Find & Target Mid-Level Influencers to Ride the Ripple Effect | Psychographic Hot House

Wouldn’t it be great for your brand to be featured on “Ellen,” talked about on “Good Morning America” or written about in the Wall Street Journal? Of course it would. AIMCLEAR has been successfully brainwashing branding to journalists, column editors, show producers and beyond for years. While major publication placements are often seen as the holy grail of influencer marketing to most, considering the hoops one would have to jump through and the likelihood of it (actually) happening, a marketer’s time is likely better spent aiming branded messaging to low- and mid-level influencers.

This edition of Targeting Hot House highlights (pretty amazing) stats and trends surrounding the new zeitgeist of “influencer” (move over, Oprah) marketing as it pertains to low- and mid-level influencers. We won’t be going over how to engage and commission influencers for a sponsored placement — that’s a post for another day. Instead, we’ll get into research methods and tools to help you identify broad-appeal power middle influencers as well as those in your niche, and finally how to target influencers in social channels. We call this the make-them-think-they-thought-of-it 😉 tactic. Considering enlisting mid-level influencers as direct sponsors? Branding to them prior to initial approach is a classic tactic. Agencies do it with prospects all the time. 😉

The power of mid-level influencers

It’s no secret to marketers that word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is one of the most powerful mediums because it either comes to a potential customer by way of someone they trust/admire or someone they believe to be like them, i.e. relatable. According to a McKinsey Study cited by Forbes, WOM generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising with a higher retention rate (37 percent), and research shows mid-level influencers drive an average of 16x higher engagement rate than paid or owned media. Influencer marketing has been on the lips of many marketers for years now, but within the past year we’ve seen it nearly double in popularity. If you’re not already, it’s time to hop on board this train.

Who are mid-level influencers?

Let’s say we’re marketing a new hygiene product for today’s modern woman. The influencers we’d seek to tap would be the dime-a-dozen mommy bloggers, lifestyle leaders and sex-positive advocates and educators.

Tapping the sex-positive audience, it would behoove us marketers to seek the voices of Shan Boodram, author and clinical sexologist, or Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson, the comedy duo behind the iTunes high-ranking comedic anti-slut-shaming podcast “Guys We F****d,” rather than the famous sex pioneer (and really, truly adorable) Dr. Ruth Westheimer. While Dr. Ruth may have loads of street cred — making the cover of Time, constantly being quoted by The New York Times and brought in for interviews on the “Today Show,” and giggling with late night talk show hosts on the regular since the 80s (because sexuality on TV, LOL) — these creds also come with a higher cash demand and a more selective process.

While Dr. Ruth may have the most Twitter followers at 88.3K (Shan has a following of 16.8K and quickly growing and Corinne and Krystyna have 22K and 20K respectively), it’s important for marketers to analyze not only social stat(u)s of influencers, but the content created: the variety of mediums, span of channels and, most importantly, frequency. These younger, sexually woke women are producing content weekly, if not twice a week, and/or guest hosting/appearing in other podcasts and serialized YouTube videos, plus these femme fatales have all tweeted today* (it’s been about a week since we’ve heard from the legendary Dr. Ruth). Oh, and your new #WCW Shan was just on “The View.” #GetItGirl. Many mid-level influencers are rising stars with loyal followers; brand to ‘em before they’re famous.

Mid-level influencers are the YouTube “Creators,” the vloggers, the Instagram aficionado crowd and the front-line engineer building code who has 10K followers on Twitter and finds everything on Reddit first — not the CEO and face of the billion-dollar company.

Unearthing mid-level influencer lists & like-minded communities

One thing marketers can pretty much count on is that mid-level influencers like bloggers and podcasters are self-promoters and will proudly list their job titles and credentials in their limited-space Twitter bios. BONUS: We also reveal a report to export that will capture the elusive podcaster or YouTuber who doesn’t mention their profession (yeah, these are considered professions now). The list-harvesting tips below range from unsophisticated toolless tactics to list exports by the thousands thanks to tools.

The intern’s tedious task

If you have more time than tools (really?) or a super-handy intern, your DIY process should be to:

1. Identify (many) podcasts, YouTube channels, Facebook Live-rs and blogs

a. Dig into Twitter lists like howlfm or search for podcaster Twitter lists via Electoral

b. Tap into pre-curated lists in your vertical with quick searches like “top Twitter influencers in/of <vertical>”

Marketers can find curated lists, often from very reputable publications, for verticals like e-commerce, engineering and even education. Point is, for just about every vertical or industry, someone has made a “top twitter influencer” list. SCRAPE IT. Or all of ‘em.

2. Log the handles of writers, bloggers, hosts, DJs, Creators, etc.

If this sounds painfully tedious (and it is, unless you need something to fill up your time while you watch the Vikings lose another one), speed up the scraping with Import.io, a free web scraping tool. Caveat: Import.io doesn’t play well with infinite scroll :\  It’s best used with Twitter lists of 4-20.

We mentioned influencers within verticals, which is essential for B2B or verticalized products. However, if your product or service has mass appeal, don’t be afraid to open up who you’d consider an influencer, meaning don’t discount the appeal of YouTube Creators who just make funny videos about the hijinks of their daily lives. These YouTube bros and beauties have HUGE audiences.

While list harvesting, don’t worry about getting too vertical with this strategy. For marketers looking to tap influencers directly for sponsorship, it’s important to choose wisely. Since this isn’t the tactic we’re after today, take a cue from Pokemon and catch ‘em all.

Twitter search & scraping with TOOLS!

Tools will do this much more quickly, exporting thousands at a time, by keywords in their bios or content (riskier – this could be too broad) they’ve tweeted.

For this example we’ll be using Sysomos Map, one of our favorite research and monitoring tools especially for social. Sysomos is a pretty hefty tool, and most marketers don’t have the budget for it. Many do have Moz tools, and if you have Moz, you have Followerwonk, which also searches keywords in bios and allows export.

Sysomos search bios:

For this task, we’d search Social Media by Influencer Bios with Boolean queries such as:

((host OR co-host OR cohost OR “co host” OR creator)
AND (podcast OR vlog OR youtube))
OR (vlogging OR podcasting).

With Sysomos, marketers can easily exclude all Twitter users under a certain amount of followers or up to a certain amount (or infinite). The downside of this Sysomos search is the tool will only allow exports of up to 1,000 Twitter influencers. Don’t fret, dear marketers. One can easily get all to most by exporting in batches of follower counts (e.g. 5,000-50,000 followers and 50,000-100,000 followers, and so on).

Sysomos: Most Authoritative

With the same Boolean query, tab over to “Most Authoritative” to get a list of Twitter’s most authoritative users tweeting on this query. With Sysomos’ Most Authoritative search, users can export over 9,000 (or random samplings). The Most Authoritative export allows marketers to add users who 1.) are authoritative and 2.) tweet about your Boolean query and 3.) may not have said Boolean query keywords in their bio, like Marcus Dobre, Sierra Dallas and Rachel A DeMita (who ARE these people??? Olds like us don’t know, but apparently hundreds of thousands of people care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good for them. Great for marketers.)

Want these lists?

List padding with expendable impressions & like-minded communities

For lists to simply work, they must be at least 1,000; if you want them to do even better they must be at least a few thousand, if not tens of thousands. Don’t get daunted! These can, and should, be ever-evolving lists and they all start somewhere. It’s highly unlikely for one to find 10,000 mid-level influencers, especially if influencers need to be vertically specific. Therefore, it is wise to pad the tailored audience list with users who are still relevant.