The influencer industry has boomed over the past ten years, with many content creators and social media influencers “specialising” in every industry. Niche influencers have, over the years, become a popular choice for brands when looking to narrow their audience search.
In this article, we will explore who niche influencers are, what sets them apart from other social influencers, and tips to find them.
Who are niche influencers?
Niche influencers are content creators who are experts in a particular industry, typically focusing on a specific area of interest, such as fitness, food, and beauty, and producing content for their area of interest.
There are two groups of niche influencers, broad niches and sub-niche. For example, broad niche influencers could be fashion in general, while sub-niche influencers could be sustainable fashion. Generally, broad niche creators have more followers than sub-niche creators.
Popular niche content you might want to consider
- Beauty and fashion: This group of niche influencers produces content related to fashion trends, skincare, makeup, and hair tutorials. They often partner with related brands to promote new collections or products.
- Sports and fitness: This group of niche influencers inspire their followers to adopt healthy lifestyles with daily motivations, training tips, and workout routines. They often promote various fitness gears and supplement products that will benefit their followers.
- Travel: Travel content creators document their adventures, at the same time providing travel hacks and tips on activities, accommodations, and destinations. This group of niche influencers are versatile in the sense they can work with a wide range of brands. However, they most often collaborate with travel-oriented brands and businesses.
- Tech: Technology content creators typically do a lot of unboxing and reviewing content, making them experts on the latest tech trends.
Other popular niche contents could also be health and wellness, gaming, food and beverage, parenting, home décor, business and finance, and pets.
Sub-niche contents you might not have heard of
- ASMR: ASMR has recently gotten popular among audiences for its supposedly relaxing audio and video recordings. ASMR content creators create content related to any of the abovementioned popular niche content. However, some of the more common brand partnerships ASMR influencers conduct are tea, lotion, or candle brands.
- Organic living: As sustainability becomes a hot topic among individuals, more brands and businesses are turning to eco-friendly solutions. Organic living content creators provide various tips to integrate clean and sustainable products into daily life, partnering with any industry brands, as long as their products are au naturel.
Other sub-niches could be minimalism, sustainable fashion, fandoms, urban exploration, and crypto-currency.
What to look for in niche influencers?
- Brand alignment: Your partnered influencer should not have to be trained extensively on how to promote your brand’s product. If you have chosen content creators that are aligned with your brand’s values and mission, they will naturally know the best way to deliver genuinely.
- Engagement rate: While follower count is imperative as that signifies the influencer’s reach, it is not everything. The most crucial factor is their engagement rate and how well their content resonates with their followers. Do note that the lesser followers they have, the higher their engagement rate should be.
- Credibility: Your partnered influencer must display a level of expertise and experience in their related niche.
- Authenticity: The authenticity of your partnered influencer affects the authenticity of your brand. Start by ensuring that their follower count is natural and not bought or bot-generated. You also want to ensure that they actually use and trust your products.
- Quality content: This is the most crucial aspect of partnering with content creators. You want to ensure the quality of their content. If their content is not visually appealing, then even if they check the above boxes, their audience will still scroll past their content.
How to find niche influencers?
- Engage with online communities: Online communities are usually where you will find active audiences related to your industry. It is where you will find many niche influencers and content creators.
- Attend webinars and events: Niche-specific events are great networking opportunities for brands to meet content creators, KOLs, and social influencers who are experts in their related fields.
- Search hashtags: Hashtags are where you can find niche influencers creating content related to your field. You can use demographic-, location-, and niche-based hashtags, such as #GenZFashion, #KpopStyle, or #BestHomeTech to search for potential collaborators.
- Consult your audience: There is nothing wrong with approaching your followers for suggestions. In fact, you also get to boost your brand’s engagement with your followers at the same time. You can do so by posting a social media poll or post asking them who they had like to see next representing your brand. You can even put out a casting call to see who is open to the opportunity.
Conclusion
Niche influencers are ideal collaborators to help your brand reach your target audience, improving your campaign’s ROI. Of course, it takes a great deal of research and studies to find the right partnership, and once you have partnered with them, you then need to maintain a healthy partnership in order to maximise their retention rate.
Here at Kobe, we specialise in influencer marketing, offering optimal KOL marketing strategies for your campaign needs. We have matched brands not only with Singapore’s best and most popular influencers but international ones too, from Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong and Vietnam, and many more. With their engaging content and hyper-targeted audiences, they make powerful partners for your brand today. Visit us at https://www.getkobe.com/ to find out how you can achieve that partnership with us!
