YouTube

YouTube is rapidly becoming one of the most popular influencer marketing channels. With recent improvements in internet speeds, video is now an expected part of most people’s online experiences. While you will find videos on most social networks now, and Instagram has even created a competing long-form video platform – IGTV, YouTube is still the de facto place for people to come to get their video fix.

Уou can upload a video to most of the other social networks, they tend to be short clips. YouTube videos can be more extended and more in-depth. They are arguably the best way to demonstrate a product, short of a physical in-person display or augmented reality. You may be able to look at pretty pictures of a product on Instagram and read in-depth information in a blog post. You can catch brief glimpses of a product in use on Facebook and hear its sounds in a podcast. But it is only on YouTube video that you can be part of an in-depth product demonstration and see it in everyday use.

YouTube influencer marketing is more comparable to brands making informal deals with television channels to promote their products. Brands don’t have to pay their promotional money directly to the “network” (YouTube in this case) with influencer marketing. In return, YouTube doesn’t provide the systems and behind-the-scenes assistance that it does with formal YouTube advertising. A traditional television equivalent to influencer marketing would perhaps be product placement during a television show.

Types of YouTube Influencer Marketing сampaigns

Top 5 Influencer Marketing Tools for YouTube

Influicity

Influicity is both an influencer marketplace and a campaign management tool. It can help build and manage your network of influencers. It is also a subscription-based platform, which you can use to find, engage, and partner with YouTube and other social media influencers. This influencer marketing tool has information on a wide range of social media influencer profiles. This makes it easy for you to find, book, and collaborate with influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. With this tool, you can also streamline your communications with influencers, as well as create reports on the impact and results of your marketing campaigns.

Influicity started as a brokerage firm that connects influencers to Fortune 500 companies. Over time, they collected enough information about social media influencers—so much so that they created a platform where brands can search for an extensive network of influencers and then negotiate for their services.

Scrunch

Scrunch is another influencer search tool that allows brands and agencies to find suitable and relevant influencers across major social networks, such as YouTube. It has one of the largest databases for influencer profiles with a wide variety of data points for discovery. Do make sure to indicate the category of influencer you are looking for when you sign up. Categories include beauty, fashion, technology, or home interior, among other things. This influencer tool is so versatile that you can even narrow down your search to micro, macro, or power social media influencers. Scrunch also allows users to manage and track their outreach efforts, as well as the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns.

Some of the best features of Scrunch include:

• It allows seamless management of the activities in your influencer marketing campaign.
• You get to add an unlimited number of social media influencers to your marketing campaign.
• You get to have access to a database containing 20 million influencer profiles which can be filtered by social platform or topic.
• It notifies you if any influencers match your requirements and criteria based on your saved searches.

Socialblade

Socialblade is a popular analytics site that compiles data from major sites, such as Twitter and YouTube. However, it is more than just a data site that tracks subscriber growth or loss. Socialblade is a vital tool for YouTube influencers, as it provides them with statistics proving why they matter as a community. Socialblade shows you detailed statistics of the number of views and subscribers a channel gets daily or monthly. It helps marketers find the right influencer, as it allows them to see the performance of a certain YouTuber. And, if users are looking for top channel rankings in terms of location and type, Socialblade will also help point them in the right direction. Armed with all these data, marketers will have a better idea which YouTube influencer can help promote their products or brands. Aside from the number of subscriptions, you can also gauge the appropriateness of the influencer’s style.

Wizdeo

Wizdeo is one of the most useful influencer marketing tools for YouTube. It provides sophisticated performance analysis for videos, brands, creators, and influencers of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms. With Wizdeo, you have the option to filter by the number of views, channel content, subscriptions, and other categories. Wizdeo also allows you to save or export the search results to reduce the need to repeat the procedure. The multiple features of Wizdeo’s analysis page allow you to view data in different perspectives. This gives you a better way to gauge a channel’s performance, including video content and channel performance. It also provides ranking and comparison with other channels. Wizdeo has all the right tools to aid you in optimizing your marketing campaigns. It’s a really nifty tool to have, though it may take you some time to get familiar with its user interface.

Famebit

Famebit is a self-service marketing platform that connects YouTube influencers with brands for sponsorship. Brands can discover registered and active influencers on this platform for their marketing campaigns. It works by notifying registered YouTubers of any new opportunities posted by brands. If the opportunity is relevant to their channel, they can send in a proposal stating why they are the best choice for the campaign. If the brand accepts the proposal, then it will notify the YouTuber. Both the brand and YouTuber can now talk directly to each other to negotiate the terms and conditions of the collaboration in the Famebit workroom.

Platforms to find YouTube Influencers

Grin

Grin focuses on eCommerce businesses with integrations into most major shopping platforms. You can use it to manage all your influencer marketing relationships in one place. It features tools for every function of influencer marketing: relationship management, reporting & analytics, content management, product seeding, payments, and discovery & recruiting.

