Learn how to find local Instagram influencers and start to work with them.
Nano-, micro-, macro-influencers and celebrities are all kinds of opinion leaders who may be quite helpful when it comes to promoting your business and reaching more customers. Yet, some businesses don’t need random influencers who are popular worldwide; they need local bloggers.
Many offline businesses believe they see no benefits in influencer marketing but they’re wrong. In this piece, we will cover a kind of influencers who may be a great help to small and medium brick-and-mortar companies.
Who are local influencers
If you have a local company or you work for a local business, we don’t have to tell you how crucial it is to build an online presence at least locally. One way to achieve this is with influencer marketing. You want to be where your potential customers are, and they are on social media platforms like Instagram.
Local influencers are nano-, micro- and macro-influencers who live in the same neighbourhood, city or country as you do, the so-called local celebrities. Not every brand, especially small and medium-sized companies, can afford to hire celebrities or macro-influencers for their campaigns. Here local influencers can prove to be really helpful.
Some marketers classify local influencers as nano-influencers. We assume that they’re wrong and believe that local opinion leaders can have any followership, and their influence is typically restricted by a certain geographic area.
Why work with local influencers
Local influencers may be of interest for you if you own brick-and-mortar stores in a specific area or around the whole city and want to attract customers from Instagram. Such a growth hack is a nice and efficient addition to the targeted ads you may be already using.
Local influencers are a profitable marketing tool for businesses, especially B2C ones, which are bound to a geographical area — cafes, shops, restaurants, bars, beauty salons, flower shops, even clinics and car washes.
The main reason why you should outreach local influencers is that because often, they are your clients, too; you just don’t know it when they come to buy your pastry or drink coffee in your bar. And even if you do, it usually happens after they tag your company in their stories. Potentially, when they become your clients, they can later even be your brand ambassadors.
How to find local influencers
Before start working with them, you’re probably wondering how to find these influencers leaving nearby. Globally, there are two ways of finding local Instagram influencers.
The most obvious way to find local influencers is to search them by locations, hashtags and keywords on the Instagram native platform. If you tag your location when you post on Instagram, just tap on it and you will see other users’ posts tagged with this location. Then you can manually review these bloggers or ask a professional to do a proper Instagram audit.
But this location should be generic, at least time to time, not your brand one: instead of Casa Buque (branded location) from the example above, you should put the city (in this case, São Mateu) or the street where the boutique is located.
Another way to find local influencers is to type a relevant location into the search field on Instagram and then start reviewing accounts who post tagging this location.
You can also monitor your local competitors’ audience to find relevant accounts and offer them a collaboration opportunity.
2. Combin Growth
Instagram is not convenient enough when you need to find relevant local influencers, that’s why we suggest you should use more advanced tools for this. Combin Growth is perfect for the purpose.
The Combin Growth functionality allows using 4 influencer searching strategies:
- Searching competitors’ followers and following lists
If you know your competitors on Instagram, enter their username and start searching for their followers, likers or commenters. Then sort them by the number of followers and review the accounts you’ve found.
To perform even more advanced search, sort the accounts you’ve found by their follow ratio or the engagement rate. To exclude all stores, mass followers and other accounts that are considered inappropriate, hide all irrelevant accounts in the Filters tab.
- Searching popular posts by relevant hashtags and locations
Unlike Instagram, Combin Growth has a convenient interactive map where you can manually find an area you need. The map identifies your location automatically and shows your area but if you need, you can enter the city and then pull the cursor to find a relevant street or spot.
Then again apply the required filter and sort the accounts as you want.
- Searching popular posts’ authors by event hashtags
- Searching by accounts’ bio
To use this method, you need to know your target audience really well because this way means you enter keywords that identify your typical buying personas.
With Combin Growth, you can target your search by narrowing it in advance: choose the time when then the content was posted, set likes and comments count of an influencer and even set the advanced search and pick the required gender, language, activity, followers and followings count.
Ways to work with local influencers
When you find local Instagram influencers relevant for your business, it’s time to outreach them and offer a collaboration opportunity. What exactly can you offer them?
Invite them to be your guests for free or with a profound discount and/or gift. If they’re not your clients yet, ask them to be. When they realise you offer good service, they will more likely share their experience with their followers and family.
You can also offer them to be your affiliate. Create a unique promo code which offers a discount to their followers. Each time when you get clients with this promo code, you will pay the influencer a commission.
Your influencer marketing campaign can be a one-time or a long-term one. An influencer will promote your company in their posts or stories at your discretion. If you’ve chosen an influencer right and developed a proper strategy, local influencers will bring you clients, and influencer marketing campaign will finally pay off.
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