How to Find New Target Markets with Influencer Marketing: 3 Proven Strategies for Brand Expansion

Building a business around one type of customer rarely leads to long-term growth. Yet when sales plateau, most brands make a common mistake – they abandon influencer marketing completely or blindly spend more money reaching the same audience.

Most see influencers as just megaphones to reach more of the same customers. But they're actually perfect testing grounds for new audiences. They can validate if your product solves different problems, reveal unexpected use cases, and connect you with customer segments you never considered.

To understand why influencer marketing excels at uncovering new markets, we spoke with Sambhav Chadha, Co-Founder at Augmentum Media, who has helped numerous brands expand into new customer segments. He explains:

"When testing a new customer segment, you're in the discovery phase. Unlike your core audience, you don't know how they'll react to your message. This is where the influencer channel allows you to not only identify resonance in a new customer segment, but by leveraging each influencer's authentic voice, you also learn which specific messages work within that new segment."

Let's take the example of Loop Earplugs. They started with concert-goers but discovered their earplugs also solved problems for other groups. By working with ADHD influencers, productivity experts, and autism advocates, they found new customers who needed their product for entirely different reasons.

In this guide, we'll explore why influencers excel at connecting brands with unexpected audiences, plus 3 ideas to uncover these hidden market segments.

Why influencer marketing is great for finding new types of audiences

It's faster and cheaper than traditional market research

Traditional research means spending lots of time setting up surveys and organizing focus groups. With influencers, you're learning about new audiences just by watching how they naturally interact with the influencer's content about your product. You understand precisely what different types of people like or don't like about your product.

But you have to work to find these insights. Watch for patterns in what people ask influencers privately, what features they mention to friends in comments, or which benefits they get most excited about.

Look at this Magic Spoon cereal post from an influencer. Someone commented that they bought it for their kids. This shows Magic Spoon could try reaching out to moms as new customers.

While it's not as structured as formal research, paying attention to these real conversations gives you ideas.

You get ready-made groups of similar people

Each influencer has already worked hard to bring together people with shared interests.

For example, a food influencer might have followers who are busy parents looking for quick recipes, while a tech reviewer attracts early adopters who love trying new gadgets.

Instead of spending money showing ads to everyone and hoping the right people notice, you can go straight to these groups likely to care about your product.

You can also discover unexpected groups: maybe your meal planning app was meant for fitness enthusiasts, but through influencers, you find out busy students love it, too. It's smarter than guessing who might like your product - these groups are already formed and paying attention.

Kim Biddle, Co-Founder of Clutch Affiliate, who has helped numerous brands scale their affiliate and influencer programs, says -

"Traditionally, brands often segment their target audiences based on demographic data and market research, which could lead to a disconnect between the brand and potential customers. However, with influencer marketing, brands are now leveraging the natural relationships influencers have with their followers. Influencers serve as trusted sources of information and innovation, providing insights into emerging trends and consumer preferences that brands might not have identified on their own." Biddle explains.

Quick social feedback reveals surprise customer groups

When influencers share your product, you often discover completely unexpected audiences in the first 48 hours.

For example, you might partner with a bodybuilder to promote your protein bars but notice many busy working moms commenting, "Perfect for my purse when I skip lunch!"

Or your partnership with a tech reviewer for your portable charger might reveal travel nurses in the comments excited about using it during long hospital shifts.

Regular market research, like surveys or focus groups, could take 3 to 4 months to tell you the same things. With influencer posts, you get these insights within days, helping you quickly adjust your marketing or product based on what real potential customers say.

When testing new markets through influencers, many brands make critical mistakes that can derail their expansion efforts. Kim emphasizes this point:

"One of the primary mistakes brands make is failing to understand the new market they are entering thoroughly. Without this foundational knowledge, brands risk misaligning their offerings with consumer expectations and cultural nuances." She advises brands to invest time in market research and consumer behavior analysis before diving into new markets.

This shift to influencer-led market testing has fundamentally changed how brands discover new opportunities.

Real-world success: How one brand discovered new markets through influencer marketing

Take Gourmend Foods, a gut-friendly food brand that discovered an unexpected customer segment while working with niche influencers.

