by Shane Barker
Search engine optimization (SEO) and organic social media marketing both take time to drive results.
But you need a faster method that can help propel your business’ growth.
So, what should you do to grow your small business?
You can leverage influencer marketing. It’s a powerful way of driving results instantly.
About 89% of marketers say that influencer marketing ROI is as good as that from other marketing channels too.
You might be thinking, “As a small business, I don’t have the budget to collaborate with influencers.”
Right?!
Well, you don’t always have to contact macro-influencers. Everyone can’t afford influencers like Kylie Jenner.
Instead, you can start the journey with micro-influencers.
In this post, we’ll see how you can leverage micro-influencers to grow your business. But before that, let’s take a closer look at who micro-influencers are.
What is a Micro-Influencer?
An influencer is called a micro-influencer when they have a follower base between 1,000 and 100,000 followers on social media.
They’re different from the celebrities or experts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Instead, they focus on a specific niche and build an audience around a specific vertical only.
Nowadays, many big brands collaborate with micro-influencers as they have hyper-engaged audiences compared to other influencers.
So, let’s take a look at how you can get started with influencer marketing.
How to Get Started with Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies for small businesses.
Once you decide that you’ll opt for micro-influencers for your small business, you need to follow the steps below.
Set Goals and Finalize the Platform
Depending on your marketing campaign’s goals, you’ll have to decide which influencer you want to work with.
Some of the common goals are:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Customer Retention
- Boosting Sales and Revenue
- Increase Social Media Followers
Once you determine the goal, the next step is to finalize the social platform to promote your business.
Each platform is good for different objectives and you need to look for the one where your audience is most active. And remember, choosing the wrong platform won’t give you expected results.
That said, here are things you need to check before deciding on a platform:
- Target audience: Based on your business, your target audience will differ. You need to research where your audience is active.
- Content type: The content type that you choose defines your social media platform as well. For instance, if you have mostly text content, you won’t be able to promote it on Instagram. Instead, LinkedIn would be a better option. You need to create visual content to post on Instagram. That’s why the content type is crucial while choosing the social media platform.
Finding the Right Micro-Influencers
Not all influencers are on each social platform. So you need to check whether the influencer (with whom you want to collaborate) is on your target platform.
And it’s important to choose the right influencer as they can make or break your marketing campaign. So, you have to be careful while collaborating with influencers.
Fortunately, various influencer marketing platforms are available that can help you find the right influencers for your brand.
But why should you use them?
Because:
- They allow you to find influencers in any given niche.
- Some of the platforms offer free searches.
- With filtering, you can filter influencers based on their followers, niche, audience demographics, etc.
Additionally, you should come up with specific criteria to find the best micro-influencers for your brand. Some of the things you can consider, for example, are:
- Do they promote products/services in your niche?
- Have they partnered with your competitors?
- How many followers do they have on their page or channel?
- What are the results of their past brand collaborations?
- Do they engage with their audience regularly?
But selecting micro-influencers is only one part of the challenge. You also need to come up with a powerful campaign strategy. For all of this, it helps to get help from an influencer marketing professional to design a result-oriented campaign with micro-influencers.
Once you’ve found the right micro-influencer for your business, you need to reach out to them via email and direct message (DMs) and then plan out your campaign.
For example, you can create an excellent article including your best-selling products and ask them to promote them to their audience. As a UAE-based beauty eCommerce site did and get good sales as well ranking in the SERP.
Now that you know all about how you can start promoting your brand with micro-influencers, let’s take a closer look at why they’re so effective.
Why Are Micro-Influencers So Effective for Small Businesses?
The most significant benefit of micro-influencers is that they have niche audiences. Once they endorse your product, their audience sees it as a genuine product/service.
In addition to that, the other benefits that you get by collaborating with micro-influencers include:
High Engagement Rate
As you know, micro-influencers don’t have a large follower base, which in turn allows them to connect personally with their audience.
Because of that, the audience has a stronger connection with them and this leads to a higher engagement rate.
Typically, this rate decreases when the follower base grows. Why? Influencers generally aren’t able to connect individually with each of their followers once they have hundreds of thousands of them.
That’s one of the biggest advantages of micro-influencers over macro-influencers who aren’t able to connect with their audiences personally because of a large follower base.
Niche-based Audience
Micro-influencers are popular among a highly targeted group of people, considering they have a niche audience that follows them because they publish and promote content around specific topics.
So, whenever you want to reach a highly-targeted audience, you should contact and collaborate with these influencers.
For example, if a micro-influencer publishes content about football; then, they may not promote basketball-related content.
In the above case, the influencer will likely have an audience that’s only interested in football. As a result, a brand that’s looking to reach football fans will benefit from partnering with that micro-influencer.
Follower Loyalty
In influencer marketing, your brand promotion depends on the follower loyalty towards the influencer you’ve collaborated with. The stronger the bond between the influencer and their audience, the better it is for your brand.
If an influencer builds trust and a relationship with the audience, it can improve the chances of success of your campaign.
It won’t be wrong if we assume that micro-influencers have more follower loyalty compared to macro-influencers as their bonds tend to be stronger.
Wrapping Up
Micro-influencers are extremely helpful when you want to connect with a niche-based audience at an affordable price.
However, not all micro-influencers can influence your target audience, so you need to be careful while collaborating with influencers and find the right ones for your brand.
Do you have any questions about how you can partner with micro-influencers to grow your small business? Ask them in the comments section below.
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
