In a world where social media marketing is gaining more and more popularity, you must be familiar with the impact of social media influencers and celebrities on your business. In the olden days, businesses had to hire television celebrities to promote their brands effectively. These celebrities used to charge a high price for appearing in advertisements, which companies were willing to pay for the sake of enhancing their brand image.
But these days, anybody who has a good following on social media can become an influencer for your brand’s target audience. On top of that, even micro-influencers do not even need to be paid much. They voluntarily promote your brand and products if they are fond of them and have had good experiences with them. This is why many businesses like to integrate their websites with their social media pages.
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Before discussing the benefits of using micro-influencers, let’s answer this question - what is a micro influencer?
What is a Micro Influencer?
Micro-influencers are people who have a good following (1,000 to 10,000 followers) on a specific social media platform. Even though the number seems very low when we compare it with the following of the bigger social media influencers, there is still a lot of power in micro influencer marketing.
Micro-influencers are particularly beneficial for small businesses that have smaller budgets for marketing but fantastic product ideas. They need to find micro-influencers who are popular on a social media platform that they want to target and have a following that is similar to their target audience. These micro-influencers do not charge a high price for promoting a brand because they enjoy the process and in fact, gain more popularity throughout.
Micro-influencers can be industry experts, public figures, or merely small-scale celebrities. They tend to have gotten lucky in terms of having a large audience, who may or may not be interested in your business. But most of their audience is usually an active group of followers. That is why, if you can get hold of the right micro-influencers for your business, your brand can get more visibility than it would get through any other marketing strategy.
The Benefits of Using Micro-Influencers for Your Business
The small businesses and larger and established brands are also beginning to realize the benefits of micro influencer marketing. This is exciting because using micro-influencers does not cost a lot of money and can become a cost-effective strategy for growing your brand equity.
With the rise of influencer marketing, more and more people are surfacing as influencers for different industries. These are people who have had some experience directly with your product or indirectly through a similar product. They have a massive following, particularly on social media, and can give a vast reach to your marketing campaigns if they are willing to mention and promote your brand to their audience.
Micro-influencers are a mini version of these influencers. They have a relatively small following, but their influence can still significantly impact your sales. Following are some specific benefits of using micro-influencers for your brand.
1. Improved Authenticity
The way customers are influenced to purchase products is evolving at a rapid rate. More than listening to the features and benefits, people are more interested to know who is using it already. If they see someone they admire using a specific brand, they want to follow suit.
When customers see the ones they follow using a particular brand, they perceive the brand and its products to be authentic. Authenticity on social media has become one of the most effective ways of building a digital brand community. They know that if someone they admire posts positive content about a particular brand, it must be coming from their heart. They know that these micro-influencers are not charging high amounts from the businesses for promoting their brands. This is why micro influencer marketing is perceived as the most authentic form of marketing that consumers know of these days. Hence, among the benefits of using micro-influencers is that it improves the authenticity of a brand and its campaigns.
2. Higher Engagement
The fact that micro influencer marketing is seen as authentic brings us to the second point. What a business wants the most from its brand community is for all the members to be engaged. The last thing a company wants is to get no response to its marketing campaigns. Every business wants to get feedback from customers, engagement in the community, and active people in the groups that are following the brand.
At Strikingly, we have a help center that serves as our brand community. It is always our effort and intention to keep the members of this community engaged in the discussions.
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Micro-influencers, when they start promoting a brand, bring about higher engagement in the brand communities. They build an interactive space where people follow them constantly, like chatting, making comments, asking questions, sharing opinions, and gaining credit. Since micro-influencers already have an active and engaged community, they can really help businesses with this. The reasons micro influencer marketing gives you the benefit of an engaged audience are as follows.
- Micro-influencers are passionate about whatever they post, and their followers admire that and follow suit.
- They know their niche very well and keep giving out updates and information about it, which their followers are keen on.
- They have a lot more time than the macro-influencers, or the big celebrities who have too many ongoing projects to keep working on. That’s why micro-influencers can respond to individual comments, which helps them keep their community nourished.
Consumers are always in search of content that’s honest, sincere, and coming from a passionate person. When they follow micro-influencers, they do not initially intend to buy anything. They only plan to look for inspirational content and go with the flow of whatever entices them. They enjoy reading and listening to the content published by micro-influencers and YouTubers and gradually get persuaded to make a purchase from the brand that’s being promoted.
3. Cost-Effectiveness
As mentioned above, it is very cost-effective for businesses to work with micro-influencers. When it comes to the more prominent influencers, they do charge businesses depending on the channel they are popular on and their followers. But micro influencer marketing costs even less than that.
Micro-influencers are not super cool kids, but they might have a foot in the door of your specific niche. If you know precisely the niche you are targeting for your brand and look for micro-influencers from that very niche, you can save a lot of money while getting a massive reach.
Many micro-influencers can be found on Instagram. They can promote your brand at significantly low costs in their Instagram stories. Their rates start from as low as $10 per post, which is viewable by everyone following them. If you hire a celebrity for the same purpose, you would have to pay them as high as $1 million. Isn’t that crazy?
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Tiktok is another popular and growing platform for micro-influencers. If Tiktok is popular with the audience you need to target, you can use micro influencer marketing on TikTok for as low as $25 per post. If a micro-influencer really likes your brand, he might even be willing to negotiate further on the price.
4. Seamless Brand Collaboration
Micro-influencers can connect different brands with each other. This is very common in the beauty and fashion industry. For example, a boutique or a clothing website named after one particular brand can be selling dresses from a few different brands. Suppose the business owner of the boutique uses micro influencer marketing. In that case, all the brands selling their dresses through that boutique will automatically get linked with each other and promoted together.
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How to Work With Micro-Influencers Effectively?
There are specific actions that you can take to make your micro influencer marketing even more effective.
1. Use Campaign-Specific Hashtags
If you have ever conducted social media marketing, you must be familiar with the concept of hashtags. The way most businesses go wrong with hashtags is that they make them too general. The more specific your hashtags are, the more effective they become. When you work with micro-influencers, make sure you get them to use hashtags that are very specific to your campaign.
2. Leverage User-Generated Content
For promoting a product, using content produced by a user of the product has much more influence than using the words of the brand or its micro-influencer. When you work with micro-influencers, suggest to them to push forward any positive feedback about the brand that comes directly from their followers who are already users of the product.
3. Create Sponsored Posts
If you sponsor the posts for the micro-influencer that you hire, they will be more willing to post your content and promote your brand name to their audience regularly. Even though they are not charging you hefty amounts of money, they would still be encouraged by the smaller payments you are willing to make to promote your brand.
Micro influencer marketing is a fun approach to market your products. It is beneficial for your business and good to grow the passion and spirit of the micro-influencers. If you are running a business, this is an excellent time to start cashing micro influencer marketing.
