If you’re feeling guilty about it, don’t. We’ve all been there at some point or the other.
Micro-influencer marketing is a newer trend that has recently entered the social media scene. It’s similar to influencer marketing, but on a smaller scale: brands team up with people who have smaller social media followings to advertise goods through genuine, visual posts rather than sponsored advertising.
If you want to use influencer marketing to promote your brand, there is no better time than now. Marketing with social media influencers is predicted to be one of the most successful ways to take your company to the next level in 2021.
As you keep reading, we’ll cover everything you need to know about micro-influencers and give you a step-by-step guide on communicating with these individuals to support your brand.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
It’s a social media marketing technique that focuses on using influential people to spread the brand’s message to a larger audience. You encourage, recruit or pay social media influencers to spread the word instead of selling directly to a broad group of customers.
This approach works in tandem with content marketing and social media marketing. While brands often use social media and content marketing in influencer marketing campaigns, they are not the same.
What Is a Micro-Influencer?
Micro-influencer marketing is influencer marketing on a smaller scale. Companies collaborate with people who have 1,000 to 10,000 social media followers. They are usually well-known in their field of expertise and have a high level of interaction with their target audiences. Micro-influencers may help brands expand their presence in niche areas.
Micro-influencers are people who use social media but are not celebrities, experts, or public figures. They’re people who work or specialize in a specific industry and often post social media content related to their passions. Micro-influencers, unlike conventional “influencers,” have fewer followers but hyper-engaged audiences.
A yoga influencer, for example, might have millions of followers and own many yoga studios. A yoga micro-influencer may only have a few thousand followers on Instagram and post instructional videos for their fans to try at home, but their average post receives a healthy amount of engagement compared to the size of their following.
Influencer vs. Micro-Influencer
Influencer marketing is when a company teams up with a top content creator — someone who has thousands, if not millions, of followers — to sell their goods or services to the content creator’s audience.
- As marketers work with influencers, they can take advantage of the influencer’s audience’s existing confidence.
- Influencers are highly successful in tactics like word-of-mouth marketing and increasing social evidence because consumers are more likely to buy from someone they know and trust.
- Brands often pay Influencers to post content highlighting their products or to sponsor their events, allowing brands to take advantage of the influencers’ wide reach.
The collaboration between Diageo, the parent company of Scottish whiskey brands Lagavulin and Oban, and actor Nick Offerman is an outstanding example of influencer marketing.
On the other hand, micro-influencers have a smaller following than influencers, with typically less than 100,000 followers.
- The rate of viewer interaction on content reaches its pinnacle at around 1,000 followers, making a relationship with a micro-influencer extremely beneficial to businesses seeking to raise brand awareness.
- Micro-influencers create a lot of content that appeals to their audiences and define themselves as experts in their field.
- About 82% of consumers polled said they were likely to purchase something suggested by a micro-influencer.
Companies may work with micro-influencers to write a blog post about a product deal, write reviews, or share the product with their social networks.
What Makes Micro-Influencer Marketing So Effective?
Do you remember the infamous Fyre Festival marketing disaster three years ago? It is the prime example of why your influencer marketing strategy is of utmost importance when it comes to this form of marketing.
Marketers have a lot of concerns about influencer marketing, likely due to the medium’s unfamiliarity. Despite this, approximately 66% of advertisers plan to boost their influencer marketing budgets. According to Adweek, the industry will be worth $10 billion by 2020.
The greater the financial stakes for companies and marketing firms, the larger the budgets become. So, as a marketer, how can you effectively reach your target audience and market your brand, particularly if your budget is limited?
Working with micro-influencers will assist you in this endeavor.
The Significance of Micro-Influencers
There are various types of influencers to choose from, but micro-influencers stand out as a low-cost, high-return marketing option. Collaborating with them has its own set of benefits and drawbacks, but the advantages frequently outweigh the drawbacks.
