How Brands Can Work Effectively with Micro-Influencers

The influencer culture, which started with the introduction of Instagram and other platforms where people could take a glance at other people's lives, created a new marketing opportunity to reach out to new people, one with extreme risk.

How to understand the influencer's motives? How to figure out their audience’s reaction? And how to ensure that the influencer does good work from the given resources?

These are all heavy questions. Some forms of marketing only require money, and the result will come. Influencer marketing is the exact opposite of that. This field of marketing requires content, budget, and time planning, and precise influencer picks.

In this article, we will introduce micro-influencers and give tips on how to build effective collaborations.

What are Micro-influencers?

The first few years of the rise of influencer marketing were all about maximizing the number of interactions. Marketers believe that if they work with the most influential and popular influencers, they will deliver their messages to their desired audience as well.

Although they knew about waste coverage, they took the risk. However, as the value of influencer marketing became better and better, this tactic worked worse and worse, because of two specific reasons.

First, influencers started to be aware of their value and desired bigger packages for their work. On the other hand, their audience started to be furious about them if they accepted every sponsored deal, even those that were not connected to their lifestyle or hobbies.

Therefore, the sponsored collaborations became expensive and less worthwhile. That was the point when some marketers reshaped this field, by making a very good assumption: what if we deliver our messages to many smaller groups of people that are all aligned with our desired audience specifics?

Micro-influencer marketing grew from this idea. Micro-influencers are social media creators who have a moderate but highly engaged audience, typically between 1,000 and 100,000 followers.

These influencers are highly engaged in a specific field or a hobby, but they don’t try to be involved in everything all at once. That makes them special for marketers: even though they can’t deliver the messages to the whole world, they can deliver them to a very strong community. A community that would rather click on your website’s strong domain name than any other group of people.

Why Can Micro-influencers Be Useful for Brands?

In this part of the article, we will demonstrate the advantages of micro-influencers and why more and more brands are involving them in their marketing strategy.

➤ High Engagement Rates and Trust

As long as a popular influencer is not just popular, but authentic, there is no need to use micro-influencers. However, the main concern is that the more popular the influencer is, the more their audience's average trust score starts to decline. They can’t be part of the community and reply to their followers' comments; they have other things to do.

Although they are still followed by their old audience, they start to be less active and caring. That’s what makes a micro-influencer special: many of them have a magical connection with their audience, who are both loyal and active members of the community.

They actively listen and read what the loved influencer posts, and that is a fantastic marketing opportunity. If a brand’s product aligns with those that the influencer works with, this will lead to a fruitful collaboration.

➤ Cost Efficiency

As we already mentioned, the biggest reason why many brands stopped working with top influencers was their prices. At that point, they finally understood their real value and started to think like a salesperson, instead of an enthusiastic beginner. Nowadays, you can’t race with the biggest brands to make a deal with Selena Gomez, Kylie Jenner, or Dwayne Johnson.

But as the mentioned trust score shows, it wouldn’t be that effective either.

However, a micro-influencer doesn’t have 100 different offers on the table to choose from. They are typically more open to collaboration, and as they can get more reward for their hobbies. Also, she will definitely put effort on creating the content, and pass all of your criteria that you stated on the contract.

➤ Reaching Niche Audiences

Sometimes, it is really hard to find your target audience. With Facebook or Google paid advertisement options after the implementation of the GDPR rules in Europe, you have limited access to the users' browsed websites, area of interest, or personal data, such as country of origin, age, or marital status. Even though you have a clear target in your head, it is almost impossible to reach most of the online marketing options without big waste coverage.

However, micro-influencer marketing is different, as you have certified evidence that those people who follow a nail-builder influencer are interested in artificial nails, for example. Also, you can be pretty sure about the followers' age, gender, or their current place of residence.

How Can Cooperation Be Successful?

However, brands also have great concerns about micro-influencers for different reasons. They might be bad at creating content, or the effect will be so small that it will never be worth it to actually put effort in it. However, if you pass some rules and you are prepared before starting your micro-influencer strategy, there’s a high chance that you will be satisfied with the results.

In this part of the article, we will introduce the most important rules.

➤ Understand Your Potential Buyers

A micro-influencer called “micro” who typically has between 10 thousand and 100 thousand people. If you try to communicate global messages, these numbers are way too small to create a big impact.

However, if you completely understand your visitors’ attributes, the best way is to communicate the messages in those platforms, channels, or through those people who deliver your messages only to the designated target audience.

Let’s see an example: you have two ways to promote your messages, but you are limited to using only one according to your budget. 10 micro influencers whose followers have the same internal and external characteristics as your target audience, or 1 global influencer, who is followed by a quarter of the platform users. However, the first option costs you $1000, and the other is $10000. And even though for $10000, you can get 10x more views, most of the listeners are wasted reach, as they would never resonate to a specific message, like yours.

➤ Research About the Influencer that You will Hire

Many marketers fall into that same trap again and again. They only look into the recent magazine of Forbes, and pick a random influencer from there. Without any further investigation, like audience attributes, or the influencer’s likeability, or authenticity scores, this decision can be considered random.

And brands don't like random elements added to their campaigns.

This advice is even more true about micro-influencers. Without an in-depth investigation, you don’t have evidence online about the influencers’ or their audience's attributes, which determine the success of your campaign.

➤ Write a Detailed Contract

In a cooperation like this, a well-written contract is worth gold. The problem is that the brand that initiates the cooperation, and the influencer, both have negative assumptions in their mind.

The influencer worried about most of the cases that she won’t get paid, or requires more work than the two parties previously agreed on. On the other hand, the brand is usually afraid of how well the influencer sticks with the brand’s expectations and the quality of its posts.

However, there is no need to be afraid, if all these questions are answered in the contract that is signed by both parties before the start of the cooperation. Of course, you can’t refer to the quality of the content inside the contract, but you can state most of the aspects of the work: number of videos, maximum length, parts that need to be covered - these all ensure that the content will exceed your expectations.

➤ Measure the Results

The last piece of advice is one of the most important ones in the marketing scene. As in this industry, where there is no past data about influencers or influencer - brand synergy, there is only one way you can learn from: your mistakes.

But without a well-documented measurement, you will never know the results of your campaigns. There are plenty of ways to document the effectiveness: some marketers still believe there is no better way to measure this than with promo codes, some believe that a post-purchase survey is the most effective way.

Well, it all depends on the platform, your resources, and your brand’s industrial attributes. But one thing is sure: without a measurement, you will commit the same mistakes again and again.

Conclusion

In this article, we went through the difference between micro-influencers, and macro-influencers, and the real reasons why sometimes it is better to stick with those celebrities that are not on everyone's radar. We also included some tips on how an effective micro-influencer and brand collaboration works, and what parts you need to look at very carefully.

Digital Marketing