Gain 2X ROI with Micro Influencers: Here’s How to Get Started

Influencer marketing is a popular marketing tactic and continues to gain traction, as 84% of marketers find it effective. In fact, 90% of these marketers plan to keep investing in influencer marketing in the future as well.

While almost everyone will agree on the effectiveness of influencer marketing, marketers have long debated over the type of influencers that perform best. Every marketer faces the dilemma of whether to choose a popular influencer or a micro-influencer.

Well, we are here to help you make that decision. Macro-influencers can help you reach a much larger audience. But micro-influencers can get you much more engagement and connect with your audience in a more meaningful way.

So, if your goal is simply to reach a large number of people, then go with a macro-influencer. For all other marketing goals, micro-influencers are your best bet.

Why Work with Micro-Influencers?

The short answer is that they get much higher engagement than bigger influencers, plain and simple. In fact, the lower the influencer’s follower count, the higher their engagement rate.

That said, there are a lot more reasons why micro-influencers provide better ROI than macro-influencers. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of working with micro-influencers:

Cost

Influencer compensation is usually directly proportional to the number of followers that they have. And so, micro-influencers cost less than macro-influencers. Instagram micro-influencers, for example, charge as low as $75 per post, compared with macro-influencers who could charge as much as $1,000 (or more) per post.

Authenticity

Authenticity is an important factor in determining whether your content will resonate with your audience or not. According to a Stackla report, 86% of people like and support brands that they find authentic.

And, as micro-influencers are essentially regular people that their followers (other consumers) can relate to, they are considered more authentic.

Expertise in Their Niche

Most micro-influencers post about a specific niche that they are interested in and have followers who are also interested in that niche. So, they are considered experts in their domain.

Engagement Rates

Micro-influencers get as much as 47% more engagement on their sponsored posts compared with organic posts. And, when compared with celebrity influencers, the results are much better.

Image Source: Klear

How to Get the Best ROI From Micro-Influencers

Now, let’s take a closer look at how you can get the best ROI from you micro-influencer marketing campaigns.

Find the Right Micro-Influencers

The first thing that you need to do is to find the most relevant influencers for your brand. Here are some factors to consider before making your selection:

• Average engagement that an influencer gets on their posts.
• Whether their values align with your brand’s values The level of expertise they have in their niche.
• How active they are on social media and the frequency at which they post.

To search for micro-influencers in your niche, you can use any of the numerous influencer search tools available online.

However, we would strongly suggest you to first search for influential people among your followers. Your followers already like your brand and may be more willing to work with you.

And, the best part is, they are already familiar with your brand, so they will be more effective and genuine when they promote it.

Leverage Micro-Influencers the Right Way

The beauty of working with a micro-influencer is that they have a lot of influence over their small but loyal audience. So, you don’t need extravagant designs and videos or even huge promotional offers to get the desired results.

Give your influencer partners some creative freedom as well as a clear set of brand guidelines and instructions on what you expect to achieve from the campaign.

Also, certain content types work best with micro-influencers and you should experiment with these.

• Product Reviews – Micro-influencers are trusted by their followers, so, if they recommend a product people are very likely to at least consider it.And, if they do a detailed product review then that would help in introducing your product to their audience, who might even make a purchase after reading the review.

  Here’s an example:

Image Source: Instagram

• How-to Content – You can leverage micro-influencer to create useful “how-to” content or “tutorials” to show different ways of using your product.
• Whitelisting – Whitelisting influencers and taking control over the amplification is becoming table stakes when working with influencers. This ensures you can control the media spend and get the content in front of the audience most likely to take action (i.e. purchase).
• Share Expertise – Another great way of collaborating with micro-influencers is by asking them to share their expertise with your audience.You can ask them to create content like tips, tricks, and hacks, and then post it on your social media. You can also ask them to take over your account for some time and interact with your audience.
• Sponsored Posts – This is the most common way in which brands collaborate with influencers. You simply need to ask the influencers to create a social media post to promote their brand, in a way that looks natural and non-promotional.Here’s how influencer Melissa has done it.

Image Source: Instagram

Use Tools to Get the Best ROI

If you choose to work with micro-influencers, you will need more than one to reach a significant audience.

And, managing multiple creators and their content could be a messy, inefficient, and time-consuming if done manually. Also, finding influencer is another challenge, that tools can help you overcome.

Here are some tools that can help you get the best ROI from your influencer campaign:

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a useful tool for finding influencers in your niche. It has advanced search filters that can help you find the most relevant influencers for your brand.

Lumanu

Lumanu is a tool that lets you turn influencer content into revenue-generating ads. Lumanu streamlines the process of acquiring usage rights and permissions in order to amplify influencer content.

Upfluence

Upfluence is a tool that you can use to measure the performance of your influencer campaigns. It provides you numerous KPIs to track and measure the performance of each influencer and their content.

Final Thoughts

Micro-influencers have high engagement rates and considerable sway over their small, but loyal followers. If you want to connect with your audience and get them to try your products, then micro-influencers can do a much better job than macro-influencers.

And if both reach and engagement are important metrics for you, then you can work with a group of micro-influencers to achieve that. This will still cost you less than what a macro-influencer would charge and also help deliver a better ROI.