nano influencers vs the competition: a number comparison

(Spoiler alert: we are winning, by far)

Influencer marketing has become a crowded, competitive industry, and understandably so ! With an average return on investment 6 times higher than for traditional advertising and the possibility to showcase your product to millions of "loyal" followers in an "authentic" way, influencers have become a must have in any decent social media marketing strategy.

But as the market became hotter and hotter, problems began to rise, and not small ones. From influencers buying fake followers and likes, to skyrocketing campaign costs, coupled with the loss of engagements and the inevitable decline of the holy saint Engagement Rate.

Communities are losing trust in their influencers, knowing they are sponsoring products just for the financial aspect of it, and brands are losing trust in influencers, knowing they are capable of falsifying their numbers to get more partnerships, and thus more money.

Now, we are not saying influencer marketing is dead ! We are saying traditional macro influencers (influencers having 100.000+ followers) are dead. And pretty everyone else is saying the same thing too. Enters micro influencers. Bloggers and social media "mini stars" that have between 5.000 and 100.000 followers. They are more authentic, less expensive and get better results than macro influencers. More and more agencies are specializing in micro influencer marketing. But when you think about it, the same problems will sooner or later emerge for this category.

This is why here at BeInfluence we are betting on nano influencers, everyday social media users having between 500 and 5000 followers, all of them being friends, family members, coworkers etc. Their authenticity is unmatched, and so are their results. Let's take a look and you'll see for yourself.

Below is a comparison between traditional social media advertising (hello Facebook Ads), macro influencers (Kim Kardashian and co.) agencies (imagency.com), micro influencers (your favorite travel blogger) agencies (tribegroup.co and indahash.com) and nano influencers (you, me, your best friend) represented by beinfluence.eu . Which category / company has the better reach ? Engagement rate ? Cost effectiveness ? Wow factor ?

1. Reach

the reach defines how many people will see your product on social media. It used to be that the reach was the most important success factor in the early days of influencer marketing. The more people see my product, the more I'll sell right ? That is why macro influencers were the kings and queens of influencer marketing. With huge followings, Kim Kardashian has 118 millions followers as of this writing, they have an unmatchable reach, even for the good old Facebook ads.

Keep calm, you don't need to showcase your product to 118 millions people, in fact nobody does. Many brands see reach as a valuable metric for "apples for apples" comparison across traditional media. But with influencer marketing, and even more so with nano influencers, reach is not the best thing to focus on. Firstly because reach without engagement is useless. And secondly because today, more and more influencers are buying fake followers. BeInfluence tackles the two problems thanks to its constant focus on authenticity and use of nano influencers.

Nonetheless, a huge organic reach can be achieved by using more micro or nano influencers for a campaign ! The reach of a macro influencer with the engagements of a nano influencer ? Win / Win !

2.Engagement

The Engagement rate is THE key metric in influencer marketing. It is defined as the number of likes, comments, shares and clicks that a post receives divided by the number of people who have seen the post.

The Engagement rate is closely correlated with two factors: the quality of the post and picture (the fit between the influencer and the product advertised) and, most importantly, the authenticity of the overall message. If an influencer's community feels that the message is not authentic and that money is the primary factor for a collab, it will punish the influencer by not engaging with the post, or worse, engaging negatively !

Now, let's explore engagement for the different categories and for different actors (after all, we are here to compare BeInfluence and its competition) . The higher the organic reach, the greater the level of engagement and the more influencer ROI (return on investment) you get.

The smaller the following, the higher the engagement !

As you can see the smaller the social account, the higher the level of organic engagement. The trade-off is always reach (combined followers) vs engagement. A smaller reach means that you have only people you know and trust in your network, thus the authenticity of the messages and interactions is at its highest !

This picture should not surprise you. Because BeInfluence is using nano influencers, the engagement rate on our campaigns is 3 times higher than the one of micro influencer marketing agencies such as Tribe or Indahash and 10 times higher than the engagement rate of a Facebook ad ! Now tell me you are not impressed.

BeInfluence campaigns generate 10-14% engagement rate ! 

3. Cost

"That's all nice but how much will it cost me ?" Here is a breakdown of the price for one post on social media for each company:

Let's put it another way and see what you'd get from each category / company for a 10.000€ campaign:

For a quite similar reach, nano influencers (represented by BeInfluence) will have by far the best return on investment (you can calculate the absolute engagements by simply multiplying the average reach by the average engagement rate if you don't believe us).

But what's even more interesting, and extraordinary for you ROI, is the so called wow! factor created by nano influencers.

4. The WOW! factor

One of the best perk when using influencers is the creation of the content by the influencers themselves. You don't have to pay thousands of euros to agencies or professionals to take pictures in a studio that look authentic. The influencers are taking for you real, authentic pictures ! What's crazy about nano influencers and BeInfluence is the amount of contents created for the client.

As you saw above, for a 10.000€ campaign with companies like Indahash or Imagency you'll only get between 1 and 25 contents for which you'll need to pay extra to re-use in your advertising.

With BeInfluence, you get as much as 330 unique contents created by each nano influencer. You can share those contents on the sema platform they have been posted on and buy the rights to the contents you love to re-use them in your advertising ! You paid for one campaign and you got 330 different campaigns with different contents. That's User Generated Content at scale, and its awesome.

Ads showcasing User Generated Content perform 5x better returns on ad spend.

We hope this article will help you with your future influencer marketing campaigns ! If you want more info or have any questions, make sure to check our website www.beinfluence.eu or to contact me directly !

Have a great week ??