Did you know that in 2022 a whopping 91% of the engagement with sponsored social media posts happened on content created by micro-influencers?
If you weren’t already familiar with the term micro-influencers, if you’re a business owner or a professional marketer — it’s time to learn.
Let’s explore this relatively new marketing concept, the very real benefits it has for businesses who deploy it, and how to pull off a successful micro-influencer marketing campaign.
influencer marketing is a powerful go-to-market strategy, especially for D2C brands, where a social media personality and a brand partner up to endorse a product or service.
Micro-influencers make up a subset of influencers, and they typically have 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They’re “micro” in comparison to celebrities and other types of mega-influencers with more than a million in their audience.
Micro-influencers have become recognized for having great knowledge of their niche and high levels of engagement, enabling brands to reach a very productive audience.
There’s no denying that micro-influencers have less reach than huge, famous influencers.
However, their community is much more likely to engage.
In fact, Later x Fohr’s Influencer Marketing Report found that as the following got smaller, the engagement actually soared higher!
This is partially because micro-influencers actively engage with their followers themselves (no bots, agencies, or assistants involved), value their followers’ likes and dislikes, and continue to build their following only by producing authentic content. This is why followers of micro-influencers love their content and engage with it more like they would with a friend’s — clicking it, liking it, saving it for later, sharing it, and so on.
Another reason smaller influencers have higher engagement rates is because they’ve carved out a space in a very specific niche. That means everyone who's following is very interested in what they post and the kind of products and services they themselves recommend.
The Kardashians may have millions of people following them, but Ava the London-based food micro-influencer is probably getting more engagement from the tight-knit community of followers she’s grown who love her tips for getting reservations at the poshest establishments and making copy-cat recipes at home.
Related reading: How to Find Right Influencers in Your Niche Business
For the past few years, we’ve all seen the shift to “authenticity” on social media and in marketing and advertising. People don’t want to follow someone who promotes things they don’t even like. Audiences are looking for connection, relatability, and realness. Smaller, focused influencers tend to offer this because they’re more sensitive about potentially scaring away loyal followers.
Because of all the above benefits, it’s easy to see why working with micro-influencers can save you money!
The average micro-influencer can charge between $100 to $500 per post, while the megas are more in the $10,000+ range. It may still be a little painful to shell out several hundreds of dollars, but you’re pretty likely to make it back thanks to high engagement and conversion rates.
And, because of these more affordable rates, a brand can even work with multiple micro-influencers at the same time to reach more consumers.
When you’re considering collaborating with micro-influencers as part of your promotional strategy, there are two ways to go about it.
Due to the popularity of influencer marketing, there are plenty of agencies and digital platforms that offer a one-stop shop for working with micro-influencers.
If you want to go fully hands-off, an agency (like The Influencer Marketing Factory) will probably act as a go-between to plan and handle the whole campaign themselves. This is probably the most expensive way to engage with micro-influencers, but it may be worth it if you don’t have time to manage it yourself.
As for influencer databases (like Upfluence), you typically subscribe and use their filters to find people in your niche and budget. Usually, you’ll go on to work with the influencer through the platform to complete your campaign.
Then there’s cold outreach — a more time-intensive approach but probably the best for hands-on and budget-sensitive marketers or business owners.
A lot of micro-influencers will help you find them by using hashtags like #microinfluencer on their content. You can also search for hashtags related to your brand’s niche to find micro-influencers. Many also include contact information in their bios, so you can reach out via email — an ideal tactic as email is much easier to track and follow up on compared to direct messages.
You can start the conversation by introducing your brand and asking about their collaboration interests, rates, and availability. If it seems like a decent fit from the start, dive into the next section to learn how to move the relationship forward.
Here’s everything you need to know to fully prepare for and launch a micro-influencer campaign.
What do you want this partnership to do for your business?
Are you aiming to build general brand awareness in new markets? Increase website traffic so you can optimize your conversion rate? Grow your social media following, so that subsequent marketing and advertising campaigns go further?
Whatever your goals, make sure they’re SMART:
With your goals in mind, you can go on to create a mock-up of your ideal customer profile (ICP).
This will define exactly who your audience is, ideally down to their location, budget, job, hobbies, and typically buying signals.
This will help you understand what kind of micro-influencers you need, what kind of followers they should have, and what kind of content will have the most impact.
This is the brief you’ll go on to share with influencers whom you partner with.
There’s a lot that should go into a brand brief:
You can reuse this part of the brief for other influencer engagements. In addition, we recommend adding one more section that describes the specific campaign at hand, including what you want to promote, your goals, and so on.
Define your budget for the campaign. It’s probably best to be flexible. Just remember what your goal is worth to you (for example: How much would you pay to increase website traffic 5% tomorrow?) as well as market rates.
A decent, current rule of thumb that many social-media influencers use is $100 per 10,000 followers.
Finally, you can break down the entire campaign into smaller deliverables that you can lay out on a timeline to keep both you and your influencer marketing partner on track.
These deliverables may include:
…and so on.
While you can track progress on your own goals (traffic, followers, etc.) on your end, the influencer with whom you’re partnering will have the best insight into the performance of the actual content via the social media platform where they’ve posted it. Ensure that, via your contract, you are provided access to that data.
Analyze the results to get a picture of the success of your campaign. This will help you understand your audience better, craft better campaigns in the future, and understand how to work with micro-influencers going forward for even higher performance.
How can you level-up the micro-influencer marketing you’re already engaged in?
Check out these simple tweaks.
A good brief is critical — after all, guidelines can actually bring out creativity! — but it still shouldn’t be overly restrictive on exactly how you want the content to be.
Your partner has probably been creating content for their audience for a while now, trust them to know what works best. If you lack trust in your micro-influencer, it’ll show. And that will make it difficult for them to build an authentic connection between your brand and their audiences.
Stay flexible, maintain open communication, and provide them with all the support and resources they need — all while allowing them to do their job as they know best.
Just because you don’t use a certain platform or know how to create a specific type of content — that doesn’t mean your audience doesn’t prefer it.
For example, if your best buyers are between 25 and 34 years old, don’t rule out focusing on TikTok micro-influencers! And even if you think a picture slideshow + long caption full of hashtags is the way to go, don’t forget that right now short-form video has the best ROI.
When deciding on your medium and platform of choice, let your ICP, influencer expertise, and their own audience preferences guide you.
Clearly, micro-influencer marketing presents a powerful opportunity for businesses to connect with targeted audiences, drive engagement, and achieve cost-effective results.
With the steps we’ve outlined here, you should be ready to leverage this innovative marketing strategy and pave the way for continued success in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
