Micro-Influencer marketing is an effective way to produce valuable content for your audience and achieve your desired action.
A micro-influencer is an individual who has a loyal and engaged following that counts on them for content and expertise. He or she can be a blogger, startup founder, or online creator who has an engaged group in a particular niche.
#2 What Defines a Micro-Influencer for Your Brand?
It is important that they have all the following attributes:
Relevancy: The key to a successful campaign is to choose a micro-influencer with the right personal brand, audience demographics and social engagement.
Context: A contextual fit is the most important characteristic when targeting the right influencers for your brand. For example, Salesforce.com hired Gay Kawasaki to explain to the world how their products change people’s lives.
Reach: After you establish that they are a good fit, you want them to have the reach so they can share their content or positive recommendation to your desired audience. Ernst & Young worked with five business-minded influencers to create original content focusing on the advice they would give to their younger selves, looking back to their college or early career experiences. Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat content were used promoting Ernst & Young as a desirable company to build a career with.
Actionability: Due to the fact that their audience is engaged and is there to hear about the topic being discussed, the influencer’s ability to cause action by their audience. This can be a click to like, share or even buy your product.
Passion: Partner with micro-influencers who are passionate about your brand. This passion will resonate via the content they produce. As result, their audience will sense the authentic love for your product or service and they will learn to love your brand too.
#3 Where to Find Them?
Lots of brands wish to work with micro-influencers but often have a problem choosing the right ones online.
There are different platforms depending on which channels your campaign will be running on.
The Grapevine platform and Content BLVD focus on enabling brands to see their products shared on YouTube, so it seeks to match up product companies with YouTube creators.
Revfluence is a self-service platform, working with Instagram and YouTube, with a database of more than 150,000 influencers who have opted into the system. Their search and match function does a good job of matching brand with potential influencers.
Find Your Influence, TapInfluence, Webfluential platforms operate with influencers across blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
InkyBee, IZEA uses algorithms to analyse big data and come up with a statistical data, indicating who the most influential bloggers and Twitter profiles are for each niche.
InstaBrand place their main focus on mobile-specific networks like Instagram and Snapchat. For Twitter try Followerwonk.
#4 When to Start a Micro-Influencer Marketing Campaign?
If you are looking to increase your outreach and engagement, partnering with influencers would be a good start. Also using micro-influencers can be an effective way to introduce a new product or expand into a new region and win customer trust.
#5 Why Should You Do It?
If your target audience is on social than is a good campaign to launch. *According to the research, micro-influencers have better engagement and more loyal following than influencers. Also, a micro-influencer campaign is more cost-effective and so can achieve better ROI than a campaign using influencer or celebrity.
Next time you start your micro-influencer campaign, pause to check whether you have the Five Ws covered. Finally, if your goal is to promote your brand, consider running an ongoing campaign using micro-influencers rather than a one-off campaign.
*Research done recently by HelloSociety and Markery.