Social media marketing is one of the best ways to expand your business. Many companies opt to work with influencers on popular platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Usually, influencers have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of followers. Small businesses often partner with these key figures to inform a targeted audience about their products or services through content promotion.
While it might sound attractive to promote your product to millions at once, there’s another group of influencers known as micro-influencers. These smaller influencers usually have between 2,000 and 100,000 followers. Some believe that micro-influencers could be a better option when you are looking to market your website.
What makes micro-influencers so great, and how can you find the perfect one for your business? We are here to show you exactly what to look for in these small to medium sized influencers.
Why Micro-Influencers?
The first thing you need to know is why micro-influencers are better than there mega-sized counterparts. One of the primary reasons is that the people with a small to medium number of followers tend to get more audience engagement. If you want more people to see your product and follow through to your website, you’re going to want to look at an influencer with a high engagement rate.
Let’s look at some examples of customer engagement from variously sized influencers below.
As we can see from this chart covering Instagram influencers, people with 1000 followers or less tend to get an almost 10 percent engagement rate. On the other side, we have the people with 100,000 followers who typically sees a low 0.1 percent engagement rate. The reason for this enormous shift in customer engagement outlines the first thing you need to consider before choosing a micro-influencer.
Find Someone with a Highly Relevant Niche
The perfect way to find a great micro-influencer for your business starts with understanding the audience who currently follows the influencer you plan on contacting. Someone with a smaller audience is likely more interested in a particular niche. The engagement rate is higher for smaller influencers because the audience is there for an extremely specific reason.
Your influencer of choice should have an audience that fits your customer persona. More substantial influencers are harder to target because they don’t consist of one similar group of people. Instead, it’s a large audience who may only align with the channel in a small way.
For example, if you were going to target an influencer with your new fishing tackle box product, which channel do you think would generate more traffic? Option one is a channel with two million people, but they post and discuss all forms of hunting. On the other hand, you could target a smaller influencer with around 100,000 who covers nothing but fishing. Your product is more likely to resonate with the smaller audience in this case.
Look for People who actively Review Products
If you find a micro-influencer who is already open to trying and using new products, they will be much easier to contact than someone who seems like they are relevant to your niche, have a good following, but don’t seem to promote products actively. There is also a good chance that these smaller-scale channels could benefit if you upload their video review to your website.
Here’s a great example from beauty product blogger AndreaLissetteReyes.
If you go to her about page, she lists what she likes to do and what types of products she is interested in reviewing. She has 5.3K followers, which is decent for a smaller influencer. Most importantly, she provides her contact information for those who want to promote their products. Essentially, this is the perfect formula if you sell beauty/fashion products and want someone willing to do business.
Conclusion
Micro-influencers can have a huge impact on a business. The traffic they generate tends to have what’s called a “long tail.” A long tail is a reference to how long you’ll get traffic from this source. People with smaller followers are more likely to draw in a specific audience who will likely be more than willing to take a look at your product, based on the content presented by the influencer. If you’re looking for a way to shake up your social media marketing plan and get more leads, small to medium sized influencers are the way to go.