Influencer marketing employs leading, niche content creators to improve brand awareness, increase traffic, and drive your brand’s message. How do you decide which to use, nano or micro-influencers? If people are aware of your brand in the market, then the next step is to start getting those conversions through micro-influencers. Micro-influencer marketing is especially effective as it’s both word-of-mouth and social proof. For smaller brands, you can check out our post on nano-influencers too!
Who Are Micro-influencers?
Unlike the usual influencers you have heard of, there’s a growing pool of ‘micro-influencers’. They possess a following of 10K-50K within their niche. In essence, what makes them special is that they engage directly with their audiences through social media, websites, forums, or any other interactive platforms. This results in high engagement rates compared to celebrities. Your brand might have worked with micro-influencers before, or if you are considering working with some, just ask around how it worked out for those who have tried!
How Exactly Can Micro-influencers Help Your Brand?
As compared to other forms of marketing, influencer marketing can bolster your brand’s long-term reputation and credibility. This is done through enjoying your products and providing authentic reviews about how they’ve felt about your brand or product. They also have thousands of people looking at their positive reviews. In other words, a wide reach of people potentially interested in trying out your product. This is because they deem it as credible after someone they follow and trust has tried it. Below are 2 other benefits of leveraging micro-influencers for your brand:
1. Brand Awareness and Reaching New Audiences
With so much competition out there, it’s getting more and more difficult to stand out amongst your competitors, much less raise brand awareness. However, this is where the magic of micro-influencers comes in. A partnership with them reaches more specific target audiences aligning with your brand. Especially if you’re looking to expand to a new market or widen your current pool of target audience, micro-influencers are effective in helping you achieve just that. If your target audience are Millennials or Gen Z, you’re in luck because they are more likely to learn about new products to buy through social media posts from influencers.
Imagine you own a female clothing brand, selling basic-style everyday clothing made of sustainable materials to millennials. This target group enjoys taking care of both themselves and the environment. However, you want to expand into activewear because your target group is also looking for such clothing. To raise brand awareness and reach out to active Millennials, look to micro-influencers who advocate healthy lifestyles and exercise regularly. Their followers are more likely to have similar interests or aspire to become similar in lifestyle.
2. Generating Sales & Conversions
Consumers tend to trust people who they are familiar with such as close friends (86%), distant friends (39%) and influencers (31%) when making decisions. With specific topics that are interesting and engaging, followers of micro-influencers are a very close-knit community. Moreover, micro-influencers content is more natural and motivated by the genuine benefit of products rather than purely financial gains. Thus, micro-influencers tend to have higher engagement than big name celebrities, macro or mid-tier influencers of over a 20% conversion rate. This however depends on how aligned the micro-influencer is to your brand. You’ll find out more on how to choose a suitable influencer in the next section.
Where do I start?
Definitely, influencer marketing is an investment. To make the most out of it, it requires devotion of time. This ensures you find suitable influencers who promote content that appeals to your target audience and is aligned to your brand.
1. Choosing Your Influencer
- What is your campaign goal? – Is it to raise brand awareness, get more conversions, or others? Would the use of micro-influencers help you to achieve this goal?
- Who are their followers – are they closely aligned to your target audience?
- Where to find influencers – Google, Marketplaces, Networks (Hepmil Creators’ Network), Social blade, Ninjalytics
What mediums do your target audience regularly visit – Did you know? To follow influencers, men typically use Youtube, whereas women use Instagram. Tik Tok is where the younger generation of 13-16 year-olds are.
2. Market Rate and Payment Terms (your budget, and how long you’ll be working with them)
- How long will you be working with them?
- If you don’t have the budget – be creative! You don’t need to limit yourself to monetary constraints, think out of the box. Alternatives you can consider include products, vouchers, discounts or anything else you can provide to your micro-influencer.
3. Engagement and Real Results
Engagement
- Likes and Shares – How many actions taken per post versus the number of followers on average? This would determine how active the micro-influencers followers are.
- Post Engagement Rate – How many impressions does each post get? The more impressions, the more people see the post.
Real-time results
You can track influencer links with UTM tracking. This allows you to see web traffic coming from them, allowing you to get a clearer view of how much traffic they’re bringing to your site. Setting up goals on Google Analytics also allows you to track real conversions!
Having clear metrics and an idea of what you want to get out of your marketing strategy guides your decisions. Should be using micro-influencers and how to choose the right ones? However, it is also extremely important to keep in mind that there could be many other brands engaging micro-influencers leading to the saturation of this marketing strategy. It could eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. Your target audience is often flooded with sponsored posts and branded content, numbing them from the difference from one brand to another. Fewer people will tap, like, and buy, affecting your return on investments.
Using It Wisely By Doing Your Research First
At the end of the day, authenticity is one of the most critical factors for micro-influencer success. If the followers do not perceive the influencer to be making genuine claims about products, it would be difficult to get higher conversion rates. Before you take on this strategy, conduct market research to ensure this supports your business goals. Alternatively, if your brand is fashion-related, you can also check out Shopform where we build a community of users that provide genuine reviews. On top of the micro-influencers already onboard, identify other similar key opinion leaders or micro-influencers that suit your brand. If you’re interested to join us as a brand on Shopform, drop us an email!