With the right strategy, influencer marketing can help a brand grow their audience and drive serious engagement. The wrong strategy means hours of searching on Instagram, only to overpay someone who can’t really move the needle.

Farfetch is an international fashion retailer offering designer clothing from around the world. With 100,000 products available, it’s a one-stop-shop with arguably the largest selection of luxury items in the world from brands and boutiques. Farfetch takes its influencer marketing program seriously, aiming to create long-lasting relationships with social media ambassadors who can tell their brand story in unique ways.

“We find that using influencers is a valuable, authentic way of curating content,” said Emily Auchincloss, Global Online Communications Manager.

But which influencers should the brand work with? How can they find them?

Farfetch regularly works with top-tier social influencers with large followings, but they’re greatly expanding partnerships with micro-influencers — people with roughly 10,000 to 100,000 followers on any given social platform. (Instagram is the most logical.) Their audiences are typically more engaged, making partnerships feel more authentic.

How do they find micro-influencers? Curalate Explore, which lets brands find and activate quality content in minutes, not hours, using advanced search features that put millions of pieces of content at their fingertips and allows them to easily find, categorize and reach out to micro-influencers.

“We use Explore all the time. It eases the process of sourcing influencers and content,” said Emily. “We all know time is of the essence. The social space is moving so quickly that all brands have to be reactive. You have to be able to source that influencer, ensure they have the right audience, ensure they have the engagement metrics you want, collaborate, and then execute on that content really quickly. Explore lets us do just that.”


Images courtesy of Farfetch, created by @okhee0717 @ericapelosini @miguelcarrizo and Farfetch.

With Explore, the Farfetch team drills down to the nitty gritty details — searching by things like location, age, user activity and, most importantly, engagement.

“Rather than just pretty pictures, you can see the metrics behind them as well,” said Emily.

As 2016 comes to a close, Farfetch is using Explore to identify influencers they hope to partner with during the 2017 London Fashion Week in February. The brand also uses Explore to find user-generated content they can republish on social, or use to liven up email blasts and dynamic product ads. (They’re the ads that retarget shoppers who had been browsing their products on the web.)

“Explore is an amazingly simple way to maximize our team’s time and resources while ensuring that we’re finding the right influencers and speaking to the right audience,” said Emily.

Want to work with micro-influencers but not sure how to get started? Check out our free guide How to Win Fans & Influencer Purchases to learn how much it costs, how to measure ROI and why micro-influencer marketing is the future.

For a quick, painless way to find influencers, use Curalate Explore, which allows you to discover micro-influencers eager to post authentic content about your brand.