Thinking of collaborating with an influencer or blogger? 

Influencer marketing is undoubtedly one of the best online marketing strategies nowadays – it can help you reach a large audience and most of all, it can help you generate more sales for your business. 

However, in order to run a successful influencer marketing, you need to leverage the right influencers: influencers that have your target audience – and influencers that have a real following.

Because unfortunately, fake “influencers” with fake followers are only too common and you need to do your due diligence before starting to work with a new influencer. 

Not only that, but you also need to find influencers with a truly engaged audience so that your campaign will be a true success. After all, if their followers don’t engage and take action, they probably won’t when you run your campaign either. 

Which is why in this blog post, I’m going to show you how to find the right bloggers and influencers to work with, using trendHERO. 

What is trendHERO? 

trendHERO is an Instagram influencer marketing tool that allows you to search, discover and check Instagram influencers and bloggers. 

It features an impressively large database of influencers and bloggers – about 30 million, to be exact! – but perhaps most importantly, it allows you to research any influencer you find, in great detail. 

With over 90 metrics for account analytics available, you’ll be able to understand exactly who follows them and whether they have any fake followers in their midst. 

And that is incredibly useful for several reasons:

• The biggest reason: you’re increasing your campaigns’ chances of success: when you target the right people and the influencer you work with holds real influence, then your campaigns will likely perform very well (but of course, the content matters too!)
• To save up on your costs: by focusing on the right influencers to work with, you’ll be able to save money, without wasting your marketing budget on influencers that won’t generate you the results you want – and need
• To learn more about your audience: with the impressive number of metrics available, trendHERO will also be of huge help when it comes to analysing your audience and learning more about them, their interests, their problems, their likes and dislikes and so on

What’s more, it also offers a truly unique feature: a way to search through Instagram posts to find any ad and promotional posts from Instagram influencers and bloggers. 

So, how exactly does it work? What kinds of metrics do they have? Let’s take a closer look at trendHERO to see how it all works, exactly:

How to use trendHERO to find influencers and bloggers to collaborate with

Once you’ve signed up with trendHERO, you can start looking for influencers and bloggers immediately; simply head over to the Discovery tab to start your search:

As a side note, you can try trendHERO and check up to 3 Instagram accounts completely for free! 

As you can see in the screenshot above, you have numerous search options and filters that you can apply to find the right accounts as quickly and as efficiently as possible:

As you can see above, you get the usual suspects – location (including both cities and countries, so you go as in-depth as you want if you’re targeting a very specific location), language, gender and number of followers – but you also get highly specific and very useful search criteria that can help ensure you’re only finding very high-quality influencers. Most notably, you can:

• Look for influencers that have a certain engagement rate (after all, the best influencers are those who have a very active and interested audience who often engage with their content)
• Look for highly active influencers, based on how many updates they’ve posted over time (for example, I’m looking for influencers who have posted at least 200 updates)
• Search for influencers who get enough likes and comments (as you might’ve noticed above, you can enter a number for both average numbers of likes and comments) 
• Finally, there’s also the follower growth filter which is super useful if you want to look for influencers that are constantly growing – or influencers who are in the process of becoming very popular (because if they’re getting a lot of new followers on a consistent basis, that means their popularity is growing exponentially) 

Once you’re happy with your filters, click on that Search button to see the results – it only takes a few seconds to put together the list so you won’t have to wait at all:

You’ll be able to see at first glance how many followers they have, what their engagement rate is like and where they’re located.

If you prefer, you can also order the list of influencers based on different factors, such as follower count, engagement rate, average likes and comments or follower growth:

If any influencers get your attention, you can quickly “star” them for safekeeping; plus, you can click on them to study their Instagram profile and analytics in more detail:

To get access to all the available metrics; simply click on Unlock Report (as I mentioned a bit earlier, you’ll get 3 free unlocks as soon as you create your trendHERO account so you can try it for free); once unlocked, the app will start collecting and collating the data and will email you to let you know as soon as the report is ready to go. 

Your reports will also be available in the My Lists section, so that you can easily find and check all these profiles. 

Once your report is ready, you’ll get access to a ton of valuable data about that particular influencer; to start with, you’ll see an overview of their profile analytics and their engagement rate as well as how many of their followers are real and how many are fake (chances are, they’ll all have some fake followers and bots in their list – the idea is to look for influencers that have a great majority of real followers):

trendHERO can tell you how many real people are following them, as well as how many commercial accounts (brands and the like). When it comes to fake followers, it uses machine learning to identify mass followers, suspicious activity and bots – the more an influencer has them, the better it is to just look elsewhere!

