How to Find Local Influencers For Your Brand: A Step-By-Step Guide (2024)

Who would you bet on to create a successful local influencer marketing campaign: small local influencers or social media moguls?

If you chose the latter, you’re not entirely wrong. For brands with a massive budget, celebrity influencers could be an option. But, when talking about local marketing campaigns for smaller brands, we’re primarily looking at two things: engagement and trust.

Well, not really. Micro-influencers typically have higher engagement and more meaningful connections with their followers. Small and local influencers can be even better than the world’s Kims and Kylies.

Take a look at the above chart, and notice how the engagement rates drastically drop as the follower number increases. What would you say Kim Kardashian’s engagement rate is on Instagram? According to ProvenSEO, Kim K stands far behind micro-influencers at a little over 1%.

One in five people say they trust recommendations from people in the community, and that’s why they prefer to support local businesses. Local influencers are a part of that community, and their reviews hold massive weight.

What is a Local Influencer & Why Should You Work With Them?

Local influencers are creators that are popular within their specific region, instead of having widespread popularity on a platform. These influencers often have a hyper-engaged audience and can sometimes be culturally significant to the areas they’re local to.

Due to these creators being somewhat niche, there’s a tradeoff between popularity and intimacy. Local influencers will often have a much smaller audience, but they’ll often have higher audience engagement. This makes them incredibly effective at convincing prospective customers to try your product, though at much smaller numbers than their larger counterparts.

There are many reasons why you should hire them:

• Targeted Demographic: With a local influencer, you can easily reach out to an audience local to your business. In turn, the audience of an influencer may be more willing to check out your product.

• Intimate Audience Relationship: A local influencer will often have a great relationship with their audience and will come across as trustworthy to their fans. This is great, as a local influencer promoting your business to an audience that trusts them puts a lot of relevant eyes on your brand.

• Better Client Relationships: A local influencer may be better to work alongside and partner with, and may be more willing to invest in a long-term partnership with a brand local to them. By investing in these relationships, your brand will have a better chance of being locally relevant in the long term.

For example, The Stem (@thestem_uk on Instagram) is a small British company that specializes in products to help you take care of your plants. They teamed up with Georgette (@thegardensofgaia on Instagram), a local influencer who made posts about plants. 

The Stem created a long-term partnership with Georgette and sponsored multiple posts on her Instagram page to great success, as they were a local business that also related to the niche of her account. 

How to Find Local Influencers for Your Brand

Even if you have no idea who your best local influencers are, all you need is a quick search to get the wheels turning. There are multiple places you can resort to when browsing influencers, and you can do it on your own.

Social platforms like Instagram are where you’ll want to look at first. Thankfully, Instagram makes it possible for users to filter their searches and find what they’re looking for more easily.

Join an Influencer Marketplace

Influencer marketplaces, or influencer platforms, are by far the easiest way to find influencers around the globe.

It can be tough to find and connect with niche influencers in your area, especially if you want to focus on the smaller ones. By “smaller”, we mean those starting at a 1k follower count, which are the ones you should be focusing on.

Influencer platforms like Collabstr are designed to help local brand owners like you find the ideal influencers to represent you. If you find yourself too busy, you’d be interested in knowing that influencer marketplaces drastically reduce repetitive research work, they also mitigate a lot of the risk when it comes to working with influencers.

Here are just a few of the benefits of influencer platforms over traditional influencer research methods:

• Quick filtering. Regardless if you’re looking for celebrities or micro-influencers in a small niche, all you have to do is use a handy search bar. Advanced filters will let you choose influencers’ gender, pricing range, country, and city in just a few clicks.

• Central communication. Forget Instagram DMing or emails. Influencer platforms like Collabstr have their own instant chat system in place, allowing both professionals to focus on the collaboration at hand.
• Safe connections and safe transactions. There’s no need to worry about whether an influencer will simply leave you on read or outright steal your money. Yes, that could happen in typical scenarios. With influencer platforms, however, influencers’ profiles are fully vetted upfront for false engagement or any suspicious history. Plus, all of your payments are retained until the influencers have completed and sent the work. It’s a win-win.

Find and Hire Influencers

Search Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube influencers

Find Influencers

Search by Location

Go to Instagram’s search icon. Right below the search bar, you’ll find the Location tab, where you can find photos taken or posted from a particular place.

Once you start typing in your location, Instagram will bring up automatic suggestions, so you can perfectly match the location you’re currently at. This way, you’re more likely to find influencers in your area.

As an important note: even though you’ll be searching for influences through Instagram, don’t forget to look at their other social channels, such as TikTok and Youtube.

