Your influencer marketing campaign is futile without a result-driven influencer. However, the campaign will generate ROI only if you find niche and hyper-relevant influencers.  This is why you need an influencer database. 

What is an Influencer Database?

Influencer database is a tool that lets you discover ideal influencers relevant to specific niche based on their follower count, engagement rate, ROI generated, and content style. Simply put, an influencer database is a digital repository of influencers' information such as:

• Social media handle
• Contact information
• Niche
• Interests
• Follower count
• Engagement rate
• Active platforms
• Demographics and location
• Content type

For example, InsightIQ is an influencer database with 450M+ influencers across multiple social media platforms that cover a vast array of influencer data: reach, niche, and demographics. 

Why is an Influencer Database Important?

Creating an influencer database is not just about the influencer’s contact information. There’s more to it. Here are three reasons why an influencer database is important:

Enables Quick Filtering

Are you spending long hours finding the right-fit influencers manually? Maybe, you're sifting through multiple influencer profiles, their followership, and engagement. 

However, you could still miss out on other relevant information like the audience demographics, fake followers, and so on.

With an influencer database, you can quickly filter and search influencers by:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Engagement rates
• Content performance
• ROI generated for the specific campaign

Improves Campaign Effectiveness

Banish Angural, the Founder and CEO of Banish Media shares how impactful having an influencer database can be for the campaign’s ROI. 

“Having an influencer database has significantly boosted our agency’s efficiency and effectiveness. It helps us quickly match top-notch influencers with relevant marketing campaigns, thus ensuring content authenticity and alignment with the client’s objectives as a strategy. Thus, this targeted approach enhances engagement and ROI by linking brands with influencers who meaningfully resonate with their target audience.”

Because these influencers have achieved great ROI for another brand, they're likely a good choice for your campaign—leading to the success of your influencer marketing campaign. 

Also, if you have a lower budget, using an influencer database, you can identify micro-influencers who have high engagement and have generated great ROI. This is a great way to cut marketing costs while focusing on the effectiveness of the campaign. 

Helps you Verify Influencers

Adele Grigunaite, Affiliate and Influencer Marketing Manager at Omnisend emphasizes on the big mistake brands and agencies can usually make—only focusing on the influencer's follower count. 

“If a person is starting out with influencer marketing, he might think that the more followers or subscribers, the merrier.”

When you have an influencer database in place, you can verify the quality of influencers by assessing their follower count, engagement rate, fake or bot followers following them, number of viewers and impressions, and ROI generated. 

Ways to Find Instagram Influencers for your Database

Looking to add Instagram influencers to your database? Here are 5 ways you can do it:

1. Use Influencer Discovery Tools

Opt for influencer discovery tools that let you identify influencers by assessing their follower count, engagement rate, quality of content produced, and ROI generated by sponsored posts. 

For example, with InsightIQ, you can find right influencers from a comprehensive database of 450M+ by focusing on factors like their reach, engagement, and purchase intent ability. 

2. Use Hashtags and Keywords to Find Niche posts

Find industry-related keywords and phrases, and paste them on Instagram’s search bar—you'll see a list of posts from multiple creators. Look for high-engagement posts. Then, look for accounts with a large following and content posted on similar niches—these people are influencers. 

Look at their profile to check their follower count and engagement level, and find out if their content aligns with your brand. 

For example, if you’re a stationery brand that offers calligraphy supplies, you need to look for calligraphy influencers. Use #fineartcalligraphy and you’ll see top posts at the start. Check these posts for the engagement rate and reach and add them to your influencer database. 

3. Check your Competitors’ Followers

Go to your competitor’s social media accounts and see if they have collaborated with any influencers. 

These people are likely to be interested in your brand since they're familiar with your competitor’s products and services. 

💡Pro tip: Use competitor analysis tools to search for influencers who follow your competitors. 

4. Leverage social listening 

Angural shares how he takes advantage of social listening:

“To find suitable Instagram influencers, we use a combination of manual scouting and social listening tools. Through examining trends and engagement rates, we can establish the type of influencers that truly engage their audience while meeting our client’s demands”.

With social listening tools, you can monitor brand mentions and find user-generated content.  

• Brand mentions: See what kind of conversations have people started around your brand. Who are these people? Check if they're influencers and reach out to them. 
• User-generated content: See what kind of content have users created using your products. Pick the content that appeals the best and connect with the influencers who produced the content. 

5. Take a look at podcasts and YouTube videos in your niche

Look at industry-relevant podcasts and YouTube videos in your niche. Check the podcast hosts on Instagram. Or, if you find them on YouTube and they have a good subscriber count, look them up on Instagram. 