Scrolling down on your report, you’ll be able to see numerous useful audience analytics so that you can understand exactly who follows this influencer:

Here are some of the main analytics you get access to (for both their full audience, and their likers – i.e. the people that actually engage with them):

• Their locations, both by country and by cities (which is great for location targeting if you have a local business)
• Their gender 
• The audience type – i.e., a breakdown of their followers: real, suspicious, commercial and so on:

• Their audience’s interests:

• Similar bloggers and influencers (which comes in really handy when you’ve found a targeted influencer and want to find more like them)
• Their follower growth – if they’re an established influencer/blogger, it’s a good idea to check that their follower numbers are staying consistent or that they’re growing; if they’re going down, then that might be a red flag as you’ll want to know why they’re losing followers. If you’re looking to work with an emerging influencer, on the other hand, this data will show you whether they are gaining popularity fast enough:

• Posting frequency and percentage of likes from followers – in other words, is the influencer active enough and is their audience engaging with them?
• Type of comments they receive on their posts: how many real comments are they getting? Once again, this is super useful for evaluating the popularity of that influencer as you want someone who gets a lot of comments from real people:

• A breakdown of their posts, including the spread in likes and the top hashtags they use:

• Top mentions of accounts and publications, to give you a better idea of what they usually mention in their posts, as well as see what engagement those mentions get:

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll also be able to see other similar bloggers and Instagram influencers and every influencer/blogger you look at will be automatically saved in the My Lists section so you can easily find them; plus, you can download the PDF version of the report, for safekeeping. 

The Similar Bloggers/Instagram feature is another big highlight because for one thing, it’s a unique trendHERO feature and secondly, it makes influencer discovery as fast as it can possibly be. 

For every influencer you find, you’ll be able to access a new list of 500 similar bloggers and influencers:

Once you click that Collect button, trendHERO will work in the background to find and put together the list of 500 bloggers/influencers:

And if any of them look like a good fit for your campaign, simply Star them to save them and/or generate a report to check their analytics in greater details (as I showed you earlier).

trendHERO Ad Posts – how to easily find sponsored posts on Instagram

Another really cool feature from trendHERO that I’m absolutely loving is the Ad Posts:

Basically, it allows you to search through Instagram posts (using all these filters that you can see in the screenshot above) to find ads, sponsored and promotional posts from Instagram influencers and bloggers. 

This is incredibly useful for several reasons:

• You can find out what other brands a specific influencer has worked with in the past
• Gain a better idea of how promotional posts performed so that you can decide whether they’re the right fit for you 
• Discover influencers to work with, based on their past campaigns 
• Find out which posts perform best so that you can improve your own creatives
• Perform competitive analysis to see who your competitors collaborated with and how their campaigns performed

Another really cool thing about this feature is that you have some really great options for filtering your search; most notably, you can search for specific influencers, as well as based on the mentioned account, the Call to Action link they used, and even based on engagement (comments, likes and views). 

Once you’ve entered your filters, it takes a few seconds for the results to pop up:

You’ll be able to see the post in question, as well as take several actions, as per the above screenshot – including checking that account’s report and seeing all of their previous brand mentions:

Is it the right tool for you?

If you’re planning to work with any influencers or bloggers, then definitely yes.

The level of detail you get with trendHERO is truly impressive and you get all the information you need: from understanding who exactly follows that influencer and whether they’re in your target audience to seeing whether they have real followers who genuinely engage with them, you’ll get everything you need to make a truly informed decision. 

This level of research is necessary if you want to run a successful influencer marketing campaign; otherwise, if you’re relying solely on basic metrics – most notably, their follower count – there’s a big chance you could choose the wrong influencer: either someone who isn’t targeting the same audience as you do or even someone who isn’t a real influencer and has a lot of fake or irrelevant followers.   

Plus, the Ad Posts feature is incredibly helpful in both helping you find the right influencer to work with, but also for helping to improve your influencer marketing campaigns with better copy and creatives, based on actual results. 

Conclusion

If you’re planning any influencer marketing campaign, trendHERO can be your best friend: one that will help you save costs and increase your campaigns’ results. 

The level of detail and analytics is truly impressive and can tell you a ton of information about the influencers you’re thinking of working with. 

Plus, you can even try it for free – and generate up to 3 reports for the influencers or bloggers you’re thinking of working with.