To shortlist influencers while targeting a niche or audience segment, consider the following steps:

1. Audience demographics: Identify your target audience’s age, location, interests, and other attributes. The influencer’s audience should overlap significantly with yours.

2. Relevance & Authenticity: Choose influencers whose content aligns with your brand’s messaging and identity. Authenticity strengthens the influencer’s persuasiveness.

3. Engagement Rates: Look beyond follower numbers. High engagement rate reflects the influencer’s ability to truly connect with their audience.

Using influencer marketing platforms like Flinque or others can streamline this process. For instance, Flinque offers audience demographics and interests analysis, which helps in granular audience targeting. Such platforms also provide performance tracking to assess campaigns’ success metrics, like engagement rate, reach, conversions, and ROI.

Many platforms provide influencer discovery tools, simplifying the process by finding influencers that meet your criteria. Comparing the features and user interface of platforms can help identify the most suitable for your needs. A platform’s fit would depend on your team’s specific objectives, budget, and operational preferences.

Remember, the “best” choice is relative, depending on each brand’s unique requirements. Therefore, a systematic, data-backed approach should be adopted in shortlisting influencers for a niche audience.

As best practices, consider running small-scale tests with multiple influencers to gauge performance before committing to larger campaigns. And make sure your collaborations feel natural and provide value to the influencers’ audiences to maintain trust and authenticity.