How to Find Instagram Creators

Can you believe that Instagram is 11 years old? In less than a decade Instagram managed to become one of the most popular social media platforms due to features like Stories, IGTV, and the power of Instagram creators.

Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users and most of them visit the platform each day! US brands also love the social channel with 71% of them using it as part of their marketing communication strategy.

While Facebook is still the most popular social media platform, Instagram is the go-to place for finding creators.

There’s simply no denying that Instagram + creators are an incredible opportunity for organizations and brands in terms of building an online presence and community.

But the question remains — how do you go about tracking down the best Instagram content creators, and how do you use them for promotion?

What Are Instagram Creators?

Instagram creators are users that produce stunning, original content around a certain topic that really stands out. Most often they think of themselves as photographers, videographers, artists, graphic designers, or regular influencers.

Why You Should Hire Instagram Creators

You need content creators, mainly because of their engagement rates.

By producing high-quality content, Instagram creators attract a lot of likes, comments, and shares on their posts. This is all the more true since Instagram has the highest percentage of engagement compared to other platforms.

SproutSocial discovered that Instagram creators have an average engagement rate of 1.6 percent while Facebook lacks behind with a minuscule 0.09 percent.

For brands, this makes a ton of difference when it comes to marketing with Instagram creators because they’ll get more exposure in front of an interested audience.

*A lot of people reading this article don’t want to hire content creators but instead look for a way to target them as consumers. The best place to find your ideal creators is Influencers Club. With the largest creator database on the market, they offer emails from Instagram creators from your niche. If you want to find out more, read how this instructor marketplace got 10 000 paying users using creator emails.

People Use Instagram to Discover New Brands

According to Instagram’s data, 70% of shoppers say that they use the platform to find new brands and products to purchase. This is a very important piece of information for businesses that are just starting up.

While online marketing has paved the way for organizations, all things considered, the battleground isn’t leveled. No matter if it’s SEO, Google, or Facebook Ads, the dominant players are always huge companies with greater spending power.

But Instagram users love to browse different pages and frequently notice new businesses or products that don’t have all the bells and whistles that you’d see in a corporate setting.

Instagram users have disposable incomes

It’s awesome to find out that Instagram creators have excellent engagement rates, and a lot of people can notice your products on the platform. Yet, probably the most significant point is that a fair amount of people that visit the platform have money and are willing to spend it.

According to a study from Snowmad, people that use Instagram have:

• 31% of individuals earn over $75k annual income
• 32% of individuals earn $50k to $74k annually
• 32% of individuals make $30k to $49k each year

You wouldn’t be surprised by the fact that 80% of Instagram users follow at least one brand. Also, most of them (70%) have purchased at least one item from the platform.

Stats like that are the reason why you should consider hiring Instagram creators for promoting your brand.

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s move on to how you can search for the best creators and get the best bang for your buck.

How to Find Instagram Creators for Your Marketing Campaigns?

According to OmnicoreAgency 68% of people come to Instagram to interact with creators, and there are over half a million active creators on Instagram.

That being said, not all creators can equally promote your brand, so you need to know the best ways to search for, and find creators on Instagram.

We’ve created a one-of-a-kind tool that lets you search Instagram creators by keywords in their biography. By entering any keywords that are relevant to your brand you access our database with 40M Instagram users and find people with exactly those in their biography.

Try entering your keywords like “content creator”, “fashion creator”, “artist” or anything else in the empty field and get instant results along with Instagram username, number of followers, Instagram category, and IG biograhpy. If you want to get a creator email list based on keywords in Instagram bio feel free to schedule a call with our team.

1. Define the goal of your Instagram creator campaign

A starting point for any marketing campaign is to know what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to raise awareness for your brand? Or are you looking for new sales opportunities? Or maybe you’re launching a new product and you need to make sure people get excited beforehand.

It was Abraham Lincoln who said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. By defining what the desired outcome of your campaign is, you’ll know what decisions you need to make to accomplish it.

Once you know the goal of your campaign you need to outline key metrics that will be your single source of truth for the progress of your campaign.

Let’s say you’re the marketer of a fashion brand that’s launching a new selection of bikinis.

Here’s an example of what your campaign’s KPI’s might look like:

• In this campaign, we’ll work with 10 female Instagram creators that are in the travel niche.
• Half of them will share posts while wearing our new line
• While the other half will do a product review using Instagram stories
• Based on the planned budget we expect a 250% increase in website traffic and to exceed the number of sales of our previous launch by 30% within the first 3 weeks.

Try to be as specific as you can when defining your KPI’s just because it’s easier to track your campaign progress and identify things that need to be optimized.

2. What kind of Instagram creators are you looking for

The perceived value of your brand is mostly determined by your brand consistency. Brand consistency means the delivery of brand messaging in line with the identity of your brand, its values, and strategy over time.

A brand with a recognizable personality, voice, or values needs to make sure the creators will have these traits as well. If your brand is associated with, for example, elegance and sophistication, then you need to look for creators with a minimalistic feed.