Of course, it is the discovery & recruiting tool that you will use to find the best YouTube influencers for your brand, along with those on most other major social networks. Grin emphasizes the importance of searching for influencers who align with your brand. Its influencer audience report shows you a credibility score to indicate how genuine an account’s engagement is, along with other key audience metrics.

If you already work with successful influencers, you can use Grin to recruit influencers similar to your current top performers. Its lookalike tool allows you to input your best influencers and find new creators with similar audiences, engagement, demographics, and reach. You might find that you already have customers operating successful and popular YouTube channels. You can use Grin’s influential customers’ tool to find devoted customers with highly engaged followings and recruit them as influencers for your brand. Grin also includes a social listening tool so that you can discover references to your brand. This influencer discovery engine reveals who’s talking about your brand and how well they’re being heard.

Upfluence

Also a great campaign management tool, Upfluence also hosts a database of over 1 million influencers across multiple social networks. What makes its search function so good is the ability to keep refining the thousands and thousands of results in real time without it ever feeling overwhelming. With most search tools, you enter your criteria and a list of influencers appears, along with their profile pics and basic data about them and their account. It can make it hard to parse through the results to find the most relevant people.

There are two things that Upfluence does to make discovery manageable. First, you can assign a “weight” to each criteria, so that the algorithm knows what’s more important (and who, therefore, is more relevant). Second, the platform won’t show you any of the influencers until you’ve narrowed your search down to a set of results you can handle. Instead of seeing a list of results that refreshes each time you refine the search, you’ll see data about the overall group—how many influencers match the results, what the total reach is for all of them, and a breakdown of their relative influence (i.e. how many are macro-influencers, how many are micro, who’s in the top 5%, etc.). You’ll also get a snapshot of their collective audience’s basic demographic information. Once you’ve got the numbers down to something manageable, you won’t waste time wading through irrelevant results.

Tagger Media

Like all the platforms on this list, Tagger’s deep reliance on data is the key to its discovery tool. It boasts over 50 search criteria to choose from, with a big focus on understanding an influencer’s audience. You can actually learn quite a bit here, as Tagger’s software isn’t just indexing data points and analysing them. Some of the data also comes from a social listening engine that’s constantly monitoring and analysing the conversations on the social web. Here, Tagger gleans some highly accurate psychographic information that can be put to good use.

Such as: once you’ve found a creator with the kind of followers you’re looking to market to, the platform can show you other influencers with “lookalike” audiences. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to find influencers who cover a wide range of topics between them; you can be sure that all their followers will be largely similar to one another. You can read our review of Tagger to learn more about this innovative feature.

NeoReach

Before everyone realized the importance of data and analytics, the people at NeoReach were busy coding algorithms that could mine as much data about influencers and their audiences as possible. With over 3 million influencers and 40 different criteria to search them, the platform offers a quick and intuitive way to narrow your results—not only down to the the right influencer, but to the right audience. Once you’ve found them, the integrated campaign management and reporting tools make the platform a real end-to-end solution. With such powerful software under the covers, NeoReach originally targeted their platform to high end, Fortune 500 companies. These days, that’s still the goal, but they do offer a scaled down version for smaller companies who need an affordable way to discover influencers and manage campaigns.

Julius

Julius began its life as a purpose-built discovery tool, and has since expanded to include campaign management features as well. Because of its early history, the search function is still the standout feature of the platform. A big differentiator here is the that the influencer profiles aren’t just the result of an algorithm scraping data off the social web. There is that, of course, but there’s a human element at play here. They’ve got a team of people whose jobs are to constantly pore over profiles and fill in any of the blanks that the algorithm missed — like whether or not a potential influencer has worked (or is working) with other brands. That’s not all they add; there’s much more information you can get than out of a straight software-driven tool.

Hypr 

Calling themselves the “Google of influencer search,” Hypr is all about influencer discovery. Their database is an index of over 10 million influencer profiles. That’s a lot to search through, and Hypr gives you ways to search based on attributes for the influencer and her audience alike. What really sets Hypr apart from other discovery tools is its interface. When you’re dealing with that many potential results, they need to be organised on the screen in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user—and Hype delivers on that front. Results are laid out like a series of little business cards, with a picture of the influencer, a bio, and some quick stats to give you an overall idea of their reach to each network. Scrolling through the list, it’s beyond easy to create and organise lists of influencers on the fly—no extraneous mouse clicks or navigation to other pages are necessary. The lists also serve as a snapshot of a group of influencers, as you’ll see an aggregate of their various statistics. Especially useful is Hypr’s Unique Audience measurement. Where most platforms look at a group of influencers and add up all their followers to determine reach, Hypr’s developers understood that there’s often a lot of overlap between similar influencers. The Unique Audience measurement accounts for the all the duplicates between them, and gives you the true reach.

