By: Micaela Ryan, Creative Content Producer
Brands now have more access to social influencer marketing than ever before. As one of the most successful ways to promote a business, it's becoming more popular to raise brand awareness, increase traffic and interaction, communicate company messages, and increase overall sales.
Social media influencers can be extremely diverse, in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity on social media. Most brands go toward the big names in their fields due to their well-known and respected name. They also range from having hundreds of thousands to millions of followers on social media. With this new rising popularity of influencer marketing, would you take advantage of the same incredible brand promotion using micro-influencers? Before diving deeper into this question, we need to define what these social media influencers are.
What are Micro-influencers & Macro-influencers?
Micro-influencers are social media influencers with a following of 1,000 to 100,000 people. They have a loyal following despite not having millions of followers. This does not prevent them from having the same power and influence on individuals. In reality, because they have fewer followers, they are frequently considerably more involved with them on a daily basis, as opposed to some of the world's most influential people, who have hundreds of thousands of followers and can't possibly engage with them at a high rate. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a lot smaller, more focused audience, which is far more effective when marketing something. Micro-influencers are considerably more accessible, create more brand awareness, increased website traffic, and increased social media engagement at a much lesser cost.
A macro-influencer with a vast audience of committed followers has undeniable power and influence. Macro-influencers are definitely the stars of social networks, thanks to their vast groups. For many of them, social media has become their place of work, which explains why they can handle them as if they were a real business. Their community's size and strength define them. Brands approach them for their visibility and undeniable popularity because they can reach up to a million followers, such as international celebrities. However, hiring macro-influencers to assist in promoting your brand is more difficult and expensive, which is why examining the benefits of micro-influencers is important.
Why Should Your Company Target Micro-influencers to Promote Your Brand?
According to Facebook US, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of online users watching live video jumped by 50%. Influencer marketing is when businesses and brands collaborate with well-known social media personalities, bloggers, and influencers who have a huge following. It aids in the development of brand awareness, credibility, and sales. Influencer marketing is anticipated to grow to a $15 billion business by 2022.
Influencer marketing became well-known because it differed from traditional marketing, which provided just surface-level sales content. Influencer marketing concentrates on deeper dialogues and experiences. As a result, influencer marketing is more personal than data-driven advertisements. While many corporations are already accustomed with partnering with high-profile celebrities, micro influencers provide increasingly different trade-offs for businesses trying to expand their reach. Large corporations now employ three times as many micro influencers as they did in 2016. Furthermore, Instagram accounts with 1k-20k followers published 46.6 percent of brand mentions with the hashtag #ad in 2020.
Key Steps in a Successful Micro-influencer Marketing Strategy
1. Choose Your Companies Niche
Some questions you need to consider before reaching out to micro-influencers with a distinguished niche such as fashion, travel, lifestyle, wellness, etc include: What kind of market would you place them in? What are the most common topics they cover and discuss? If they have any, what is their area of expertise? The more you know about their favorite forms of material, the more you'll be able to generate content that they'll want to share, increasing your chances of having your own content shared.
2. What are Your Marketing Goals?
The first step is to figure out what your objectives and key performance indicators are. Most brands don't invest enough time in identifying their goals and metrics before investing in influencer marketing. When it comes to influencer marketing, organizations must identify three key objectives and methods for achieving them:
Increasing brand recognition
Increased lead generation
Attracting a new consumer market
3. How Authentic is Their Audience?
What is the authenticity of the influencer? People are more likely to trust individuals who are genuine and use an organic approach to promoting. When an influencer is overly forceful in their promotion of a product or a business, their followers are likely to become irritated. This could have a detrimental influence on the advertised brand. Another thing to examine is how many authentic followers they have to their distinguished niche. If a micro-influencer has lots of spam accounts following them, that is a red flag to look out for regarding their authenticity.
Time to Collaborate
Brands will continue to focus on micro-influencers in 2021, as they have a strong connection with their communities and followers, thanks to the increase of micro-influencers.This new marketing method will undoubtedly be a game-changer in the field of communications, allowing firms to target a certain niche and boost sales. It's time to include influencers in your digital marketing approach. Go collaborate and find out for yourself!
