The world of digital marketing is a battleground where thousands of brands are fighting to grab the attention of their audience. While being exposed to so many advertisements, people find it difficult to remember or trust most brands. To win this battle, 93% of marketers are using influencer marketing as it is one of the most powerful strategies a brand can employ.
However, despite what many people believe, celebrities or macro-influencers are not the most effective figures for running successful campaigns. Nowadays, as micro-influencers have a smaller but more active and committed follower base, they can cause a bigger impact. In fact, micro-influencers were responsible for 91% of all sponsored post engagements in 2021.
Experts and marketers believe micro-influencers can transform your business as they are more affordable, have high engagement rates, can generate high ROI, are more trusted by internet users, and provide deeper audience insights.
Today, we will look deep into what benefits micro-influencers offer to support your business growth. But before that, let’s discuss who micro-influencers are.
Who Are Micro-Influencers and Where to Find Them?
Influencers are categorized based on the size of their follower base. As the number of followers for each category is not universally defined, it is difficult to determine what size of follower base a micro-influencer should have. Therefore, the definition of micro-influencers varies.
However, influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers on social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like, are commonly considered micro-influencers. They are popularly characterized as being trustworthy, relatable, genuine, and engaging by both internet users and marketers.
Since there are hundreds of thousands of micro-influencers on different social media and streaming platforms, it may be difficult for brands to find the right ones for themselves. Currently, Instagram is the top choice of marketers for running effective influencer marketing campaigns. Therefore, you can start your hunt for micro-influencers there.
It is the best practice to find micro-influencers from your brand’s follower list. As they already know about your brand and products, they are more likely to promote and build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with your brand. Alternatively, there are also several reputed influencer agencies that can connect you to the right micro-influencers, track, manage, and optimize your campaign, and even create all the necessary content.
9 Ways Micro-Influencer Marketing Can Transform Your Business
Collaborating with micro-influencers is one of the most powerful marketing strategies a brand can implement. If managed well, a micro-influencer marketing campaign can significantly boost your brand’s reputation and sales and, thus, the growth of your business. Below, we outlined how micro-influencer marketing can transform your business in nine ways.
1. Low Cost and High ROI
Micro-influencers charge significantly less than macro or mega influencers for each post or per 1,000 views. Although the amounts vary based on the influencers’ niches, platforms, locations, engagement rate, and follower base, micro-influencers are still 6.7 times more cost-efficient than higher-ranked influencers.
As a result, running influencer marketing campaigns with micro-influencers brings your overall marketing expense down and boosts your ROI. Moreover, as we will discuss below, micro-influencers are more effective in generating sales as they can engage a more loyal fan base, further improving your ROI.
2. Easier to Get in Touch with
As a brand, you may have the urge to collaborate with macro-influencers and celebrities as they appear on our news feeds more frequently. However, as they have a massive follower base, while also being limited in number, they have a tight schedule accommodating the needs of a handful of brands and even have exclusive contracts with certain companies as well. As a result, it becomes difficult to build a successful partnership with macro, mega, and celebrity influencers.
On the other hand, as there are plenty of micro-influencers available, significantly less number of brands compete for each of them. Micro-influencers are also more open to collaborations and long-term partnerships with smaller enterprises. In addition, most of them can be reached personally through emails or social media and are more responsive and professional to brands’ queries. Such accessibility not only saves you time and money but also helps you to better manage and control your influencer marketing campaigns.
3. Higher Engagement
According to Medium, micro-influencer marketing campaigns have shown a 60% higher engagement rate than others. The reason behind micro-influencers outperforming other influencer categories lies in their interactions with their follower base.
Micro-influencers can better interact and engage with their followers as they are much smaller in size, even on an individual level if required. Moreover, followers appreciate how accessible, responsive, and relatable micro-influencers are. This level of engagement results in your brand or product creating a buzz, intriguing more people, and, eventually, enhancing your growth.
4. More Authenticity and Credibility
Micro-influencers are known to produce more authentic content. Even when they promote brands or products, they tend to remain honest about them. Moreover, the level of personal interactions between micro-influencers and their followers is considered a genuine audience connection.
Such authenticity makes micro-influencers more trustworthy among their followers and credible figures for promoting a brand. Therefore, they can influence your target market to trust your brands more readily. Their authentic content drives more top-of-the-funnel traffic and sales, growing your customer base.
5. Ideal for Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting involves focusing on your target market’s location and utilizing localized or location-specific promotional content to reach them. As a local community always trusts its own micro-influencers more than national or global celebrities, it makes sense for brands to use micro-influencer marketing strategy for geotargeting.
Micro-influencers also have a better understanding of the local people and know how to reach them effectively. In addition, micro-influencers can provide you with valuable information about their community so that you can develop more focused marketing strategies and elements.
6. Access to Niche Audience
Usually, a micro-influencer and its follower base have a specific, common interest, such as gaming, traveling, cooking, fashion, etc. Moreover, there are further sub-classes of such interests, each with its own niche community, such as baking, European cuisine, air frying, healthy cooking, etc. The micro-influencers content and overall theme reflect this particular interest.
When you find a micro-influencer whose niche community represents a part or whole of your target market, you get the opportunity to reach them even on an individual level through the influencer. And as the micro-influencer is already trusted by them, they will more readily accept your product and perceive it as a good recommendation.
7. Easier to Work with
Due to time constraints, macro-influencers cannot support most brands that reach out to them. However, as we have discussed before, micro-influencers are more available to work with. As you are growing your brand, they are growing their influencer identity. You both can support each other’s growth and learn from each other, which makes the collaboration more than a beneficial partnership.
It is far easier to build a long-term relationship with micro-influencers. This relationship can be leveraged to run more profitable campaigns and strike better deals in the future. Furthermore, if your micro-influencer turns into a celebrity and you keep a highly supportive connection, you can sign them up for exclusive contracts as well.
Additionally, as micro-influencers are also learning to grow their own personal brand, they are more open to feedback and new ideas. As they are more flexible than higher-ranked influencers, they are more comfortable to work with, can accommodate your input or request, and allows you to exert better control over the campaign.
8. Better Audience Insights
Thanks to micro-influencers strong connection with their follower base, they can provide you with deep audience insights that you can use for product design, strategizing, targeting, and other essential purposes. For example, your micro-influencers can tell you what sort of content generates the best response from their follower base, and you can develop your content accordingly.
Moreover, with the use of platform-specific analytics tools, micro-influencers can help you profile your target market based on their demographic characteristics and interests. Along with that, you can also learn about how each demographic class is responding to your brand or product. Such information is essential to growing your business sustainably.
9. Greater Connection with Target Market
Through micro-influencers, your brand can build a closer and stronger connection with your target market. It enables your brand to engage in two-way social conversations with the audience, where your micro-influencer becomes your brand’s voice. Because of such an intimate level of communication, the audience perceives your brand more humanly, trusts you more, and relates to your values better.
Such connection with your target market and current customers is undeniably the greatest asset you can ask for. When you build such rapport, these people start advocating for your brand and trigger word-of-mouth marketing. Such a phenomenon not only boosts your sales but also enhances your brand’s reputation and makes it respected by society.
The recent rise of micro-influencers has made the influencer marketing field accessible to all sizes of businesses. They give your brand a far better opportunity to shine the brightest in the digital space than macro-influencers.
With their highly supportive follower base, authentic content, and trustworthiness, micro-influencers can take your brand to another level of growth. That is, as long as you know how to identify the right micro-influencers and effectively run the campaigns.
