What are micro-influencers? How to take advantage of the micro-influencer trend.

Getting more customers in today’s competitive marketing landscape is almost impossible.

SEO marketing and optimization takes months, if not years to drive any significant amount of traffic to your website, and the results are not guaranteed.

You don’t have six to twelve months to get new business.

Google PPC costs a lot of money, it is difficult for a business owner to set up, and run without an agency. In certain markets, PPC is not effective because competitors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars without a realistic ROI on their spends. This drives up the cost of PPC advertising above the breakeven point and forces many campaigns not to be profitable.

You can only get so many referrals, and it is hard to get them when you don’t have clients to refer back to your referrals.

Most marketing strategies take months of effort and planning before they come to fruition.

So, what are you to do?

Influencer marketing is extremely popular in 2018, countless brands are joining the bandwagon and moving their paid advertising dollars to influencer marketing. However, small businesses can’t afford the likes of Kim Kardashian or Huda Kattan.

Fortunately, there are micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are great as their following is more niche-focused. They provide promotion of your product or service and often have engagement rates that rival the Kardashian’s. Influencer marketing spends by companies and brands of all sizes is going to increase in the coming years. On Instagram, influencer marketing revenues have reached $570 million in 2016.

Read our post on The Key to Instagram Marketing in 2018

Micro-influencers are micro-celebrities with less than 25k followers. You typically want micro-influencers that post in specific categories which closely related to the following you want to attract to your business or service. For example, if you are a coffee company; you could find a micro-influencer that posts pictures of different coffee shops, reviews unique blends of beans, and in general, has a following which engages with the coffee content he or she is posting.

Free webinar on “How powerful is Influencer marketing” by Global Web Index

Do you see how this micro-influencer’s following can be beneficial to you?

The data supports the trend of marketing dollars flowing into this type of advertising. Markedly, published a study of over 800,000 Instagram account with 1,000 followers or more. They compared engagement data to major celebrity influencers. They found that as the follower count increased, “like rates” decreased significantly.

Along with the “like rates”, comments and engagement decreased as well.

Basically, the more followers someone has, the less their followers pay attention to what is being posted. This is great news for companies who can’t afford celebrities or Kim. Let us keep in mind that celebrity endorsement deals, celebrity advertising is not new. For decades, brands have enlisted the help of popular celebrities to promote their wares. Movie stars wearing fancy watches, actresses and pop-singers with shampoo, models, and perfume.

What has changed significantly, is who we consider a celebrity. You no longer have to win the Grammy, to be approached by a big brand for a spokesperson role. Average people are becoming what is known as Ambassadors for brands. But as celebrities sell out their names to the highest bidder for promotion deals, the consumers no longer trust or get affected by big-name celebrities. This why micro-influencers are so powerful and will continue to attract marketing budgets in the future.

Here are some of the results from a nationwide study conducted by Dr. Jonah Berger from the Wharton School and Keller Fay Group which shed light on the importance of emerging influencer marketing channels. The study funded by Experticity, has uncovered that “micro-influencers have up to 2.2 times more conversations each week regarding recommendations on what to buy.” Additionally, “82 percent of consumers who were surveyed for the study, reported they were highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.”

If you find the above study surprising, you shouldn’t be. We, humans, have relied on recommendations of friends and family for decades; we are influenced by social-proof, the idea that if others are buying something, that it must be good. In reality, nothing has changed, other than the source of this advice and social proof is no longer coming from face-to-face conversations but is moving to social media where we are spending more and more time.

So here are some tips:

• Find a micro-influencer for your company or brand
• Use campaign-specific hashtags to raise brand awareness and drive sales
• Leverage user-generated content
• Create sponsored (paid) posts
• Tell a great story along with every post

I will cover details of searching, selecting and working with micro-influencers in the future.

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