Search Hashtags That Include Your Location

Another way to do this is by looking for hashtags that contain your location, followed by the word “influencer”.

As an example, when looking at the results for the hashtag #OrlandoInfluencer, you’ll see a lot of influencers using this hashtag, along with multiple other hashtags, in their photos. This is a strategy they use to be discovered by people like you, in order to advertise that they could be open for business.

Here’s a handy tip for those looking to work with smaller influencers: instead of focusing on the “Popular” tab, go to the most “Recent” pictures. This way, you’re sure to find smaller influencers whose pictures have been posted minutes before your search.

Do a Simple Google Search

On the flip side, if you’re particularly looking for the most sought-after influencers from where you live, Google can be extremely helpful.

With a search like “best influencers in (your location)”, you’ll come across various articles listing some of the most popular influencers in that area.

Look within your Local Community

Searching online is one way of trying to find local influencers, but you can also have great success by engaging with your local community.

By reaching out to your community, you can get to know local influencers and their communities better. This allows you to decide which audiences are best to target. 

It can also help you organically grow a relationship with an influencer. They may be more likely to invest time into a long-term partnership with a brand that cares about the local community.

Above All, Get to Know Them

No matter which search method you use when finding influencers, it’s important to look at their channels (Instagram, TikTok, and/or YouTube) and their current ads for other products. Do you like what you see? Would you like your brand to be portrayed by that person? In particular, look for quality content you’d be proud to showcase.

Next, and this one is important: don’t be swayed by a large follower count.

While a large following is what most brands look for, this shouldn’t be the sole criterion that dictates whether or not you work with this person. Things such as audience location, audience gender, and engagement can be equally as important.

How to Find Local Influencers on TikTok

Being one of the most popular social media sites on the planet, TikTok is a great place to try to find local influencers. Here’s some tips on how to find local influencers that are great for your brand on TikTok:

• Use Hashtags: By searching ‘#[Location]’ in TikTok, you can easily find influencers within your local area. This is a great way to see who is around the local area and create a shortlist of TikTok local influencers.

• Look at other local establishments' accounts: By looking at other local companies or organizations within your area, you’ll be able to find local influencers that have worked with or interacted with other local brands that may be a consideration for your strategy.

• Use Collabstr: You can use Collabstr to sort by platform and search for influencers in your country, or even local to your city. 

How to Find Local Influencers on Instagram

While similar to TikTok, there are a few ways in which you can find local influencers that are unique to Instagram. Here are a few ways:

• Use Hashtags: Just like on TikTok, you can use ‘#[Location]’ to find creators and influencers in that specific area. 

• Look at specific location tags: On Instagram, you can search for certain locations to find posts from that specific place. Simply just search for a city or landmark in the Instagram search to find a host of influencers who post from around that region. 

Use Collabstr: Just like with TikTok, you can search for Instagram influencers and use a filter for specific countries and cities on Collabstr.

How to Find Local Influencers on YouTube

Unlike Instagram and Tiktok, YouTube has a very different approach to finding influencers. Still, we’ll provide two solutions.

The easiest way to find local YouTube influencers is through a tool like Collabstr. YouTube’s algorithm works by keywords, so unless an influencer is using a location in a title, you’ll have a hard time finding the relevant people. 

With Collabstr however, you can simply search by location, and we’ll start connecting you with local YouTube influencers easily.

How to Build a Local Influencer Strategy

As with anything, building a strategy to ensure that your search for Local Influencers is effective for your brand is a great way to make sure that you don’t waste your time and money. 

By creating a thorough plan, you can easily and methodically set out to find local influencers with ease.

Here’s a great plan for you to start with:

1. Set your Goals and Budget: Firstly, you want to make sure that you know what your aim is and what your means are. By setting goals and budgeting effectively, you can make sure that you’re constantly moving towards your objectives while ensuring you’re spending within your means.

2. Set Parameters for Influencers: Instead of having to judge each influencer on a case-by-case basis, set minimum metrics for your influencers to meet. This can include (but is not limited to) metrics such as minimum profile engagement, audience quality, follower count, and relevancy. Doing so can help ensure that you’re taking on influencers that will provide some benefit to your brand. 

3. Create an Outreach Strategy: Creating an outreach strategy is crucial to any influencer marketing strategy. Using a tool such as Collabstr to find, reach out to, and communicate with potential influencers is important, as it gives you a constant level of control and ease throughout the entire campaign. This allows you to focus on actually making customer conversions. If you're unsure about how you should structure your offers, consider looking at some influencer outreach examples to get an idea.

