Micro Influencers – Should Your Business Use Them?

Driving traffic, leads, and sales are becoming tough each year. SEO requires months of hard work to show results. Paid ads work only if you have money to spend. Generating referrals is not as easy job as well.

So the most popular marketing tactics become out of reach for the average marketer. Even if you can achieve them, they require tons of effort and months of planning before you see results. But who would want to wait that long?

So, what should the average marketer do? He/she should work with micro-influencers.

As you know,?influencer marketing?is one of the best ways to market your products and services. In fact, almost 2 out of 10 companies spend over half their marketing budget on this marketing tactic.

But the thing is, most people don’t have the money to afford influencers like Kim Kardashian.

Fortunately, you can get away with not having a million-dollar budget. Here, I’ll tell you what micro-influencers are and why your business should use them.

What Are Micro-Influencers and Why You Should Use Them?

You can probably name a dozen influencers right now. Think about the type of content you consume mostly on YouTube.

In each niche, you have a few influencers. This industry is booming every year. You can find them on many social media platforms. In fact, you should also strive to become an influencer in your niche.

But for now, our focus is on using other micro-influencers to grow your business. They come in handy when you don’t have many followers for growth.

They can promote a product instantly while showing amazing conversion rates. For example, if you are a new brand, you may have 1,000 followers on Instagram. But if you worked with an influencer who had 10,000 followers, you will get instant results.

That’s why it is one of the best ways to drive big sales. Many top companies are taking advantage of it. Mcdonald’s, Audible, and Lynda are one of those companies that use influencers.

But our main concern is micro-influencers. Who are they? How do they differ from typical influencer marketers? Why you should choose them over ordinary influencers?

Let’s start by looking at the basics. As the name states, these influencers are hyper-specific. They have gained a specific follower count (lower than other types of influencers). Their follower count is below 25,000. Still, their audiences are very engaged.

Don’t mistake top influencers like The Rock as micro-influencers. Their follower count is in millions.

Here, we are talking about a far lower follower count. There’s also another type of influencer, nano-influencers, that have a lower follower count than micro-influencers. Both nano- and micro-influencers prove to be successful.

Specifically, one study by?Markerly?shows micro-influencers’ powers. They analyzed over 800,000 Instagram accounts having a minimum of 1,000 followers. The results showed that audiences engaged with them more as compared to major influencers. They also found that likes rates drop as the follower count increases. The same goes for comments.

So what’s the point in paying top dollars to a major celebrity if you can’t get many results? I’m not saying they can’t drive results. I just have doubts about them being successful, which are backed by data.

Here’s another set of data the Markerly team found out.?Instagram influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers had a like rate of 4%. On the flip side, accounts having more than 10,000 followers got only a 2.4% like rate. Not only that, but accounts with over 1,000,000 followers only got a 1.7 percent like rate.

Experticity also analyzed the powers of micro-influencers. They found that Micro-influencers have the capability of driving 22.2 times more conversations than average consumers when they recommended products. On top of that, around 8 out of 10 consumers were highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

So micro-influencers do have more power of driving more conversations in terms of actual sales and buying recommendations.

So if you were thinking about hiring Selena Gomez to promote your brand, reconsider it. Micro-influencers are at your service, on a lot less budget.

Now let’s see how you can find micro-influencers and four ways to use them to gain more customers.

How to Find and Use Them for Your Brand?

Finding the right influencer is critical. The wrong influencer can waste your money quickly. This is how you can find?micro-influencers to gain more customers.

You can find many tools to locate these people, but I suggest you to go with HYPR.

This analytics-based tool lets you find different influencers’ audiences’ data. The good part is that it offers you some free searches.

After creating the account, focus on accounts in the 1,000 to 10,000 following range. Enter your category and refine your audience based on the typical demographics of your customer base.

Remember to be specific because you are looking for micro-influencers.

After finding the right influencers, use these tips to make the best out of them:

1. Use Campaign-Specific Hashtags: They will help you spread brand awareness and drive sales. This way, micro-influencers can connect easily with your brand. Make sure to find campaign-specific hashtags.

2. Leverage User-Generated Content or UGC: Your influencer can also ask people to generate content related to your products. You never know how powerful it can get.

3. Create Sponsored Posts: Sponsored posts are similar to UGC in that you focus on getting the influencers to post the content on their own accounts.

4. Tell a Story With Your Promotion: Storytelling has enormous powers. Utilize it when you have a specific audience in front of you.

What’s your experience working with influencers? Let me know in the comments!