Just like TikTok, YouTube is another mega-platform where influencers can monetize their image and expertise. There are around 1.5 million influencers on YouTube, making it the ideal channel to seek the perfect personality for your brand.
With brands of all sizes extending their online presence to YouTube, influencers have become their secret weapon to sell products and increase brand awareness. Even businesses with a smaller following can borrow an influencers’ reach in order to strengthen their own.
Hiring influencers is a sure-fire way to get a boost from people your future audience already admires, placing you on their radar. So, “how to find and hire influencers on YouTube”, you ask?
Here are our best tips.
Plan Ahead
Not all influencer campaigns are created equal. While some of them are meant to sell products or services, others have different goals. These could be driving people to a landing page, encouraging them to sign up for a trial, and more.
Plus, not setting a goal for a campaign will make it harder for you to set a task for the creator. This, in turn, could result in the need for multiple revisions, a different influencer, and a waste of time and money for both of you. Before anything else, you need to know exactly what you want them to do or say.
As an example, there’s a difference between asking people to “learn more” and asking them to “shop now”. The latter is directly asking for a purchase and, if the viewer clicks on a call-to-action, they’ll be sent directly to a product page. On the other hand, “learn more” and similar calls-to-action are inviting the viewer to familiarize themselves with the offer.
So first things first, what’s the goal of your campaign? Don’t skip to the next step without deciding it first. Here are some examples that may help you narrow down your decision. Is the goal of your campaign to...
- Increase brand awareness?
- Make a sale?
- To create informative, relatable content?
In sum, the goal of your campaign will depend on what your brand desires to achieve. Knowing that will help you pinpoint the perfect influencer (or influencers) to feature in your content.
Take Your Audience Into Consideration
The person you choose as an influencer for your campaign should be someone your audience resonates with. It sounds pretty simple, but you’d be surprised at how many companies select their influencers based only on their appearance.
It doesn’t make sense to hire an influencer who doesn’t resonate with the people you’re trying to convert. If your audience consists of beauty lovers, the influencer of your choice must be someone who specializes in beauty-related content. Yet, “beauty lovers” is a basic definition, and there are innumerable beauty influencers out there. Not all of them would be a good fit.
So, how can you find YouTube influencers your audience will love?
Let’s say you’re the owner of a sustainable beauty brand. You’ll have to discover influencers who are beauty influencers, but who also advocate for sustainable beauty. Your audience wouldn’t love to find out you’re paying a regular beauty YouTuber to speak about a cause that’s important to them.
Just by filtering out regular beauty influencers from sustainable beauty influencers, you’ve already narrowed down your search.
Now that you know what to do, let’s jump into how to do it.
Consider YouTuber “Tiers”
YouTube influencers can be divided in four tiers: nano, micro, mid-tier, macro, and elite. As seen below, the higher the average number of views a YouTuber gets on their videos, the higher the tier they belong in.
Taking your brand into account, which of the above tiers would you be more likely to hire?
As an outlandish example, it would be non-viable for a small beauty brand to hire one of the Kardashians because, well, they’d cost a lot of money.
But here’s the good news: for small and large brands alike, thinking “micro” instead of “macro” gives them more for their money. Hiring micro and even nano influencers gives them the opportunity to hire more than one professional for multiple campaigns. What’s more, smaller influencers tend to have higher engagement rates compared to elite influencers.
If you can afford a Kardashian, go for it. But if you can’t, your brand can still thrive. The teams at HiSmile and FashionNova kickstarted their success by targeting micro-influencers, and FashionNova didn’t even know they were called “micro-influencers” at the time!
Benefit From YouTube’s Algorithm
This seems like a no-brainer, but YouTube’s search bar is the ideal place to begin or round out your influencer research.
If you use a search term like “sustainable beauty products”, you’ll find titles ranging from “the best sustainable beauty products” to “my favorite sustainable beauty products”. Alter and refine the search to meet your brand’s specifications, and don’t be too picky in the beginning. Jot down all the influencers that create content which aligns with your brand.
You’ll start tightening your choices once you consume their content, visit their other social media platforms, and decide whether their online personality matches that of your brand.
After you’ve handpicked your influencers, you can reach out to them individually via their preferred contact method. This information should be on their social media profiles.
Still, if you think that’s too much work...
The Easy Way: Influencer Platforms
Platforms like Collabstr compile all of an influencer’s essential information into a single place. Straight away, companies have access to influencers’ niches, rates, and the past brands they’ve collaborated with. No need for back-and-forth emailing or digging for information.
What’s more, every payment is held safely until the influencer completes and sends the work. There are no contracts involved, and all influencers go through a strict vetting process before being accepted on the platform.
In order to fast-track your search for YouTube content creators, simply visit and start your search by selecting “YouTube” in our platform search filter. This will turn up all the YouTube influencers on the marketplace.
When looking for influencers for your campaign, you’ll never run out of options as far as YouTube is concerned. The real task lies in pinpointing the most valuable ones -- if you’re using traditional methods, that is. Influencer platforms are here to skip through the hassle and speed up that process for everyone involved.
