How to Find YouTube Influencers in 2024

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Finding YouTube influencers can transform your marketing strategy. For example, if you've run a few ads or posted on social media and saw little engagement, you know you need to do something different to connect with your audience.

The good news is that partnering with YouTube creators is a natural and authentic way to reach your target customers. But how to find the right influencer for your brand? This guide will discuss finding YouTube influencers in 2024 and explain the exciting benefits of working with YouTube creators.

Aha Ads’ AI-driven platform can help you efficiently find and connect with YouTube creators that align with your brand’s goals and target audience. Instead of searching for YouTube creators for countless hours, let our platform do the work for you.

What is a YouTube Influencer?

YouTube influencers have evolved from simple content creators to key figures in digital marketing strategies. These individuals have built a loyal and engaged community around their channels by producing content on specific niches—tech reviews, beauty tutorials, fitness, gaming, or lifestyle vlogging. Due to the trust they have cultivated with their audience, influencers can influence purchasing decisions and public opinions.

Different Types of YouTube Influencers

Macro Influencers: These influencers have over 100,000 subscribers, some reaching millions. Their broad reach makes them ideal for brand awareness campaigns targeting a broad audience. However, they can be expensive and may not have as profound an engagement with their followers as smaller influencers.

Micro-Influencers

Typically ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers, micro-influencers have highly engaged audiences, often within a niche category. Their followers trust them more personally, making micro-influencers particularly effective for targeted campaigns.

Nano Influencers

These influencers have fewer than 10,000 subscribers but are often viewed as highly authentic, and their followers are typically highly engaged. Brands can tap into this smaller yet intensely loyal community for niche marketing.

Why Collaborate with YouTube Influencers?

Collaborating with YouTube influencers helps brands break through the noise of traditional advertising. YouTube influencers can help build brand credibility, reach new audiences, and improve conversion rates. Their content can smoothly integrate into everyday life, making product placements feel less like advertising and more like a recommendation from a trusted friend.

For example, a beauty brand could work with a makeup tutorial influencer who introduces their products during a demonstration, offering a natural, non-invasive promotion.

Additionally, influencer marketing on YouTube allows you to leverage user-generated content. Audiences are likelier to trust recommendations from real users, leading to higher trust and engagement.

How to find Influencers

Brand Ambassador vs Influencer

Different Types of Influencers

Influencer Outreach

Nano vs Micro-Influencer

Influencer vs Content Creator

Influencer Collaborations

UGC Creator vs Influencer

Platforms and Tools to Find YouTube Influencers

YouTube’s Built-In Search Features: Start with the Basics

YouTube’s search functionality is a great place to begin your search for influencers. Use keywords specific to your industry or campaign to discover influencers naturally ranking for these terms. Filters like "most viewed," "relevance," and "upload date" can help narrow down your search. For example, typing “best health supplements for energy” or “fitness routine for beginners” will yield relevant influencers who frequently post about health and wellness topics.

Influencer Marketing Platforms: Go Beyond Simple Searches

Influencer marketing platforms are designed to help brands find the right content creators quickly. Upfluence, for example, offers a vast influencer database and allows you to sort influencers by niche, location, audience size, and engagement metrics. You can also use Upfluence to manage campaigns, track performance, and generate reports. It provides deeper insights, such as audience demographics and engagement rates, making it a powerful tool for brands. Influencity is known for its robust analytics and reporting.

It lets brands find influencers who have a proven record of engagement. You can filter influencers based on location, niche, audience size, and performance metrics such as engagement rates. Heepsy is a user-friendly platform that enables you to filter influencers by categories like health, beauty, fashion, and food. Heepsy also provides insights into follower authenticity, ensuring you partner with genuine influencers rather than fake followers.

Social media monitoring tools are another option for finding YouTube influencers. BuzzSumo’s social listening feature tracks mentions of keywords across platforms, including YouTube. This makes it ideal for identifying influencers discussing topics relevant to your brand. Hootsuite and Sprout Social track social media mentions and provide influencer outreach capabilities. They help you discover influencers across various platforms by analyzing trends and audience interests, including YouTube. These tools simplify discovering influencers, ensuring you find the best fit for your campaign.

Identifying the Right Influencers for Your Brand

Define Your Brand’s Goals to Find the Right YouTube Influencers

Before searching for influencers, clearly define what you hope to achieve. Your goals will determine the type of influencer you need. Consider these common objectives:

Brand Awareness

If you aim simply to get your brand in front of as many people as possible, partnering with macro-influencers with large followings can be beneficial. Their reach is vast, and they can expose your brand to a broad audience.

Targeted Engagement

If you want to engage a specific audience—fitness enthusiasts or tech geeks—look for micro-influencers with followers who fit these categories. Micro-influencers tend to have higher engagement rates and more loyal followers.

