Usually between 10K and 100K followers, micro-influencers are specialized online experts with quite a limited audience. Their smaller following allows them to devote more time to communicating with their audience, so they often achieve better engagement rates. This makes them quite successful in highlighting and advancing specialized brands. Suppose you know the appropriate approach to identify micro-influencers that fit your company's needs. In that case, You must create an outreach plan that helps you interact with them appropriately and will concentrate on optimal strategies for effectively spotting and interacting with micro-influencers. We will review the advantages of dealing with micro-influencers and provide some insightful advice on creating lucrative alliances.
Everyone with 10,000– 100,000 followers on any social network may be regarded as a micro-influencer. Though not as huge as macro-influencers, who may have a following of up to several hundred thousand or a million, they are more than nano-influencers. Usually, micro-influencers are seen as authorities in a somewhat specialized field. Their first priority is producing instructive and practical material for their readers.
This audience may be smaller than macro and mega-influencers, but one thing they surpass is engagement. An influencer's degree of interaction with their audience usually increases inversely to their audience size.
They engage in much more lively conversations, and the influencer herself may directly meet a lot more audience members.
They, therefore, have a much closer connection with their fans. This implies that the people appreciate the views of the influencer and give what they have to say top importance. These influencers likewise cherish relationships and would not accept any unrelated marketing offer as it might harm their reputation. Users also know that the influencer would not promote any product they disliked or considered useless for the niche they follow.
Working on your influencer marketing initiatives with micro-influencers might provide many advantages. Micro-influencers may, first of all, devote more time to developing connections with their followers as their audience is smaller. Micro-influencers are also much more easily relatable to online consumers. Their postings usually result in more interaction.
Second, because most micro-influencers target specific market niches, locating someone who suits your brand will provide you with direct access to your target market.
All of this aids in creating authenticity, credibility, trust, and brand recognition. Micro-influencers also are much less expensive to work with!
Working with micro-influencers has several advantages, as we have lately shown. However, the success of your campaign will finally depend on whether you have found and contacted the correct micro-influencers for your company.
These are some guidelines and significant ideas:
Researching every social media channel you will be focusing on for your campaigns can help you to identify micro-influencers that fit your brand. The first step for this is hashtags. They can enable you to sort through the noise and locate micro-influencers in your market sector. They also let you know the kinds of ads your rivals are pushing and whose micro-influencers they are dealing with.
Verify that the hashtags you search for are relevant and popular. Look for trendy hashtags you might use in your marketing and employ specific phrases consistent with your brand. Additional ideas might come from hashtag search tools.
Reviewing the profiles and timelines of prominent and relevant thought leaders can help you identify micro-influencers that fit your particular campaign goals and criteria after you have developed a selection of them. Review the material of every micro-influencer to find out prior advertising strategies they have pushed.
Does their material have a bearing on your brand? Share with them your brand values. Apart from this, any other brands have they handled? Is the material positive, aesthetically pleasing, and uplifting? Do those who follow interact with their postings? Could they buy bogus followers to mislead their audience size, or is their audience engaged and authentic?
Though it takes some time, this phase of the procedure is reasonably necessary. The cooperation will be more valuable the more a micro-influencer fits your brand and interacts with its audience.
Making contact comes next in your outreach plan after you have a micro-influencer you want to collaborate with.
These are some excellent practices that enable you to reach out properly:
Before you get in touch with a micro-influencer, build rapport with them. Track them on social media and comment on a few of their entries. Try to get on their radar so they will recognize you when you get in touch. People who feel you are interested in them will be more inclined to reply to your outreach message.
When you get in touch, clearly state who you are, what your business is, and how you believe they could assist you. Clearly state your objectives and expectations, and include a clear call to action in your message. If you reach many micro-influencers, ensure every message you forward is unique.
Once you decide on a collaboration and begin working with a micro-influencer, concentrate on building a long-term, mutually beneficial connection. Working with a micro-influencer longer will help them to grasp your brand better. Ensuring authenticity and consistency depends on this.
Ultimately, influencer outreach tools can help you to simplify and automate your search, thus identifying micro-influencers. The correct solution can help you locate relevant influencers, negotiate contracts, provide influencer briefs, and track your campaigns.
For example, Influencity's all-inclusive IM system offers all the tools required to oversee every phase of your micro-influencer outreach program. The Discovery features on the site let you search extensively using a range of parameters, thereby identifying influencers operating in your specialized market.
More importantly, our Influencer Relationship Management tool (IRM) lets you improve every phase of your micro-influencer interactions. This covers first contacts, negotiations, campaign planning and running, follow-up, and last comments. All of this lets you control the micro-influencer outreach process much more effectively so that you know the optimal approach to locate micro-influencers each time you start a brand campaign.
What, then, might micro-influencers help your company with? As it happens, plenty of things.
Getting traffic with just your website might be challenging. This is so because it will only draw those ready to utilize your good or service or those seeking the kind you are providing.