Through SARAL's platform, they identified and partnered with creators outside their usual gut health niche, leading to a surprising discovery: people suffering from migraines were an untapped market for their products.

As founder Ketan Vakil notes, "Migraine issues are related to gut health, too; who knew?" This discovery expanded their customer base and demonstrated the product's versatility.

"We don't have a ton of marketing money... But when people find us, they buy, and they come back. Our recurring rate is in the 40%. But we have an awareness problem. Not enough people know about us. And this [influencer] channel is a good way, not necessarily to drive sales, but to get people talking about us," explains Ketan.

By staying organized with SARAL's tools, Gourmend could efficiently manage these relationships and scale its influencer marketing efforts without a massive budget.

"SARAL is so easy to use. It's easy to find people in our niche with the hashtags or find people who are following heads of brands or tangential brands," shares Ketan.

He has simple but effective advice for other brands: Stay organized from day one.

"Looking back, starting with a platform like this [SARAL] sooner for organization reasons would have been smarter because it's easier because you forget who you've talked to and who's doing what. This helps collect all those things." ~Ketan, founder of Gourmend

3 Ideas to find new customers with influencers

1— Finding new customers through influencers who speak different languages

When you've found a specific type of audience that loves your product, you can find that same type of audience in different languages and regions. Instead of starting from scratch in a new market, you can use influencer marketing to connect with people who share the same interests, and needs as your current customers — they just happen to speak a different language.

For example, let's say you sell hiking gear, and you've found great success working with outdoor adventure influencers in the US who create English content. Your products are popular with American hiking enthusiasts who follow these influencers. By finding Hindi-speaking influencers who create similar outdoor adventure content, you can tap into a parallel audience that shares the same interests in India.

How to Find Look-alike Creators

Start by analyzing what's working in your current market:

• The type of influencers who resonate with your audience — their age group, content style,
• How the current influencers engage with followers — through live sales reels, posts, etc.
• What messaging drives the best response?

Then, find influencers in your target language market who share similar characteristics with your successful influencer.

This approach helps you expand your market systematically, finding new pockets of customers who match your ideal customer profile but were previously unreachable due to language barriers.

Cultural Context Matters

Give your influencers in new language markets the freedom to present your product in ways that naturally fit their cultural context. Don't just translate your existing marketing message.

For instance, a thermos marketed to English-speaking Americans for "keeping coffee hot during the morning commute" might find a whole new audience among French-speaking influencers who might discover their audience loves it for keeping wine at the ideal temperature for picnics in the park.

3 SARAL tips

• Once you succeed in one new language market, you have a repeatable process for entering other language markets. This creates a systematic approach to global expansion that can be refined and improved with each new market entry.
• Before partnering with major influencers in a new language market, test your approach with micro-influencers (10K-50K followers) who match your criteria. This lets you validate your strategy at a lower cost.
• Create and track dedicated hashtags for each language market. This helps you monitor conversations and engagement patterns unique to each language community.

Discover look-alike creators at scale

Found an influencer who's crushing it for your brand? SARAL's intelligent look-alike finder helps you discover similar creators who match your top performers:

Input your star influencer's profile and instantly find creators with:

• Similar content style and aesthetic
• Matching audience demographics and engagement patterns
• Comparable follower growth trajectories
• Related content topics and hashtag usage

Book a 30-minute demo to see how SARAL helps you find influencers across the world, without spending hours of your time.

This takes just 18 seconds to schedule, and our team will customize the demo to your specific market expansion goals.

2 — Testing new markets through influencer seeding

One powerful way to discover new audiences for your product is to seed it to different types of influencers and watch how their followers react. You're basically running small tests with different audience groups through these influencers.

For example, if you're selling protein cereal, you can send your cereal to influencers who speak to different types of audiences — maybe a mom influencer who shares daily routines, a student influencer who talks about dorm life, or a nutritionist who advises busy professionals

When these influencers share your product, pay attention to how their followers respond. Are the comments exciting? Are people asking where to buy it? Are they surprised to discover your product? This feedback tells you if you've found a promising new market.