How to Contact Local Influencers?

It takes more than just one message to get a partnership started. You need to have a strategic approach before and during the connection. Here’s how to do it.

Reach Out

This part can be a bit nerve-racking for brand owners, as there’s always a chance the influencer might reject the offer.

What should you do? Your initial message needs to be attention-grabbing, after all, most content creators are being approached by multiple brands at any given moment.

If you’re emailing them, make sure the email subject is direct and clear. Avoid subject lines such as “Question” or “Proposal”. You’re much better off writing something like “Interested in a paid collaboration with {company}?”.

Here’s how to effectively reach out to an influencer:

• Be human. Greet the influencer and get right into things, there’s no need for technical language or corporate-speak in the first email. This increases the chance of them reading your whole message.
• Include the “meaty” part of the message up front. This should tell them what you’re doing, and why you want them to partake in it. This is the perfect opportunity to give them an overview of your product and tell them why they would a good fit for your campaign.
• Lastly, ask for their thoughts, and if they would be interested in partnering with you.
• Wrap up the email with your name, rather than your brand name. This adds to the trust and warmth of your message. Also include a link to your website, or your socials if you don’t have a website. This gives them a place to go research your brand.

A rough draft should look something like this:

Hey there, (influencer name)!

I know this might be one of tons of messages you’re reading today, so I’ll make this quick.

I’m the owner of (brand name), and we’re about to launch an exciting campaign for (product). (Here, you can elaborate a little about your product and what’s unique and desirable about it. Don’t make it too long.) We’re in the process of selecting influencers to help with the promotion, and we thought of you because (briefly explain why they’re the perfect choice. Is it their authenticity? The quality of their videos? Is it because they’ve worked with similar brands and you’ll think they love your products?)

We’re looking for someone that can (Explain what the requirements of this collaboration are. What do you need this influencer to do? This gives them enough information to decide if they would like to move forward).

What do you think? Is this something you’d be interested in? Eagerly waiting for your response.

Thank you,

Your name

Your website

Of course, the above is for demonstration purposes. Apply this draft to your current campaign accordingly.

Follow Up

As “micro” as an influencer might be, your message could still be one of many they’re receiving on a particular day. So be patient.

If they don’t reply in up to two or three days, follow up with them. If they don’t reply to your follow up message after a few days, don’t get stuck on them. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting precious time you could be using to find someone else who’s truly interested in what you have to offer.

In the end of the day, not everyone is going to be interested in working with you. Sometimes people are busy, other times they’re simply not interested, don’t take it personally.

Communicate Deliverables

That’s awesome. This is the time when you start talking a bit more in-depth about the campaign and what you expect from them. This is also where the influencer will most likely begin throwing prices at you based on what your expectations are.

A great way to convey your thoughts and requirements to influencers is by providing them with a campaign brief. The brief should include the following details:

• Name of your brand/company.
• Your website and social channels
• Any important details about the brand and its audience(s).
• Details about which actions the influencer should take, what they should say, as well as any keywords they should mention, if relevant.
• Expected project completion date.
• Expected measurable results, if relevant.

Types of Content To Get From Local Influencers

Tutorials

How-to videos are among the most watched videos on the internet for a reason. Anyone who’s trying something for the first time needs another person’s help. They want to see how others do something, and the results they get from it. No two people’s final results will be the same, and that’s exciting to watch.

Benefits

Most of the time, people just want to know what’s in it for them. If your product isn’t the only one of its kind, what makes it unique? What benefits will it deliver? Why should you choose it over its competition?

What to Do After a Local Influencer Campaign?

Once you receive an influencer’s work, you’ll be able to ask for revisions if needed. After you approve it, the work can finally be published and analyzed.

Be sure to share the content as much as possible, and if it’s okay with the content creator, you can even repost it to your brand’s social channels. Cross-posting content is a great way to get the most out of the content that you pay for.

Ultimately, influencer marketing shouldn’t be a one-and-done kind of thing. Don’t hesitate to set an influencer marketing budget aside – there’s a reason influencer marketing is gaining popularity amongst brands.

Find a local influencer in seconds with Collabstr

Want to find the perfect influencers to boost your local brand? Collabstr is the best place to search for and hire influencers from any platform or any niche. 

Head over to Collabstr.com, pick your desired platform, and select your niche. You can then browse a list of vetted influencers to find the right content creator to partner with. 

You can safely purchase through Collabstr and we’ll hold your payment until the work is completed.

Then, receive your high-quality content from influencers directly through the platform. It’s that easy! 

Get started today at Collabstr and find the perfect influencer in seconds.