Digital/Social / Jun 4, 2024

Why Micro-Influencers Are the Future of Marketing (and How to Get Started)

The Brand Leader

By Sara Tressler

In the current digital landscape saturated with content, a targeted social media strategy is not just beneficial; it's essential. A strategic approach ensures your brand connects with key audiences, maximizing your impact and engagement potential.

That said, hoping to reach everyone with your strategy is impossible. And even if you try, it’s incredibly ineffective over the long run. General social media strategies designed to appeal to the masses often dilute your brand's impact and fail to generate authentic relationships or rapport with important audience members.  

Alternatively, creating a specific and highly tailored strategy that prioritizes thoughtful tactics to reach these key niches can help your brand and content reach the right viewers, giving you the most potential for meaningful engagement. Strategic partnerships with micro-influencers can be a great way to reach these targets, making them a savvy addition to your brand's social media strategy.

What Is a Micro-Influencer?

A micro-influencer is an influencer with a social media platform of 10,000 to 100,000 followers. Nano-influencers are a subset of micro-influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers. Conversely, macro-influencers are defined as notable social media figures (such as celebrities, public figures, etc.) with follower counts of over 100,000 users.

Micro-influencers can take many forms and have varying presences from celebrities to your local community. A great way to find these key tastemakers are by following relevant industry hashtags, using the ‘find similar accounts’ feature on Instagram, or even by monitoring your  existing following and brand hashtags for loyal customers and brand enthusiasts with a small but mighty following. Engaging with brand enthusiasts, even without a formal presence, can have a great impact because shows followers that your brand values customer loyalty and connection in an authentic way. 

Why Partnering With a Micro-Influencer Makes Sense

While micro-influencers may have fewer followers than their celebrity or macro-influencer counterparts, there are many reasons why partnering with them may benefit your brand. Let’s look at the top three:

Authenticity

Micro-influencers are often known for their authenticity and have loyal follower bases because their size allows them to create more genuine and personalized content than mega-influencers. This means when micro-influencers post about a product or partnership, their fans are more likely to trust them because of the intimate relationship the influencer has cultivated. These relationships make it possible for brands to effectively reach their desired niches through partnerships with strategically selected micro-influencers.

Engagement

A recent influencer report from Emplifi revealed that micro-influencers have higher overall engagement rates on their content, with a 13% difference in rates from macro to micro-influencers on TikTok. While macro-influencers cast a wide net in reach, micro-influencers can contribute serious value in engagement and conversion due to their strong loyalty among their tight following.

Cost Effectiveness 

Influencer partnerships can vary drastically in pricing, with posts ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on where the influencer is based, the project's scope, and the influencer's following size. With their smaller, more intimate following, micro-influencers are often more affordable and provide high-quality content with a more personal touch for their fee. 

When to use micro influencers: 

Utilizing strategic partnerships with micro-influencers can have major benefits to your brand. A few circumstances where influencers can help your brand maximize their impact and returns include: 

• Product Launches: To help amplify the impact of your next product launch, consider partnering with micro influencers to generate buzz and authentic early reviews for amplified consumer engagement and excitement around the launch
• Reaching a Specific Niche: If there’s a consumer brand your brand is trying to expand into, partnering with micro influencers are a great way to make this entrance
• Driving Conversions: For conversion specific initiatives, sharing discount codes and affiliate links with micro-influencer partners are a highly effective way to boost sales
• Content Generation: To help support your brand’s own organic content, partnering with micro influencers can be a great way to bolster your brand’s presence. Making feed posts ‘collaboration posts’ and resharing partner content to your channels offer extra variety and engagement with added post cadence. 

What’s the Best Way To Partner with a Micro-Influencer?

For best practice, you should always set aside a budget when working with influencers of any level. Sending product to an influencer “in kind” (with no compensation) is a dated practice that doesn’t guarantee the influencer will cover the product in a way that's beneficial to your brand, if at all. 

This being said, sending products to influencers can be a great way to build an initial relationship with targets. The best way to start this is by reaching out to the influencer directly from your brand channel and engaging with their content. This can look like leaving a comment on some of their posts about how the brand likes their content, and then sending them a direct message about working with them more closely. This will likely not result in immediate product coverage, but it will help put your brand on the radar for target influencers, build relationships, and possibly open the door for larger opportunities down the line. 

Sponsored Content

To build a partnership that results in quality content, we always recommend paid opportunities, as these allow for more creative input and collaboration from the brand's end. This includes the active participation in the creation of the content media and copy, as well as a final approval on the collaboration posts before going live. Additionally, there’s also more opportunity in paid partnerships to work with the influencer to properly optimize the post. This includes the date and time the post will go live, if it will be pinned, posted to stories or some other form of cross promotion. 

These sponsored posts have The price of these opportunities will depend on a few factors including medium of the post (in-feed, stories, reel, etc.) and the amount of followers the influencer has.

Affiliate Marketing

In addition to sponsored posts, creating an influencer affiliate program is a great way to direct more traffic to your brand’s website. With affiliate marketing, your brand can use traceable ‘affiliate links’ in tandem with sponsored posts for influencers to share with their followers when promoting the product. When these followers use the link this can track how many sales come in through each link, this is a great way to gauge the conversion impact these partnerships are having on sales in real time. 

Brand Ambassadors

As a bonus, paid partnerships go a lot further in building a relationship with said influencer, making them more likely to mention or feature your brand in organic content they create, even after the initial paid project has ended. 

Selecting strategic brand ambassadors are a great way to generate long term momentum with desired target audiences. Sponsored posts differ from brand ambassadors as these are longer term partnerships that go beyond a select few posts, and are usually a content series posted by one influencer over an agreed upon period of time. This can result in further brand loyalty and awareness as followers are exposed to the content over time and are better able to build their own relationship with the product. A few sponsored posts can get lost in the shuffle, but a brand ambassadorship can create better sustained interest and maximize engagement from their audience. 

Micro-Influencers. Major Benefits.

In short, it doesn’t always take the loudest or most well-known voice in the room to make a sizable impact. In the case of micro-influencers, building focused partnerships with creators in the right niches can have massive ROI for your brand at a fraction of the cost. 

The Brand Leader