How to Find and Contact Instagram Influencers Within Your Niche

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Instragram has gone from just a photo-centric social media app to an ecommerce-friendly platform. In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can find Instagram influencers to boost your sales, how much you should pay, and how to go about the process.

We’ll give you some helpful advice whether you’re an Amazon-only brand or primarily DTC through your own website.  We’ve included real examples from our own Instagram influencer campaigns.

Advantages of Using Instagram Influencers to Promote Products and Increase Sales – Even for Amazon Brands

Influencer marketing has become a $13.8 billion industry in 2021, growing about 10x in just five years. And one of the most popular social media platforms for influencers is Instagram.

Instagram has many advantages for e-commerce businesses:

• Huge user base
• Most content on Instagram is either photos or short videos, so they’re easier to consume.
• Instagram is a highly visual platform, making it easier to catch users’ attention.
• It’s great for collecting user-generated content.

As of October 2021, there are about 1 billion Instagram users worldwide, a big chunk of which are 18 to 34 years old.

Source: Statista

Traditionally, brands that use influencers try to send users directly to their own websites. However, we send most of our influencer traffic to Amazon for a few reasons:

• Amazon has a very high trust level from consumers and therefore has a higher conversion rate than sending them directly to our website
• Great for product launches and try to get initial customer reviews
• Good for long term SEO as Amazon rewards external traffic very highly

There are times when sending customers directly to your website is the best thing to do, such as when you have a very high LTV product, but for us, sending customers directly to Amazon makes more sense.

Which Kind of Instagram Influencer Should You Be Working With?

Imagine if Kylie Jenner posted about your product and told her 296 million followers to buy it. That would be great, right? However, you may have to shell out around $1.5 million for that single post. Ouch!

Of course, this is understandable because Jenner is a mega influencer, i.e., an influencer with more than a million followers. And she’s not even the top Instagram influencer.

Mega influencers have a very large reach, but they are likely not experts in your niche. They’re paid for their fame and number of followers, so they can endorse just about any brand or product they want. For example, Kim Kardashian once endorsed toilet paper while Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness himself, endorsed butter.

Unless you’re as big as Nike, you probably don’t have the budget for these types of influencers. So which type of influencer should you be working with?

Thankfully, there are two other types of Instagram influencers that will be willing to promote your brand. Macro influencers have between 100k and 1 million followers, while micro-influencers have 1,000 to 100k followers. (These numbers are not set in stone, but you get the idea.)

You can work with either kind of influencer, but we personally prefer working with micro-influencers first because they are more likely to have a uniform audience and are specializing in specific niches. Also, because they have fewer followers, they’re less likely to demand so much from you when you ask them to promote your products.

How Much Do You Need to Pay Instagram Influencers?

While mega influencers ask for millions, macro and micro-influencer posts are more affordable. In fact, there are lots of them who are willing to not get paid at all and settle with giveaways.

If you want to get a feel for how much an Instagram influencer may potentially charge, as of 2022 it’s usually $10 per post/1,000 followers. However, influencers often don’t ask to be paid until they get 100,000 followers and are happy strictly with some free product and recognition, which is another reason why micro-influencers are preferred for small e-commerce businesses. 

Those who do charge for sponsored posts have media kits just like this:

So the price per sponsored post depends on how much the influencer is asking for and how much you can negotiate it down to. Generally, we are looking to pay less than $3.00 per conversion. Let’s say an influencer has 20k followers and she charges $500 for a post. Assuming a 1% conversion rate, this will amount to $2.50 per conversion.

However, giveaways are a much better option if you can both agree on the terms. In most of our brands, we usually sponsor giveaways instead of a paid partnership.

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How to Work with Instagram Influencers for Giveaways

Most micro-influencers will be more than willing to do sponsored giveaways because they also want to give back to their followers. But how does it usually work and how many items should you give away for free?

Of course, you have to give the influencer at least one free product that they get to use, review, and keep. For the number of giveaways, we usually give only one item if the Instagram influencer has 1,000 to 4,999 followers and two if they have 5,000 to 9,999 followers. For influencers with 10k plus followers, we have to decide on a case-by-case basis, depending on how effective we think the campaign would be.

Again, this isn’t set in stone. Sometimes, we give away more products even if the influencer didn’t reach the specified number of followers if we think the campaign will be successful. So you have to determine what this number is for you.