That applies also to your social media. Furthermore, PPC and straightforward ads have problems as people are naturally dubious when it is clear someone is attempting to sell them something.
Micro-influencers may assist you in reaching fresh markets and promoting your good or service along the route.
Their name, "Influencers," is fitting, given their capacity to affect the buying choices of others.
Don't undervalue this power: 40% of Twitter users have bought a product straight from an influencer they like based on Twitter's analysis.
This relates precisely to the prior explanation. People will know more about your good or service the more it is advertised.
A top goal should constantly be raising brand recognition, which is fundamental for expansion.
Enjoy word-of-mouth recommendations; influencer marketing is based on a person regarded in their field of expertise discussing how they enjoy your product and which issues it solves.
Influencer marketing strengthens the relationships with your already-existing audience in addition to helping you discover new markets and advertise your company elsewhere.
The people you contact also work in your expertise; otherwise, it would not be logical for you to collaborate with them.
Showing their audience that they trust your brand will help you subtly influence their choices by demonstrating that your brand is reliable.
And should someone from your already-existing audience learn of it, it will only help to increase their faith in your company.
And if someone knew your company before but needed to decide whether they should buy, the influencer might be the push they need to do it.
Giveaways are great for all those engaged in them. Influencers gain more engagement in their social circles, their followers get something fun for free, and you get a big bucket of benefits—all three of which we highlighted above.
Coupons, discounts, and affiliate codes are yet another often-used promo tool in influencer marketing.
Sometimes, all the encouragement someone needs to make a buy is a good bargain. People are naturally impulsive; hence, why not use this advantage?
Finding Micro-Influencers For Your Projects
Finding influencers may be done using a couple of straightforward methods.
The most straightforward way to accomplish this is to search for your specialty hashtags on Twitter or Instagram and see who pops up.
For instance, if you own a clothes store, you would search for something like #shoes, #outfits, etc.
Search for hashtags your rival uses to identify influencers collaborating with other companies. They are much more likely to accept your proposal if they have collaborated with someone.
This approach has the drawback in that you will have to search through accounts personally, verify if they are an influencer or an entire firm, and find out their follower numbers without any means of filtering down the findings.
Influencers also abound among bloggers. Therefore, searching for specialist blogs in your business field might help you identify micro-influencers for collaboration.
Usually, bloggers usually connect to their social accounts anywhere on their blogs. Click these links to learn about their audience size and the kind of material they provide.
Once again, this approach's drawback is that browsing hundreds of sites on your topic takes time. Furthermore, even if a blog attracts many quality visitors, this does not always guarantee that the blogger's social groups experience as much engagement.
Make use of an influencer database like Followerwonk.
Different databases exist that simplify the search for influencers. Among them is Followerwonk.
Though it's a premium product, you may use it only somewhat for free.
Although Followerwonk provides a primary influencer database, a tool like Respona offers even more capability.
Its integrated search engine searches for influencers; change the search source to "Influencers" and enter your term.
Usually, one gets hold of influencers via email. You should be aware, however, that many of them already have someone working with them, have most certainly heard similar pitches before, and will get more.
Consequently, it is less successful than we would like. MeetingMeeting an influencer personally is the fastest way to get to know them. Your industry events attract corporations and influencers, so they are the ideal venue for accomplishing it.
While an email pitch may appear to be a chilly marketing tactic, personally meeting an influencer will let you display your human side and transmit much more information naturally and relaxedly.
Therefore, anytime there is an event or conference in your field of business, you should aim to go for knowledge, meet new people and build fresh, mutually beneficial connections.
Although it may sometimes be challenging to interact with Instagram influencers—especially if they are well-known social media stars—even in terms of nano or micro-influencers, relations can be complicated. This is mainly because Instagram influencers are more concerned with developing their brand. Hence, your message sometimes gets buried among all the noise. It's all about knowing how to approach them in a manner that grabs their interest and persuades them that collaborating with your business is a chance they cannot afford to overlook.
Should you launch your first influencer campaign with micro-influencers, we have the perfect four-step method ready. Start by knowing your main objectives, selecting appropriate influencers, and working on material production.
Let's take you through working with micro-influencers and experience the results of your efforts.
Like any new marketing effort, your first step should clearly state your main aims and objectives. With your micro-influencer marketing plan, what results do you want? Many shared objectives of influencer marketing consist of:
At this stage, decide which aspect most defines your brand. And it could vary with time. For instance, you may begin your first influencer campaign to raise awareness and social following but later determine that your main objective is to increase sales and conversions and veer from there.
Remember that your influencer partners' content and promotional tools will reflect your goal. Therefore, You will have to design a fresh campaign and negotiate with each change in influencer content and objective.
Starting your hunt for influencers comes next. One may achieve this in a few ways.
Therefore, there are two basic approaches to identifying influencers: either utilize a program or database to expedite the process or personally search social media or specialty blogs.
It would help if you did outreach via email and social media; when you have the time, go to trade events to personally meet influential people for a much more robust and human connection.