Product Launches or Sales

For campaigns focused on increasing sales, look for influencers who have demonstrated an ability to drive traffic and conversions. Influencers using affiliate links or promo codes can give you measurable results.

Engagement Over Followers: The Key to Finding YouTube Influencers

It’s easy to get swept up by the allure of a huge follower count. However, engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares relative to their followers—is often a better indicator of an influencer’s ability to drive results. To evaluate:

Look at how often the influencer’s videos receive high engagement.

Assess the comment section—is the audience interacting with the content, asking questions, or offering feedback?

For instance, an influencer with 50,000 subscribers but 3,000 likes per video and many interactions in the comments are likely to have a much higher engagement rate than someone with 1 million subscribers but only a few hundred likes on their videos.

Content Quality and Style: Finding the Right YouTube Influencers

The influencer’s content style and quality are paramount. High-quality production, engaging storytelling, and authenticity should all be factors in your decision. For example, if your brand values sustainability, an influencer who creates polished, professional videos on eco-friendly living will resonate better with your audience than an influencer who focuses on fast fashion or irrelevant topics.

Influencer Performance and Authenticity

Analyze YouTube Influencer Analytics to Find the Right Partner for Your Brand

Once you've identified potential influencers, evaluating their past performance and authenticity is crucial. Start by analyzing YouTube influencer metrics and analytics. Always request access to their analytics to ensure their reach and engagement metrics align with your brand goals.

Key metrics to review include

Views per video, Average engagement rate, and Audience demographics (age, gender, location, etc.). An influencer who shares these metrics transparently is more likely to be genuine and open in their partnerships, which creates an opportunity for better collaboration.

Authenticity is Key to Influencer Marketing Success

A YouTube influencer’s authenticity can make or break your campaign. An influencer’s audience must trust them for your brand’s message to resonate with their followers. Assess the influencer’s history of brand collaborations. If an influencer has worked with many brands, but their content feels overly promotional, they might not be a good fit. Check whether their previous partnerships align with their usual content style, and ensure that they openly disclose sponsored content per advertising regulations.

Audience Sentiment: The Final Metric to Review

Finally, analyzing audience sentiment regarding an influencer’s brand partnerships is crucial. Monitor audience comments and reactions across multiple videos. Are followers generally supportive of the influencer's brand partnerships? Negative feedback could indicate a mismatch with the influencer's audience. Tools like Social Blade can help assess the growth trajectory of an influencer’s channel and give a sense of their authenticity.

How Much do Influencers Charge per Post

Influencer Metrics

How to Find Micro-Influencers

Influencer Seeding

How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Product

YouTube Influencer Marketing

How Does a Brand Choose a Specific Influencer

Influencer Analytics Tools

How to Find Local Influencers

Best Influencer Search Tools

Reaching Out and Building Relationships with YouTube Influencers

Craft a Compelling Pitch

Reaching out to influencers can be intimidating, but a well-crafted pitch can make the process much easier. Your outreach should feel personal and tailored to the influencer. Begin by expressing your admiration for their content and explaining why you think their audience would resonate with your brand. Be clear about how the collaboration can benefit both parties. Offer them creative freedom while explaining your expectations.

Offer Value

Influencers want more than just monetary compensation. Depending on the campaign, you might offer exclusive content or behind-the-scenes access to your products, discounts for their followers to create more value for their audience, or early access to products or services for testing and review.

Negotiate Terms Clearly

Once the influencer expresses interest, it’s time to negotiate. Be upfront about compensation—how will the influencer be paid? Fixed-rate, commission, free products? Deliverables—what do you expect from the collaboration? This includes the number of videos, type of content, deadlines, and format (e.g., video review, unboxing, etc.). Timeline—clearly outline the schedule for content production and publication. By creating a mutually beneficial partnership, you can cultivate long-term relationships that lead to successful, ongoing collaborations.

Book a Call to Learn More About Our Creator Marketing AI Agent Platform Today

Aha Ads is an AI-powered platform that brings precision to influencer marketing. It functions like a Facebook Ads Manager for influencer campaigns, helping marketers find and work with the right creators more efficiently. The platform's key features include DeepMatcher AI for rapid creator-brand alignment, performance-based payment models, and comprehensive campaign management. Aha Ads serves marketers with $5,000+ budgets across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter video ads.

The platform’s done-for-you service handles everything from creator networking to campaign execution and payments. Solving traditional pain points like time-consuming creator searches and ROI tracking challenges, Aha Labs transforms influencer marketing into a measurable, efficient process. Simply set your requirements and let our AI-driven platform deliver results while you focus on your business growth. Book a call with our sales team to learn more about our creator marketing AI agent platform today!