Influencer Marketing – How to Work With Microinfluencers
Influencer marketing is a booming industry. Working with influencers is a cost-effective way for brands to promote their brand and boost brand awareness and equity, as well as sell their products or services.
Unlike more familiar macro-influencers with massive followings, micro-influencers have more intimate followings hovering between the 1K – 100K count. When partnering with micro-influencers, the influencer marketing strategy tends to cater to a more niche audience that’s highly engaged. By tapping into these audiences, brands can market effectively–often more so than when trying to tap into larger audiences, which feature a mix of engaged, unengaged, and even meaningless bot followers.
Micro-influencers have the ability to connect with their audiences on a more emotional level that’s conducive to boosting engagement, and if you implement the right influencer marketing strategy–conversions, too. If you’re looking for a way to drive up likes and comments, and better yet sales, brands of all sizes should consider working with micro-influencers as part of their overall marketing strategy.
What and Who Are Micro-Influencers?
Micro-influencers are everyday social media users who have anywhere from 1K to 100K followers on social media platforms. These content creators might be style gurus, travel enthusiasts, health food bloggers, or anyone else who uses their own channels to connect with a substantial audience.
They are popular across all social media platforms, but generally, they can all be found on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Audience members tend to view these influencers as unofficial yet reputable experts in their niche. What’s interesting to today’s marketers is that the smaller the audience, the stronger the engagement. Consider this, for example: Micro-influences with just 1K followers have scored 85% higher engagement rates than more mega influencers boasting 100K.
Why Are Micro-Influencers So Effective?
Micro-influencers foster engagements with the influencer’s audience in a way that larger influencers don’t primarily because they’re more accessible and relatable. People can’t connect with household-name influencers in the same way that they can with an everyday shopper who has far less fame. At the end of the day, celebrities just aren’t in the influencer marketing game to make those types of connections–they’re there to promote large brands and make money doing so. Lesser-known influencers, on the other hand, are where they are precisely because of their love for shopping and dedication to their hard-earning followings.
Audiences are also well aware that when a Jennifer Aniston or a Tom Brady promotes a product, they’re doing so for a hefty paycheck. That level of pay tends to lessen the authenticity factor as a result. It is much harder to trust a celebrity who’s getting a massive payout for promoting a product than it is a micro-influencer with a proven track record of great taste who is endorsing brands they love at a fraction of the cost–or even for gifts from a brand they absolutely love.
What’s more, a product or service that’s promoted by a trusted micro-influencer has built-in social proof, which is a powerful incentive for online-shopping followers who are not able to interact with such products or services in real life prior to making a purchase.
Working with Micro-Influencers: Check Their Relevance
If your brand wants to run micro-influencer campaigns, you first need to decide which micro-influencers are best suited to promote not only your brand but the campaign at-hand.
It’s important to select micro-influencers who generate content aligned with your brand’s ethos and overall vibe. For example, if you sell healthy food, it makes sense to seek out a micro-influencer who regularly posts about nutrition, as opposed to a high-brow foodie who rarely takes nutrition into consideration. Once you have a few content creators in mind, you should devote time to research their engagements, content, and past endorsements to determine how well of a fit they are for your brand.
Establish Connections
When you’re ready to reach out to influencers about promoting your brand or products, it can be tempting to direct them on how you’d like them to produce their content. After all, it’s your brand they’re endorsing, and you may have strong brand guidelines in-place, which are definitely important to consider.
However, it may be best, instead, to reinforce the connection and make them feel valued first by discussing how you believe they’re a good fit for your brand and how you respect their work. This way you’re setting yourself up for a two-way partnership where the content creator feels valued in a non-monetary way.
While you will definitely share a creative brief with them, be sure to open the door for discussion about how they wish to infuse their skills and personality into their endorsements.
Instead of directing, brainstorm with them on different ways to promote your products, inviting them to have a few creative liberties. After all, while you know your brand, they know their audience, as well as content best practices to engage them.
If you’ve chosen wisely, then you should be able to trust your selected content creators to communicate effectively with their audience in a style that’s aligned with your brand while still well-suited for their audience.
Be Up Front
When working with a micro-influencer, be upfront about your goals from the start. Discuss the duration of your campaign, your marketing goals, and influencer marketing budget.
Many brands pay micro-influencers a percentage of each sale they helped facilitate, while most pay them a set fee based on their budget, which may be small, and result in payment in the form of gifts. Whatever the payment, be as transparent as possible because you want the influencer to feel they are valued so as to feel motivated while creating content for you.
The influencer marketing agency is growing, so it’s important to negotiate professionally and utilize contracts, just as you would with any other partner. Consider working with a digital marketing agency fluent enough in influencer marketing to apply best practices for any given platform.
Reinforce the partnership by talking about your goals so they understand what your objectives for the campaign are, and can consider them when producing their content.
Additionally, if at any time you have concerns about their performance, communicate with them right away. Ideally, you’ll want to establish a well-oiled process for working with influencers so that you can seamlessly form successful influencer partnerships in the future.
Tried-and-True Campaign Ideas
When you approach micro-influencers and discuss campaign goals and content ideas, you can mention a few tried-and-true best practices that have worked well in the past. For example, if product reviews have worked well for your brand, feel free to ask your micro-influencer to provide a product review. Their target audience trusts them and will trust them to cover your product with honesty. Ultimately, however, the delivery should be up to the influencer as it’s their channel and their following. They understand their audience best–they’ve built it. So, openly discuss your ideas, but be sure they can put their own creative spin on them for best results.
If you’re ready to begin working with influencers, you can take the time to research, perform outreach, generate contracts and creative briefs, and monitor performance.
However, remember, influencer marketing is a high-ROI-generating industry full of specialized professionals who know their craft and the influencer marketing industry better than most–so you will need to deliver the same level of professionalism and dedication when seeking content from them.
That’s why it’s smart to work with a digital marketing agency like MuteSix, where platform-specialized paid media and creative strategists understand how best to weave influencer marketing into your omnichannel digital marketing solution.
What’s more, digital marketing agencies boast a wide network of influencers to tap into, which can save your brand a lot of time and money from the research and outreach phases to campaign tracking.
To get started, reach out to the paid media, creative, and data experts at MuteSix today to start unlocking the potential of influencer marketing utilizing micro-influencers and maximizing their success across all your paid media channels.