Once you understand your brand, you need to make sure you know who’s your target audience.

• What are their interests?
• Age, gender, locations
• What are their hobbies?

And probably the most important question: Who are they following on social media? We specifically wrote a blog post on this topic called how to find your target audience on Instagram.

One approach that’s explained in the article is to check the Instagram users that liked or commented on your latest posts. Then use an Instagram follower extractor to see what kind of Instagram accounts (other than your brand) they’re following. Then you can easily sort them by the number of followers and see which of them are the most popular creators. Make a list of these creators based on your top followers that engaged with your brand on Instagram and see if there are any overlaps.

3. Use Google to Find Instagram Creators First

Now that we know what we want to achieve, what our brand is about, and who our target persona is, a simple search on Google can be a great starting point for finding creators.

If we use the fashion brand example from earlier, we’d Google for something like “top fashion Instagram creators”.

Next, we need to make sure the creators are popular at the time of the search — not in 2019. So to refine our search we can click on Settings and then select the Advanced Search section. Then you can filter your search based on your targeted locations and see results that are less than 6 months old.

4. How to find creators among your customers

If you’re not a complete start-up then there are probably a lot of creators among your customers who know and love the products you sell. These creators are 3 times more effective compared to regular influencers or creators that never use the products they promote.

Couple of reasons to use creators among your customers compared to regular creators:

1. The closest thing to genuine word-of-mouth (the best type of marketing)
2. Already know what your brand stands for
3. Since the creators use your products, their followers probably will too

If your business is on Shopify, here’s a pretty awesome application that checks all your customers or subscribers and identifies any creators along with actionable data such as Instagram handle, engagement, number of followers, interest, etc.

All other businesses can use this tool to upload their customer email list and discover their Instagram creators. At the time of writing this article, the tool offers 1500 free credits for testing purposes. According to the information provided, there’s an average match rate of 5% (from customer email to creator).

5. Find creators among your (or competitors’) Instagram followers

Influencers Club is an Instagram data provider with a research team of over 40+ people that can go over every one of your or competitors’ followers. Their main product is providing verified emails from Instagram followers but along with every email come 29 other data points. Emails, phone numbers, biography, Instagram category, but also the number of followers which can be used to find your most popular followers.

Once you have a list of all your creators, use the emails provided and reach out to them and ask for a collaboration.

To get started, check out Influencers Club’s pricing.

6. Find creators with hashtags

We previously mentioned that you should check the profiles of people that like or comment on your posts. One thing you should know by now is hashtags that are most relevant to your brand.

For example, a fashion brand should be aware of hashtags like #fashionblogger, #fashionista, #fashionstyle. Why?

Because if you check the Instagram users under those hashtags there’s a good chance to find creators that are super-relevant for your niche.

Open the Instagram app and use the top search bar to enter your query. After you open your targeted hashtags you’ll be able to see all profiles that ever used that particular hashtag in their post.

For example, the hashtag #fasionstyle has 68M posts. Although there are a lot of irrelevant posts, with a bit of research you can find the creators you need the most.

Use a spreadsheet to copy-paste the creators you’ve found and then contact each of them manually or with the help of direct-message automation tools.

7. Use Instagram creator platforms

There are tons of creator platforms out there and every one of them has its pros and cons. Generally, Instagram creator platforms do the heavy lifting of finding creators for you. You get to search through millions of creators and find the perfect ones based on your needs in a couple of minutes. Information that’s crucial when it comes to starting a marketing campaign with creators like their niche industry, follower demographics, engagement rates, etc.

If you’re planning on hiring more than 10 Instagram creators then, again, I’d suggest using Influencers Club for getting creator email addresses and reaching out at scale. The reason for this is that on average only 20% of the creators you reach out you’ll end up hiring. Some of them won’t reply, some will be a poor fit or won’t take up your offer. So instead of wasting your time, you should get emails from targeted Instagram creators and automate the process.

However, if you want to hire one or two creators then there are a lot of creator marketplaces that offer just that.

Here are the best Instagram creator platforms — in no particular order:

• SparkToro
• BrandAmbassador
• AspirelQ
• Group High
• Heepsy

As you search through creators don’t forget to:

1. Check their content — same as with interviews, when you hire a new creator you need to analyze their posts and make sure they are in line with your brand.
2. Look through the comments section — to get the gist of the kind of people following a particular creator, simply look at the profiles that engage with their posts.
3. Think of the power of micro-creators — creators with 2k to 10k have superior engagement rates compared to creators with a larger follower base.

Find Instagram Creators

Finding the perfect Instagram creators for your brand is no walk in the park. Especially if you truly care about the quality of your partners.

Experienced marketers don’t want to collaborate with creators based on their gut feeling. Instead, they look for efficiency when marketing to their targeted audience. That’s why Influencers Club exists, to help marketers find the most efficient way to reach creators anywhere in the world and scale.

For more information about how to get and use emails from Instagram creators book a free strategy call with our team.