How to Choose Influencers for Your Brand Organically

In almost two decades as a digital marketing agency, we’ve used influencer marketing aggregator platforms for our clients a lot, and, generally speaking, they’re great. However, they’re not cheap. So, when clients come to us with big content creator dreams and small influencer budgets, we recommend organic influencer management.

Choosing Influencers Organically

Based on our hours and hours (and hours) of organic influencer research, we’ve compiled a list of top tips for finding the perfect influencers for your next influencer marketing campaign by spending time rather than dollars.

1. Leverage listicles

If you’re looking for influencers of a certain size (macro, micro, nano), creators in a specific niche, or thought leaders with distinct audiences or exact locations, starting your search with influencer listicles is a great strategy.

Here are some examples to help with your search: 

• Top 60 Micro Fashion Influencers in 2026
• Top 20 Female Influencers To Follow in 2026
• Top 100 Motherhood Influencers in the US

Many influencer aggregator sites, like Influencer Hero, will have blogs or resource pages with these hyper-specific lists of influencers on their platforms. Albeit completely biased, these lists often come with data on engagement, audience demographics and location.

2. Search in-platform

If you’re looking for influencers organically, the search engine within the social media platform you’re looking to promote on will be your best friend. Depending on what platform you’re using, there are a variety of ways to search for accounts or content, including locations, keywords, hashtags, and interests.

Keywords

While some social search engines are better than others, most will deliver any result you need with a simple keyword. This means keeping the search between 1-3 words, starting pretty generic at first. If you find great results there, you can get more specific. To be fair, it’s a little bit of a rabbit hole game with this technique. The key thing you’re looking for here is content that performs well, not necessarily people who perform well. By looking for high-performing content, you’ll be able to find influencers, or even normies like us, who would be willing to promote your product or service for a much smaller price tag. 

Competitors

Any good marketing campaign starts with competitor research. Influencer marketing isn’t any different. In fact, it’s easier because influencers’ strategies are public. By researching your competitors and looking at their tagged posts, you’ll be able to create a list of influencers you know are willing to promote in your industry, and audiences who are interested in those sponsorships. 

This strategy is so easy, we’d almost call it lazy, because you’re letting your competitors vet influencers for you. The key here is to find influencers with whom your competitors have formed long-term relationships (at least 2-3 posts), because this likely means they’re seeing results.

Niches

If you’ve been on TikTok for 5 minutes, you’ve probably run into many popular community-driven niches like #MomTok, #CleanTok, #TravelTok or (our personal favorite) #NunTok. If you can find a niche relevant to your brand, these pockets of the internet are goldmines for microinfluencers with high engagement rates. While popularized on TikTok, these unique communities can be found on any platform. 

3. Stalk your followers

While we obviously don’t condone stalking, a little bit of online observation never hurt anyone. With this strategy, you can either start with the followers your brand engages with often or just from scrolling through your follower list. Either way, once you land on a follower, take a look at their following to see if they follow any influencers relevant to your brand. If you’re finding a commonality in the influencers your followers follow, that’s a clear sign that they’re someone you’re going to want to partner with. 

What’s Next

Once you compile your list of influencers, you can either reach out to them using the email in their bio or simply by DMing them from your brand’s account. With an organic approach, though, it’s a good idea to follow their account and engage with their content first before reaching out. Maybe even hint at a partnership in the comments. 

While organic influencer marketing research is not impossible, it’s certainly not easy or intuitive. So, if you’re overwhelmed by the task ahead, schedule a complimentary consultation with our influencer marketing experts to determine if outsourcing your organic marketing efforts is the right solution to elevate your brand.