According to a recent report, the average firm expects to allocate 41% of their marketing to online promotion, from search engine marketing to social media advertising. One of these fastest growing segments is undoubtedly influencer marketing.
In short, companies are quickly understanding that click rates and conversions are only part of the big picture. Crucial metrics in the digital world now also include customer reach and engagement. To get to your audience, it’s not enough to communicate your brand’s vision. You need a helping hand from someone they trust and engage with on a regular basis: influencers. For this article, we focus particularly on micro influencers.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
So let’s say you are new to influencer marketing. Your initial goal might be to hire the biggest Youtube star or the most popular Instagram celebrity. After all, they have the highest number of followers, and it would seem logical that their endorsement should take your marketing spend a lot further.
But with influencers, bigger isn’t always better. Firstly, their follower numbers might not always reflect true reach. Online stars benefit from a snowball effect, where they are automatically suggested to new platform users, so their audience might be a lot smaller than you think.
The online celebrity status also has its downsides. Huge online stars are flooded with marketing proposals, and counterintuitively, their engagement with audiences tends to decline. Quite simply, it’s impossible for them to reply to thousands of tweets or Instagram mentions on a daily basis. This means their endorsement can sometimes lose effectiveness.
“Huge online stars are flooded with marketing proposals, and counterintuitively, their engagement with audiences tends to decline.”
Benefits of Choosing Micro Influencers
So how should you plan a successful influencer marketing campaign? It’s worth focusing on what are called micro influencers. These are influencers with between 5 to 100,000 followers, but whose engagement can bring staggering results.
Micro influencers are better value. For instance, a promoted post with a celebrity could cost up to $150,000 and offer an engagement rate of 1 to 2%. But reducing that budget ten times for an influencer with ten times fewer followers brings the engagement rate up to 7.5%. You get a lot more from your marketing budget.
They create a safety net. Managing influencers is managing relationships. And for your business, it’s worth keeping numerous channels open rather than focusing on one only. We all know how fickle online audiences can be, so having numerous micro influencers on your team is easier in case of damage control.
They promote organic spreading. Studies show that viral phenomenons rarely begin with one huge boost. It’s hundreds of people who share tweets or videos to their close friends, creating a snowball effect. Similarly, a well-crafted marketing strategy has more chances of growing organically when it’s shared by 25 different people than one huge celebrity.
Final Thoughts
Micro influencers might not immediately appeal to brands and companies. However, from a marketing standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to spread your message through 25 small influencers rather than 3 huge online celebrities. Join is specialized in working with micro influencers and holds a database of over 15,000 influencers worldwide. Moreover, Join’s platform simplifies influencer marketing in such a way that is is easy to run a campaign with a lot of influencers. Don’t hesitate and contact us for a demo of our platform.
Micro influencers work for your influencer marketing campaign, and who knows: maybe one of the micro-influencers on your team will one day become the next talk of the online town.