Drawing from years of experience in running influencer and affiliate programs, Sambhav emphasizes the importance of starting small:

"We always recommend testing new markets through influencer seeding first. By sending free products to a curated group of influencers and letting them share their genuine experiences, you can gauge audience interest, gather feedback, and identify which segments show the most promise (all without committing to an expensive paid campaign off the bat)

Influencer Outreach Template

You'll need to reach out to influencers to get started with this strategy. Here's a proven template that works well for product seeding offers:

Hello {{first_name}},

I've consistently been impressed with your work on {{platform}}, especially your insights on {{theme}}.

Over at {{brand}}, we're all about {{one-line description}}. You'd appreciate our product because of {{benefits}}. We're scouting for 25 creators who resonate with our {{mission}}. We'd be thrilled to have you onboard as a long-term partner.

Confident you'll love our product, I've set aside a special package. Can I get your shipping address?

Cheers
{{Your name}}

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Measuring Market Potential

Finding a new market segment is exciting, but how do you separate true opportunities from false starts? While initial engagement and comments can be encouraging signs, you need concrete metrics to validate if a segment is worth pursuing further.

Sambhav offers a practical framework based on his experience —

"For tests like this we tend to measure everything against baseline metrics within your core audience. Identify the KPIs you are comparing (impressions & sales are the two most common), and compare how you perform within the new market. If you can drive results that are 80% or higher vs your baseline, that's often a good indicator that there is potential to scale within this market segment."

How to scale this strategy with SARAL

Instead of manually sending hundreds of these emails and tracking responses, SARAL automates the entire process:

• Set up personalized email sequences that feel authentic
• Automatically send follow-up emails at the perfect time
• Track responses and manage relationships all in one place

Book a demo with SARAL today and see how we can help you discover your next big customer segment without the headache of manual outreach.

3— Observing influencer content on multiple social media platforms

Different social media platforms naturally attract distinct user behaviors and communities, even when discussing the same product. This idea uses that concept to find different types of customers by looking at how influencers use your product across different social media platforms. You're essentially using the platform's natural tendency to form distinct communities as a discovery tool for market segmentation.

So instead of focusing all your efforts on one platform, spread your influencer partnerships across different social networks.

How it works

Start by simply searching for your product type across different social platforms. As you browse through different platforms, you'll notice that influencers and their followers talk about and use your product type in surprisingly different ways.

Study these influencers closely — read their captions, watch their content, and dive into their comments section. You'll start noticing patterns in how they present your product type, what problems they're solving with it, and most importantly, who their engaged followers are. These followers are your potential new customer segments.

Let's see it with an example

Let's say you sell matcha tea, thinking your market is just health-conscious people seeking a coffee alternative. But when you observe influencers on Instagram, you find wellness influencers sharing their morning matcha rituals.

But on Twitter, you discover writers and authors who treat matcha as their creative fuel - they're drinking it for focus during writing sessions, not health benefits. On TikTok, you find study influencers making matcha their "study companion," with comments filled with students sharing how it helps them power through exam prep. Just by observing these influencers and their audiences, you will uncover completely new customer segments.

What you're really doing is using these influencers as windows into different communities. They've already built trust with specific audiences, and by studying their content and engagement, you're essentially getting a peek into how different groups of people think about and use products like yours.

What this approach is NOT

This isn't about immediately partnering with these influencers. When people think about influencer marketing, they usually jump straight to partnerships - sending products to influencers, setting up discount codes, and trying to get sales. But with this approach, you're just watching and learning. You're using their content and audiences as research tools to understand where your new customers might be hiding.

Only after you understand these new audiences - their needs, their language, their motivations - should you think about how to reach them, whether through influencer partnerships or other marketing channels.

Scale your market discovery with SARAL

Finding new market segments through influencer marketing is powerful – but managing all these relationships, tracking performance, and scaling your outreach can quickly become overwhelming. That's where SARAL comes in.

SARAL is your all-in-one influencer marketing tool. It's built specifically for DTC brands that can help you find affiliates in bulk,automate personalized emails, ship products, track sales, send payments. All without boring manual work. Book a 30-min personalize demo and let us show you how you can scale your influencer marketing, easily.