For example, if you’re a brand that talks about nail art, you can search with keyword ‘nail art ideas’ on YouTube. You’ll see the best-performing YouTube shorts. 

Look through these videos and open the creator’s YouTube channel to check their subscriber count and engagement on their shorts to analyze if they’re influencers. Then, find and reach out to them out on Instagram. 

Bonus tip: See if they bring guests to their podcast. You can look for these podcast guests on Instagram find more influencers, and connect with the relevant ones. 

Different Ways to Find Influencers with API

Using InsightIQ’s Creator Discovery API, here’s how you can find influencers relevant to your niche and needs:

• Advanced filtering: Filter the influencer data using advanced filters such as audience demographics, follower count, engagement, location, and purchase intent. 
• Look-alike audience: Pick the favorite influencers in your niche and InsightIQ’s algorithm will help you discover lookalike influencers with similar audiences and interests, niches, and topics they create content about. 
• Profile analysis: Identify the right-fit influencers using 100+ profile analysis attributes such as audience quality, real vs fake engagement, and engagement trends.

Factors to Consider When Choosing an Influencer Database

When talking about the factors to choosing an influencer database, Grigunaite says:

“It is always important to consider what are the key things you are looking for from the platform. 

Do you only need the database where you can see the influencer's data in great detail, or do you need to communicate with them? What about the tracking? Will you give them discount codes and track their performance this way, or do you need a tool that will combine it all, including tracking and reporting? 

Talking about our specific case, Omnisend needed a tool that combines it all—having an influencer database, allowing us to communicate with them via the platform, and integrated tracking and reporting there as well, and we chose impact.”

Here are 6 key factors in choosing the right influencer database:

Database size

How many influencers does the influencer database contain? An ideal influencer database provides you with plenty of influencers to choose from. However, make sure the database is not too small as smaller databases lack niche influencers.

For example, InsightIQ has over 450M+ influencers across multiple platforms with a minimum of 2K followers.

Filtering and search capabilities 

Can you filter the influencer based on the audience demographics, location, social media platform, follower count, and engagement rate? With advanced search and filtering capabilities, you can find new influencers in your niche.

For example, if you’re looking for beauty influencers that generate better ROI, you can filter the influencer database by audience purchase intent and set it to 75%.

Influencer analytics

Sarrah Safari, the CEO of InfluencerNexus emphasizes on asking these questions before choosing an influencer database:

“Can I compare an influencer’s sponsored content to their organic content on this database? Are they tracking fake followers and engagement across each profile?”

Before deciding which social media influencer to choose for your campaign, it is important to check their analytics such as:

• Reach
• Engagement rate
• Audience demographics
• ROI generated

Based on this information, you can decide identify real influencers and understand whether the influencer is worth the investment and whether they can help you generate ROI for the influencer campaigns. 

Influencer outreach and communication tools

What will you do next once you have selected the influencers for your campaign—find their email address or send a DM on the relevant social media platforms?

Look for influencer databases that do either of these things:

1. Provide the influencer’s contact information
2. Have an inbuilt messaging system

With InsightIQ, you get option #1—access publicly available contact details like email, phone number, social media accounts, and links in bio. Once you select the influencer and get their contact information within the database, you can then reach out either via email or on the relevant social media platform. 

Campaign management tools

How detailed is the campaign management feature? Does it provide detailed, automated campaign reporting? Does it provide comprehensive campaign insights? 

Make sure the influencer database lets you analyze all the monetary metrics to help you understand the ROI the campaign generated. 

For example, with InsightIQ’s campaign tracking feature, you can identify top-performing influencers based on data points such as cost per engagement, CPV, and total media value, and measure the ROI across all the social media platforms.

How Does InsightIQ Help In Building An Influencer Database?

To build an influencer database with InsightIQ, use the Creator Search feature. 

Step 1: Select influencers from a database of 450M+ consisting of nano, micro, macro, and celebrity Influencers.

Step 2: Use InsightIQ’s lookalike feature to find influencers with similar audiences and find more influencers

Step 3: Filter the influencers based on attributes like engagement rate, location, audience purchase intent, etc.

Step 4: Check the influencer insights such as engagement rate, impressions, purchase intent, audience demographics, fake followers, etc. 

Step 5: See the selected influencer’s contact information and reach out to them. 

Step 6: Save this list of influencers for your next campaign. 

And if you're curious to try out InsightIQ and see how it can help you build your influencer database, book a demo!

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