How to find YouTube Influencers

1. Understand your target audience

Firstly, assess your audience. Influencer marketing is effective only when it’s predicated on understanding and building trust among your target audience. This grants your brand better exposure to a more engaged audience, strengthens brand messaging through authentic endorsements, and influences consumer buying decisions. Secondly, look out for who’s mentioning you online and what they’re saying. Find out if influencers are talking about your brand across social channels and if so, find positive sentiments you can highlight in your campaign. Influencers who take an interest or, better yet, already recommend or endorse your brand, will be more receptive to potential brand partnerships.

2. Find Influencers on platforms

Well, one of the places where you can find YouTube influencers is on some of the many well-known platforms built specifically for this purpose. A platform like Famebit (acquired by Google) provides an amazing service to their customers. Famebit allows businesses to easily search for YouTubers in their niche that are open to collaboration and reach out to them through the platform. YouTube influencers platforms make sure you find relevant influencers for your brand whether they are micro-influencers or big names in the industry. Another great tool in recent times has to be Fiverr. We all know Fiverr as a great tool for finding freelancers, but recent developments at Fiverr have made it a good spot to search for influencers too. You can do a couple of things on Fiverr like search for influencers directly under the influencer marketers category, and see the various influencers offering their proposals for cooperation too. Alternatively, you can always hire a freelancer from Fiverr to help you find YouTube influencers off the web.

3. Google/YouTube Search!

A great way to find YouTube influencers is perhaps the simplest one. It also requires the least amount of effort and finances. Do a simple Google search containing “your niche + YouTuber” and choose the ‘Videos’ tab as shown below. This way, you get both written articles that feature the best YouTubers and videos as well. Most likely your search will turn up big names in the industry. Meaning that most likely, they are expensive and difficult to get hold of. If you have a well-established business with a large digital marketing budget, this is a great option for you.

4. The YouTube trending tab

This is a really easy way of finding the top YouTube content creators. You simply log into YouTube and click on the ‘Trending’ tab on the left of the screen. It automatically shows you the top trending videos at that moment. You should refine your search by typing keywords based on your business or niche into the search bar. The influencers who pop up are top trending and reach a wide audience. Collaborating with them will ensure interest in your business! Keep in mind that YouTube works on an algorithm, and influencers trending today might disappear tomorrow. This is why selecting the right influencer, using the tips in the video above, is so important. One trending video doesn’t make an influencer. Consistent content and engagement do.

5. Previously sponsored content

Not everyone on YouTube is looking for collaborations. You need to search for people who have already worked with different brands or are currently working with them. To find YouTube influencers, you should search for the hashtags ‘sponsored’ or ‘ad’ + your niche. You are sure to find many paid ads and content. These YouTube posts are tailored to market and advertise a product or service for a business like yours! You should take note of this, and try and reach out to these influencers too. They are interested in creating partnerships and growing their own brand through collaborations. Someone else has already done the hard lifting for you to find these influencers. Their reach has been proven to work for other brands, and it’s so easy to see their engagement on their posts. So, searching for sponsored content can help you land some great talent for your brand without much effort on your part.

6. Hashtags

Another great way to find relevant influencers for your brand is to look for people through hashtags on social media. Hashtags are used abundantly on YouTube. This helps to promote and expedite people’s searches to easily find what they are looking for. Searching for hashtags that are relevant to your brand and industry can help you find influencers. As their hashtags are relevant to your business, their audience has most likely also taken an interest in products and services similar to yours. Connecting with influencers who are already discussing things relevant to your brand creates authenticity within the content. Those influencers will lead to real engagement and conversions. Your focus should be to see who the conversation starter was, and who is contributing the most to that particular hashtag. The number of subscribers will also indicate how far their influence can reach. Once you get your hands on this information, you should reach out to these influencers, as a natural collaboration can evolve easily.

7. Network

YouTube influencers often collaborate with other influencers and feature each other in their content. Usually these influencers operate in affiliate industries and niches. If you have found an influencer you are interested in, or one you have already worked with, you should review their videos to find featured influencers. You can also view their YouTube channel. Some influencers have a few channels and you might find other influencers featured in the additional channels too. Alternatively, you can contact influencers you have worked with, or are currently working with, for referrals. If you have a long-standing relationship with an influencer, they would usually be willing to share some of their network contacts with you.

8. Hire an agency

Finally, if all else fails, you can always go for an agency which can help you find YouTube influencers. There are dedicated influencer marketing agencies, just one click away, that can help you find the perfect match for your company. Hiring an agency significantly decreases your legwork and allows you to relax. Giving you time to focus on other tasks rather than fretting over which influencer to get on board with. These agencies will suggest names and help broker deals between you and the influencer to facilitate and speed up the process to your advantage.

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