Here are the primary reasons why you should consider giving your money to a micro-influencer rather than a celebrity:
Micro-Influencers Help Boost Brand Awareness
Micro-influencers contribute to the promotion of a brand. Your company won’t get very far if it doesn’t have an identity to set itself apart, regardless of how good your goods and services are, how much money you spend on ads, or how much time you spend on social media.
Micro-Influencers Help Define Your Target Audience
Defining the target audience is an essential step in developing a brand. Review your goods and services thoroughly, and determine who will benefit from investing in your business. Using an influencer can be beneficial to help you recognize your ideal consumer persona.
If a clothing brand collaborated with a celebrity who has millions of Instagram followers, the celebrity could attract a wide audience, but not all would be interested in fashion. Instead, if the apparel company interacted with 100 fashion bloggers, each with 1,000 followers, it could reach a smaller yet much more active audience.
According to a poll by Experticity, 82% of customers said they would be very likely to trust a micro-influencer’s recommendation.
Micro-Influencers Improve Audience Engagement Tremendously
By creating and sharing meaningful, relevant content, influencers can also help improve engagement rates.
A recent study on Instagram engagement rates found that:
- Instagram users with fewer than 1,000 followers generated likes 8% of the time
- Users with 1,000-10,000 followers earned likes at a 4% rate
- Users with 10,000-100,000 followers achieved a 2.4% like rate
- Users with 1-10 million followers earned likes only 1.7% of the time.
Based on this data, brands should target micro-influencers with Instagram followings of 1,000 to 10,000. Brands can achieve higher engagement rates in a broad enough audience by using micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers have 22.2x more interactions than average Instagram users owing to their enthusiasm and awareness about their specific interest field, according to a new report by Experticity.
Micro-Influencers Are Much More Affordable
Micro-influencers are usually less expensive than celebrities or social media accounts with millions of followers.
For a single Instagram post advertising a product, celebrities can charge up to $75,000. On the other hand, 97% of Instagram micro-influencers charge less than $500 for a promotion tweet.
Granted, marketers typically partner with multiple micro-influencers to optimize visibility, but at these prices, even 100 micro-influencers will be less expensive than a single celebrity on Instagram. Brands can even compensate micro-influencers with smaller followings by providing free goods.
Micro-Influencers Are Far More Genuine
Since micro-influencers are authentic people, their Instagram posts are authentic.
Instagram users with a few thousand followers are more likely to post their own content, react to comments and act more authentically than brands or celebrities with a social media manager.
If a micro-influencer comments on a promotional Instagram message, their followers will be more likely to click through to learn more about the brand they’re promoting.
5 Step to Launch A Successful Micro-Influencer Marketing Campaign
Now that you know their importance, let’s look at how to prepare, execute, and manage a good micro-influencer campaign step by step.
- Step 1: Clearly define your goals and objectives
- Step 2: Decide on a budget
- Step 3: Identify the appropriate influencers
- Step 4: Create engaging posts
- Step 5: Analyze the outcomes
Step 1 | Clearly Define Your Goals & Objectives
Your marketing plan should start with figuring out what you want to accomplish and how you’ll assess success. Your campaign’s objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) must be clearly defined.
The common goals and KPIs of influencer marketing have been listed in the table below.
| Goals | KPIs |
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Setting concrete, actionable targets and associating them with appropriate KPIs should be your first step. These KPIs will enable you to assess the effectiveness of your campaign while it is still in progress. You will continue to improve the campaign’s success by modifying it.
Step 2 | Decide On A Budget
According to survey data, 97% of micro-influencers don’t charge more than $500 per endorsed post. With a $5,000 budget, you can expect to produce up to 100 micro-influencer posts and target approximately 200,000 people.
You can provide other incentives to micro-influencers besides cash, such as:
- Passes to an exclusive gathering
- Recognition on your website and social media accounts
- Early access to new products
- Free trials
- Discounted prices
- Gift certificates
- Product samples
Step 3 | Identify the Appropriate Influencers
Seeking influencers was cited by 36% of marketers as one of the most difficult aspects of managing an influencer campaign.
