What are Micro-Influencers and Why You Should Work with Them

Micro influencers are ordinary people who are actually social media celebrities in their digital life. Generally speaking, they are people with a large number of followers on a social media platform that are considered experts and well-versed in their own niches like travel, beauty, pets or business. Their personal opinion can greatly affect the thinking and perception of their followers.

As per Scrunch, a micro influencer is a person who has a follower count between 2,000 and 50,000 on any of the social media profile. However, according to Forbes, you need to have 10,000 to 500,000 followers to be considered as a micro influencer. But the bottom line is that you need to be popular online and your opinion must matter on social media to hold the status of an influencer.

Benefits of Working with Micro Influencer

These influencers can be very useful for your business if you use their value properly. Specifically, this is because a large number of people - who can potentially be your prospective clients - trust their opinion and reviews about a certain niche. Their positive reviews about your brand can help make their followers trust it enough to learn more about it. Micro influencer marketing is also a very good strategy for building brand awareness, as your brand will be recommended at the grassroots level by people whose recommendation is valued by their social media followers.

You can use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube as a part of your influencer strategy to promote your brand or let the people know that you have entered the market of the respective niche. Instagram influencers in particular are an instant way to get your message across.

How Micro-Influencers Can Have Impact on Brand Awareness?

• They are very cost effective and affordable
• You can get natural and convincing content in every form, i.e. written, video, audio, etc.
• Their audience is diversified and loyal
• The engagement metric for the target audience is often very good
• They offer very precise and targeted brand awareness for their respective niche
• Influencers offer unconventional and outside-the-box marketing techniques

How to build a good micro influencer strategy

Be aware that not every strategy works for every industry. Micro influencing similarly might not work that effectively for some niches yet might work very effectively for others. Particularly, this strategy often works well for B2C businesses. It can be used for B2B businesses as well, but the results generally won’t be the same in matters of effectiveness and conversion as in B2C.

Similarly, you can use micro influencing for every industry, but the ones that generally are a perfect fit for this approach are:

• Fashion / beauty
• Travel / lifestyle
• Celebrity / entertainment
• Sports / outdoor activities
• Gaming / technology
• Health / fitness
• Family / parenting
• Business

Before you go about hiring micro influencers for your brand awareness, you should know a few things about what is important in regard to micro influencer marketing.

• Micro influencer marketing works very effectively for small businesses with limited resources. If you are launching a small or medium startup and want people to learn more about it, then this is a great option for you.
• Micro influencers are also very useful in crowdfunding campaign marketing. Since the investments in crowdfunding are small and undertaken by ordinary people, the followership of the micro influencers can come in very handy.
• It is also a good approach as an outside-the-box solution for unique businesses which cannot typically benefit from traditional and large scale marketing campaigns.

Disadvantages of Influencer Strategy

Although micro influencer marketing is generally a very useful and effective strategy, you can’t fit all businesses and marketing scenarios into this approach. Therefore, you should be very careful about your research before identifying and approaching the prospective influencers.

There are other influencers who have a wider range of audience and reach, such as celebrities and macro influencers, whose followers often number in the millions. Niches that are very popular and well-supported often require macro influencers as opposed to micro influencers. For example, the fashion industry is huge in scope so macro influencers or celebrities will give you superior outreach, as they have a large number of people following them.

Instagram influencers are hard to find as they are not well-known like celebrities. You will have to do lots of research to find the one you want. Their followers are often not in millions, meaning that their names are not commonly known.

What's Considered a Good Micro Influencer?

When looking for a good influencer for your brand, make sure you note the following aspects before deciding:

• To find the most suitable Instagram influencer for your brand, you'll need to first look at the number of followers that he or she has. There are many tools to locate that information such as HypeAuditor and Discover.ly, but thorough research is required for this.
• The engagement rate of the influencer is very important as well. How closely their followers listen to their recommendations is typically what matters the most.
• The niche and geographical density of the followers are very important too. You should pick the micro influencer whose niche is the same as your brand and most of the followers should belong to the areas which you are targeting for your brand as well.
• As per the Influencer Marketing Hub, a good engagement rate for Twitter is around 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent. For Instagram, it is around 1.7 percent to 8 percent, depending on the number of followers.

Who Can be a Micro Influencer in 2019?

Anybody with a sizeable number of followers on various social media platforms and a good engagement rate can potentially be an influencer. Of course, the niche that the influencer works in is also very important as it should match your brand niche as closely as possible.

A few notable examples of micro-influencers :

Ellie Addis

Addis is a blogger from UK with 158,000 followers and has worked in the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle niches. Her original reviews are highly valued by her followers.

Amanda Blakely

Blakely is a travel enthusiast and has about 16,100 followers, calling herself a constant tourist. Her travel tips are very well received, with her trademarks being her honest reviews and enthusiasm.

Victoria Siemer

Siemer runs an amazing and unique photography blog, with her Instagram handle being Witchoria. Her abstract and one-of-a-kind photographs make her popular among her followers, currently boasting 227,000 followers on Instagram alone.

Questions you should ask before working with a micro influencer

You will likely find many good influencers for your brand once you start searching for them. However, you need to be clear about what you want in order to find the perfect match. There are certain questions you should ask before picking the right influencer, such as:

• What is the purpose of including a micro influencer into your marketing strategy? Do you want people to know that you are launching a new brand or do you want to generate leads?
• You should evaluate the gender of the followers, the region they are concentrated in and what makes them respond the most.
• What kind of content the micro influencer produces. If their content is useful for your marketing efforts or not is an important question to ask.
• You should know if they are associated with other brands or not. Most importantly, you should find out whether or not they are working with your competitors.
• Another important point is to find out how many platforms are they using and how effective their message is.

Conclusion

Micro influencers are a very effective and affordable method for building brand awareness. This approach works best for small businesses and startups, as these influencers can potentially help make your brand a household name because their followers trust their opinions. If you select the right micro influencer for your brand, you can potentially have a much more successful marketing strategy for your startup or small business.