Why 2019 Could Be the Year of the Micro-Influencer

Adlin Sherley from iDigic shares insights on Influencer Marketing, it's categorization, micro-influencer strategy for brands and more.

Social media has fueled the marketing boom of our time. This pervasive digital network of human beings has been getting larger and more connected than ever before. Brands have started leveraging this massive potential for business and getting more brand awareness.

Due to social media’s propensity to cater to business, most platforms have the option to include ads. The problem here though is that ads lack the dynamism that is needed to get the modern consumer clicking. This means that businesses need to also look at other avenues which could net the kind of engagement they are targeting.

Influencer Marketing

This is where influencers come in. People who are more popular on social media than the average person like you and me are called Influencers. They have at their command a vast army of followers who, depending on the kind of influencer, are focused on a specific niche and regularly engage with the influencers’ content on a regular basis.

There are different categories of influencers based on the number of followers they have –

Mega-influencer – these are the people who transcend niches and gain followers solely based on their popularity. These include athletes, actors, artists, social media mavens who generally have a follower count of more than 1 million. They have massive reach driven by their star power.

Macro-influencers – people who have a follower count above 10k but less than mega-influencers. You can usually find journalists, reviewers, social media personalities in this list. They generally have followers aligned to a broad topic like fashion, lifestyle, and health, to name a few.

Micro-influencers – consumers who have followers in the range of 500 to 10k come under this category. Their followers are specifically niche based and have higher resonance than the other categories. Their influence is driven by personal experience, and their followers relate to them a lot more.

So which category should you, a brand owner, choose to get the most out of your marketing bucks?

The Holy Grail of Influencer Marketing – Engagement

When it comes to influencer marketing, the most important factor to consider is the amount of engagement that an influencer can give your brand. Every marketing expert knows that engagement is worth much more than reach. Reaching people might be important, but response to content has better implications for a brand.

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When you consider pure engagement numbers, micro influencers come out right on top. They have the top engagement rates in the game 25% – 50% compared to 2% – 25% and 2% – 5% of macro and mega influencers respectively.

This is an important reason to opt for micro-influencers, but if you’re not sold on the idea yet, we’re going to give you a few more.

Also Read:#Infographic: Influencer Marketing statistics 2019 to create a spot on campaign

Why Brands Should Opt For Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers are found in every niche that you can come up with. Done right, micro-influencer marketing can give your brand the shot in the arm it needs when it comes to awareness and credibility. Let’s look at a few more reasons why you should choose micro-influencers –

Building trust

Because a micro-influencer has a small following, they are well-connected with them and have trust built up in the relationship. To the followers, these type of influencers are a lot more honest to their beliefs, and this means that their ideas resonate with the influencers a lot better. A micro-influencer’s followers are a lot more vocal about what they like or dislike, this means a brand can get the right message during a campaign. Micro-influencers are a lot more likely to respond on their posts, which creates banter between them. This is great for engagement.

Authenticity

Micro-influencers offer authentic experiences to the followers and brands they represent. The reason is because they are consumers who are just sharing their thoughts about products or services. They are much more accessible than the other classes of influencers and share content with their followers without fluff or being sales-y. They also understand specific preferences their followers have which means they create content that is highly relevant to them.

Value for Money

Micro-influencers are easy to get hold of and are a lot more cost effective compared to the other types of influencers. Brands can now run trials or A/B testing with different influencers without losing too much money and still get great results. Since they don’t cost as much, you can pool them together and even run a joint campaign which will have much better engagement numbers than other classes of influencer marketing.

Finding the Right Micro-Influencer

There are a huge number of micro-influencers on every social media platform, and you need to get the one that is right for your brand and business. There are several things you can do to narrow down the right influencer for you. Let’s detail a few things that can help –

Research

When researching about which influencer to choose, keep in mind that there are several tools integrated within a lot of social media platforms that can help. Some of these tools are Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics both can give you in-depth numbers about an influencer that can help choose.

Getting to know your influencer

After you shortlist a few of them, get to know them a better and find out if both of your goals mutually align. It helps to be straightforward about what you expect from them and also ask the same from them as well. Make sure that you clearly communicate what you want them to do and what they can expect from you as well.

Again, Engagement Is Key

When evaluating influencers for your brand, don’t get carried away by a huge number of followers. Always remember that engagement numbers are the most important factor when dealing with micro-influencers.

Locking it in

We hope that all this has helped you make up your mind about micro-influencers. A lot of people are under the misconception that micro-influencers are what small brands use to leverage their services – this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Google had partnered up with @thesorrygirls for promoting their new Google Pixelbook, and it was a huge success generating an engagement rate of about 60%!

All you need to do it find the right influencer and regardless of the size of your brand, you will see benefits to your brand presence and improvement in engagement numbers!