You should consider relevance, engagement rate, and authenticity when choosing micro-influencers for your campaign.
Relevance
The relevance of the influencer to your niche and brand is one of the most important factors to consider during the influencer selection process.
- It’s crucial to determine whether their followers are in your target demographic.
- You must also choose influencers who can produce consistent content with your brand’s ideals and aesthetics.
- Prioritizing relevance over a vast audience is always a good idea.
- Micro-influencers usually have a large following of people who trust their advice and opinions. Even selecting an influencer with a limited but significant fan base will assist you in achieving positive results.
Engagement Rate
Checking the average number of interactions on a micro-influencer’s posts is a good way to determine their level of influence. This will also help you figure out who interacts with the influencer’s posts and whether the group is active.
- You should search for influencers who have a lot of real interaction. It helps you to find influencers based on their niches and number of followers.
- You can also look at their interaction rates, the types of content they produce, and any previous partnerships they’ve done.
- You might want to work with a micro-influencer who has a large, committed audience for your marketing campaign.
Authenticity
Influencers with a larger following will demand more money for promoting a brand. Unfortunately, many influencers have resorted to unethical tactics to increase their follower counts. Therefore, it’s important to assess the credibility of the micro-influencers with whom you want to collaborate.
- Examining the engagement rates of fake followers is one way to spot them.
- Furthermore, you can review their social media to verify the authenticity of their profiles and interaction.
Step 4 | Create Engaging Posts
You’ve decided on your objectives and KPIs, as well as your influencers. It’s now time to think about what kind of content you want influencers to share on social media.
You can produce content in-house and then ask influencers to share it, or you can delegate the work to influencers based on your campaign brief.
Brand-generated content
Brand-generated content is when you choose influencers and ask them to share content you’ve created in-house.
- The chance of anything going wrong is the lowest when using brand-generated content since the influencer does not personalize the material.
- You should create content that carefully communicates your brand’s message to your target audience.
- Brand-generated content is less successful because it lacks personalization.
- Influencers are excellent content producers aware of the types of content their target audiences will enjoy. As a result, allowing them to build content will help you reach a larger audience.
Influencer-created content
Influencer-created content is when you allow influencers to manage content development, giving them the most creative independence.
- You simply give them your brand’s guidelines as well as some general direction on the type of content you anticipate from them.
- Content produced by influencers is more likely to be entertaining and memorable. It does, however, come with certain threats.
- Therefore, when negotiating content usage rights with influencer associations, you must develop a review process to ensure that the content they produce does not exploit your brand’s values.
- Before the influencer publishes the material, you must review, evaluate, request changes and accept it.
Step 5 | Analyze the Outcomes
Influencer marketing strategies are difficult to quantify and scale. It is, however, easier to calculate outcomes if you first set KPIs that are essential to the campaign’s success.
All you have to do now is keep track of your KPIs to see if your campaign is on target. You will improve the success of your influencer marketing campaigns by using the information you learn.
Micro-Influencer Marketing: Authentic and Engaging
The efficacy of an influencer marketing campaign is determined by engagement rather than the number of followers and likes.
Social media algorithms have been recently tweaked to make feeds emphasize real, quality content over sponsored content from big brands, with posts from account users follow and connect with appearing first. If the algorithm decides that users are more interested in micro-influencer content than celebrity content, it will be more noticeable.
You can check out our done-for-you micro-influencer marketing framework that will help you generate traffic, boost rankings and convert more leads.
Micro-influencer marketing strategies will help your brand gain a lot of traction. But to use it, you’ll need to come up with a foolproof marketing plan.
If you’re looking for a new strategy and never worked with influencers before, Influx can help! Tap into the power of influencer marketing with us today, and experience a whole new level of success with your online presence and traffic for your brand. If you have questions or are interested, schedule an appointment. Don’t wait – take your business to soaring heights with our help!