creator’s authenticity rating based on factors like:

• The authenticity of their followers’ avatars and bio descriptions
• Number of posts
• Follower count vs. following
• Number of likes received vs. number of likes given

Advanced Filters

With advanced filters, Aspire makes it easy to sort through millions of creators depending on specific criteria that match your campaign. You can search using:

• Keywords used in their account
• Range of followers
• Range of likes per post
• Age
• Gender
• City and country

Once you find top influencers who align with your brand, you can quickly send them an email or bulk invite multiple influencers to join your campaign.

Image Search Tool

Looking for influencers with a certain aesthetic but not finding exactly what you’re looking for? Share an image of your top-performing branded content into our image search tool to find creators that match your brand’s aesthetic. A fan favorite in the Aspire community!

“Aspire has helped us save time, money, and energy. Being able to filter through influencers by specialty topics and having the right platform to do this is huge for us.”

– Nicole Rohrer, Senior Marketing Manager at iHerb

3. Creator Marketplace

Our influencer search engine gives you the ability to find and contact thousands of influencers at scale. Our Creator Marketplace enables creators to find you. This means you could submit your campaign to the marketplace on a Friday evening and come back to your desk Monday with hundreds of applications from creators who want to work with your brand.

Aspire is the only influencer marketing platform that offers a true Creator Marketplace, and ours is teeming with thousands of influencers who have specifically signed up to be noticed by brands and take part in campaigns. Brands simply create a proposal detailing their campaign and influencers can shop the creator marketplace and apply to work with the campaigns that are relevant to them

Aspire’s creator marketplace at a glance:

• 50K highly engaged active monthly influencers
• 100+ influencer proposals in 7 days
• Self-publish your campaign in seconds
• Scale without hours of manual searching

Our Creator Marketplace is especially helpful if you’re running a campaign that requires a very specific pool of influencers who are not easy to find via search. For instance, perhaps you’re running a back-to-school campaign and want to connect with students who are about to head off to their first year of college. Once you publish your campaign with this callout, relevant influencers can find you.

“We’re very focused on working with authentic fans of our brand — people who already love Splenda. To find these passionate influencers, we set up our autoresponder question so marketplace applicants are prompted to answer what they love about Splenda. We find some of our highest quality brand partners with this feature.” 

– Matt Thompson, Senior Manager of Social Media at Splenda

4. Social listening

Oftentimes, when it comes to finding new influencers, the most promising partnerships are right under our noses. 

Think about how many people like and engage with your brand on a daily basis. Consider your comments and DMs, brand mentions, tags and hashtags across each of your brand’s social media platforms. Whether it’s 10 people, 100 people, or 100,000 people, they’re active, engaged and you’ve already got their attention. 

Social listening involves monitoring this activity and harnessing it to help build your brand. Do you have particularly engaged followers with large followings within your target audience? Is there a popular influencer dropping hints by mentioning your brand in their stories? Has a genuine brand fan created a beautiful piece of user generated content that could be repurposed on your marketing channels? Effective social listening offers endless opportunities to expand your influencer network and foster creator partnerships – as long as you are listening! 

By seamlessly connecting with each of your social media channels, our social listening tool gathers every mention, tag and hashtag about your brand, making it easy to understand campaign success, monitor your brand reputation, and find new creative partners. We even provide monthly trend reports to help your campaign strategy and get the most successful results.

5. Influential Customers 

One significant source of potential influencers that is often overlooked – existing customers! As with the individuals interacting on your social media channels, existing customers are aware of your brand, engaged with your brand, and (hopefully!) a fan of your brand. 

With the right reach and follower credentials, this can make them excellent candidates for an influencer marketing campaign. Added bonus? They’re already in your CRM! 

Our ecommerce integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to easily explore the social media channels of people who are already buying your products and easily invite them to join your latest campaigns. 

These ecommerce integrations are also perfect for launching and managing product seeding campaigns. Simply select the individuals you’d like to send a free gift to, choose the ideal product and track the package from your store to door. 

Get started

So there we have it. Five foolproof ways to find new influencers through Aspire. They’re simple, quick and will allow you to scale your influencer programs significantly. And we haven’t even mentioned our tools for managing influencer terms, payments, influencer generated content and boosting top-performing content. 

If you’re ready to take your influencer marketing to the next level, book a demo with Aspire today.