Consumers have had enough of celebrities endorsing products that don’t align with their interests; instead they desire genuine and trustworthy advice.
Micro-influencers tend to have smaller followings but still receive significant engagement. Furthermore, these influencers often specialize in certain niche areas which make their target audiences even more engaging.
1. They’re more affordable
Micro influencers tend to be an economical solution for brands. Furthermore, they’re typically less time consuming in creating content and product reviews – this makes them perfect for eCommerce businesses looking for ways to save time on creative production when using multiple influencers to launch a campaign.
Work with micro influencers can also help your audience form trust with you and build bonds by producing authentic content together. Doing this can increase brand recognition and eventually sales for your brand.
No doubt influencers with larger audiences are in high demand and tend to have more stringent requirements when it comes to working with brands, leading to longer lead times in securing their services and potentially higher price points for campaigns. Conversely, micro-influencers usually have an easier process for working with brands: from setting their fee up through to creating and posting content they often take care of everything themselves!
Micro-influencers tend to enjoy higher engagement rates than their larger counterparts due to being more relatable and authentic to their audience. For instance, an Instagram video from a micro-influencer featuring his/her friends being silly can more closely resonate with viewers than produced content from celebrities living luxurious lifestyles.
An authentic brand image can make your brand stand out amongst the noise on social media, and is an effective way to reach new customers.
Micro-influencers are an excellent way for brands to target niche audiences. West Elm made great use of them when opening multiple new stores across the nation; when opening each one they partnered with micro-influencers in each city to promote each location. This resulted in increased foot traffic at each store location as well as creating a sense of community spirit – all on a much lower budget than hiring celebrity influencers would have cost.
3. They’re more trustworthy
Micro influencers enjoy a more personal connection with their audiences, which allows them to build trust more easily than celebrity micro influencers or macro influencers can. This authentic relationship leads to higher conversions when making product recommendations or endorsements – therefore partnering with micro influencers may be your most successful bet when trying to drive conversions.
Experticity recently conducted a study that revealed Instagram influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers received likes at an astounding rate of 4 percent – more than twice what accounts with 1 million to 2 million followers received! Furthermore, micro-influencers tend to generate more conversations around products they promote; their audience are much more likely to ask questions, seek additional info or pass along content they find engaging and share it among themselves, making micro-influencers an excellent way to market your business.
Working with micro-influencers offers multiple advantages. First, their content creation options can be more flexible to your brand; they tend to be open to trying new ideas that might benefit your campaign; additionally, their smaller audiences allow you to reach niche groups who would likely be highly engaged by what your brand offers – for instance partnering with cake decorator influencers could promote new piping tips or gaming influencers could increase downloads for an app.
Before engaging with influencer partners to create their campaigns, you’ll want to establish clear guidelines with them regarding campaign goals, deliverables and what you expect them to produce. Documentation detailing marketing messaging, background on your company and brand story may prove useful when creating their content.
Although not required, having this information at your fingertips will save you both time and energy when searching for influencers who align with the expectations of your target audience.
4. They’re more creative
Brands working with influencers typically want to ensure the content produced aligns with existing messaging and marketing objectives, with an eye towards increasing sales by capitalizing on creator reach and repurposing it across their own channels (i.e. website, email campaigns and social media). Partnering with micro-influencers enables brands to collaborate with creators who are capable of producing quality work at reduced rates so as to meet content goals without breaking the bank on secondary distribution costs.
Micro-influencers tend to be members of highly niche communities with followers attracted to their passions, which allows them to bring unique, high-targeted content directly to a very targeted audience. Macro-influencers simply cannot do this effectively – which explains why brands increasingly turn to micro-influencers for their content needs.
Micro-influencers don’t incur the astronomical fees associated with celebrity or macro-influencers, enabling brands to work with multiple micro-influencers simultaneously and reach multiple niche markets without spending as much as would be needed to get Beyonce to endorse their product line.
However, when making their decision about whether or not to collaborate with an influencer, brands must evaluate not their number of followers but rather how relevant those followers are to their overall buyer persona and market segment. When an audience is targeted and engaged properly, its effect can have far reaching ramifications on a brand’s bottom line.
Micro-influencers offer brands an invaluable way of creating content that can reach audiences globally – something celebrities or macro-influencers simply could never achieve. Zara proved this when their #DearSouthAfrica campaign generated conversations among over 6 million people daily prior to their online store launch – further demonstrating how micro-influencers are an indispensable asset when seeking to quickly generate buzz in new, experimental markets.