Finding YouTube Influencers for Your Business

• YouTube Influencers are driving engaged and already targeted traffic to beauty brands
• Finding the influencers sending traffic to your competitors can help you identify your next influencer partnership

With many companies embracing the power of social media and social media influencers to boost recognition for their brand and their products, it becomes increasingly important for businesses to learn more about the influencers their competitors are working with.

SimilarWeb provides insights into the importance of social media as a traffic source as well as drilling down to the individual platforms generating traffic to a site and even the specific pieces of content that worked. This is an invaluable tool in identifying the specific influencers working with your competitors, learning more about the kind of impact such relationships can have and helping to identify influencers as potential partners for your business.

This post will look specifically at YouTube influencers and how to identify them as potential contributors to your traffic acquisition and brand building strategies.

Looking for YouTube Influencers — Glossier

Glossier.com began life in 2013 as a beauty blog called Into the Gloss, but it has evolved into huge retail line of make-up and beauty products with the company recently valued at $1.2B. Looking at the range of traffic sources to the site in the US, it’s clear that social media plays a major part in their marketing strategy, responsible for 7.3% of desktop traffic in the US ahead of referrals paid search and email.

We can drill down further and look at the breakdown of social media platforms that make up that 7.3% of desktop traffic. YouTube is responsible for almost half of all the social media traffic to glossier.com.

Who Are the YouTube Influencers Sending Traffic to glossier.com?

You can now isolate social media sources of traffic to glossier.com to look only at traffic to the site coming from YouTube ordered by the volume of traffic each link produced. This will pinpoint the specific videos containing the links that brought visitors to glossier.com.

The top three YouTube links generating traffic to glossier.com over the past 12 months all come from YouTube influencers and give every indication that they are sponsored links from professional influencers.

The first video comes from a YouTube subscriber called SACHEU. Her About page indicates that she is represented by a talent management group called Select and potentially available for partnerships.

The second video on the list that sent traffic to glossier.com is titled “I SPENT $450 ON GLOSSIER AND… I MIGHT HAVE WASTED MY MONEY…”. The YouTuber, Kennie J.D., has over 280,000 subscribers and may be an excellent target for a company looking for YouTube influencers not currently tied to a single brand.

The third video is the most watched video of all time for YouTube influencer Camie Juan. It is one of several videos this YouTuber has posted about Glossier each with a 10% off link in the description, and a link to her hosted page at glossier.com indicating that she may be an in-house influencer and less available for approaches from competing brands.

So, should you care about influencers?

Yes! You can learn a lot about your competitors’ marketing strategies by looking at the influencers they work with and listening to the tone they use and the demographic they speak to. You can also gather suggestions of potential influencers to work with your brand or build of list of influencers that you should not approach.