How to Find the Right Influencer for Your E-Commerce Product

This process usually involves looking through profiles of influencers that you can find using related keywords and hashtags. For example, if you’re selling home gym products, you can search for #homegym and #fitness and see which influencers are specializing in this niche. The top results will give you the top posts, and they’re usually posts by influencers.

There are dedicated apps and sites for finding Instagram influencers such as Heepsy, but when you’re just starting out with influencer marketing or are working only with micro-influencers for a few giveaways, it wouldn’t make financial sense to pay for these services.

As you go through influencers’ profiles, here are some questions you should ask before deciding to finally reach out:

• How active are they on Instagram? Do they post regularly and reply to their followers?
• How are their engagement rates? (Sometimes, profiles with millions of followers have only a few hundred likes per post, so don’t pick an influencer based solely on the number of followers.)

• Are they producing high-quality content? Look at their photo and video quality.
• Does the influencer sell a product similar to yours?
• Is the influencer already working with a brand whose products are similar to yours?
• Which country is the influencer from? (If you’re selling and shipping only within the US, don’t go for an influencer whose followers are mostly from a different country.)
• If you market your product to the influencer, will they buy your product? Because if not, then their audience will likely do the same thing.
• How many sponsored posts are they posting?

Let’s talk about the last question. This is important because influencers who are perceived to be authentic are more trustworthy. If their Instagram profiles are filled with so many sponsored posts, this can be off-putting.

Let’s take a look at Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram. Of the first 18 posts, only four seem to be sponsored (indicated by the red boxes). However, he also posts promotions for his own gym and fragrances (in green).

How to Reach Out and Follow Up with Instagram Influencers

After the preparations, you’re finally going to reach out to the Instagram influencer. Have a look at their bio because some influencers include an email address that they use for partnerships.

Not all influencers disclose their emails in their bio, however. In these cases, you can do the following:

• Look at their other social media accounts
• Google their names
• Use tools like Clearbit Connect

You can also send them a private message to ask for their email address or just be straightforward because some influencers are more active in answering questions on Instagram compared to emails. We usually go for something as simple as “Hi (Influencer), we’d like to sponsor a giveaway on your Instagram!”

If you go the email route, however, you can send something like this:

After your first message, you can follow up after a few days (usually 5 to 7 days for us) if you don’t hear back from them. When following up on Instagram influencers, emphasize the fact that you are not rushing them and that you respect their time, but also highlight any important events that may be coming up such as a product launch.

You have to be patient when it comes to influencer outreach because some influencers can take weeks or months before they reply, and expect to wait longer for their post to be up. To give you a real-world example, here are the success rates of our Instagram influencer outreach for 3 different products in one quarter.

How to Track the Success of Sponsored Instagram Posts on Amazon

After the Instagram influencer has posted, the next thing to do is track how well the post is doing. We consider a 2% engagement rate over a 7-day period to be good and 4 to 6% to be excellent.

So take note of how many followers the influencer has, how many comments and likes the post got. It would be awesome if the campaign results in a couple of sales, but even if it doesn’t, at least you still got brand exposure, which can pay off in the long run.

For our brands, we have the influencer link directly to our Amazon product page as opposed to our website. The incremental sales we can send to Amazon helps our Amazon SEO far more than any positive result we’ll get on our website.

We track our Amazon sales using the discount codes we provided to the influencers. The promo code can be generated on

Then we shorten the link generated by Amazon on Bitly and give the shortened link to the influencer. After a month, we track the data through

Since the Amazon report won’t show how many link clicks were made, our workaround is to use Bitly's click tracking.

Alternatively, you can also use Amazon Attribution and you will be able to concretely track the number of clicks and sales a link receives. The downside is that you cannot use it with a discount code.

We track data a month after the start of the campaign because afterward, the post will probably be too buried in the influencer’s profile.

Final Thoughts

Partnering with Instagram micro-influencers is a great way to reach out to your target audience. These influencers usually specialize in certain niches, so their followers are likely your target customers.

Whether paid or not, maintaining a good relationship with your chosen Instagram influencer can help your brand in the long run. We’ve had a couple of re-engagements with some influencers, and these campaigns have always been successful.

Have you tried working with Instagram influencers before? Was it a paid partnership or did you just sponsor a giveaway like we did?