There is a big shift happening from big name influencers on social media to micro influencers or local area influencers. Highly targeted micro-influencers can help your small business gain visibility, engage an audience, and promote your products.
Marketers have noticed that once an account is over a certain size, however, fewer people bother to engage questioning the value of a multimillion army of fans. The ratio of likes and comments to followers peaks when an account has around 1,000 followers. Get more than 100,000 followers, and engagement starts to flatten out; users just aren’t as keen to interact with a celebrity as with someone they can relate to more closely.
An emerging trend has entered the ecommerce marketing arena since such social media channels as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube became increasingly popular. Micro-influencers, have successfully settled in the world traditionally ruled by the Kardashians and eventually gained more value for marketers. They can deliver:
- 60% higher engagement
- Underpriced (6.7X more cost-efficient per engagement)
- 22.2% more weekly conversations than the average consumer.
How do I find them?
If you look through your social media followers, chances are you’ll find micro-influencers who are already interested in your business or brand. Promoting your business through micro-influential fans can be much more effective for these reasons:
- It will take less effort to convince them to work with you.
- Your partnership will be more authentic.
If you approach local area influencers who have never heard of your business, it will take some time and effort to win them over. They might be hesitant to partner with a business they’re not familiar with and might even reject the proposal altogether.
When you approach influencers who are already fans of your business, however, you won’t have to waste your breath selling your business to them. They already know and trust you. Many of them might even jump at the opportunity.
To find micro-influential fans from your existing followers, go to your social media profiles and display all of the followers you have.
Now go through your list of followers and check out the profiles of users who intrigue you. The goal is to find people who have somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 followers.
The best way to use them.
If you really want to promote your brand through micro-influencers, a simple photo featuring your product in the background isn’t going to cut it. You can’t bet on people enjoying the post, noticing your product and researching your brand just from product placement photos. For the content to really reach and resonate with your target audience, the influencer needs to tell a story around the brand or product.
A one-off campaign may be sufficient to promote an upcoming product launch or to drive more sales. But when the goal is to promote your brand, you’re going to need micro-influencers for a long-term campaign. This is crucial because an ongoing campaign will ensure that your target audience consumes as much content about your brand as possible.
Choosing local area influencers who know the online company and are used to purchasing with it is the best tactic. Bloggers will be more inspired to build a partnership while marketers will save much effort to convey a business idea. Billy Sixes, an Australian online apparel and sunglasses retailer, went this way to launch a micro-influencer campaign. Having studied its followers on Instagram, the new start-up company identified those with the required following and engage them for shoots and showcases of products through their personal accounts.
You can use hashtags to facilitate the search. Why don’t marketers take advantage of this feature and find influential candiadates with relevant content? To make hashtag research more effective, one should narrow search parameters. For example, #vegetarianfood instead of more general #food will boil the list down to the most appropriate candidates for a vegetarian e-shop.
Doing manual research on local area influencers can be time-consuming. Such tools as BuzzSumo, Klear and Ninja Outreach facilitate the first stage and leave marketers with a ready-made list of possible micro-influencers.
Thanks to the brilliant Sidney Pierucci at Medium
About The Author: Tony
More posts by Tony