Influence Over Numbers (Micro Vs Macro Influencers)
Influencer marketing became an increasingly popular term around 2010, alongside the rise of social media platforms, but much has changed since then, from both the consumers’ and businesses’ perspectives.
Consumers have a lower tolerance towards advertisements, with most proactively trying to avoid advertising completely. Consumers have also embraced a much more critical point of view and no longer trust many “traditional” influencers, mainly celebrities, who previously dominated the influencer marketing scene.
Nowadays, the consumer model is still constantly shifting, with an overall trend of focusing on conscious consumerism. This shift has led consumers to often place their trust in influencers with smaller audiences, who usually appear more trustworthy due to their authenticity and close relationships with their audience.
With more influencer types arising in every industry, businesses have also learned to become more creative when collaborating with influencers, seamlessly incorporating product advertisements into their content themes.
So how do you assess which influencers are best suited to represent your brand?
Engagement, Engagement, Engagement
When finding the best influencers to showcase your product or service, engagement rates are an extremely helpful metric to keep in mind. Reviewing engagement rates will help you understand the influencer’s history with its audience and its feedback on the influencer’s previous sponsorships. While you should also consider their audience reach, your main priority will be to find influencers that deliver a good balance between engagement rate and audience size.
The more engaging influencers’ content is, the more likely their sponsorships will be well received by their audience. This is due to increasing consumer demand for honest reviews from real people, which has given rise to new types of influencers, typically classified into two major categories: “micro” and “macro” influencers.
Let’s go over the differences between each type to help you choose which is most compatible with your business’s marketing strategy.
Macro-Influencers
These types of influencers usually have over 100,000 online followers. They tend to be more established than smaller influencers, often being well-known figures such as celebrities, tv personalities, and renowned thought leaders in their industry. While they typically hold a lower engagement rate compared to micro-influencers (due to their larger audience size), macro-influencers can still be a good fit for established brands looking to target the masses.
Micro-Influencers
Defined as those with a following of around 100-10,000, micro-influencers are generally internet personalities such as travel vloggers or makeup gurus who have gained influence in their specific niche. While they may not possess the mass popularity of macro-influencers, they’ve been proven to dominate the influencer marketing scene for quite some time now. This is due to their ability to connect with their audience more personally than well-known, influential figures, which promotes a sense of trust and reliability. Micro-influencers are a great fit for any brand looking to build audience trust, awareness, and engagement to promote sales.
The Authenticity Factor
Influencer marketing’s biggest selling point is its focus on authenticity. Unlike traditional advertising, it is deemed more trustworthy and relatable by most people. As we’ve mentioned, consumers nowadays are smarter than ever and mostly make purchases based on reviews from real people.
While both micro and macro influencers have the potential to be perceived as authentic by their audience, micro-influencers tend to develop more genuine connections with their followers due to their smaller audience size. Micro-influencers also have their brand to protect, so they will usually opt to accept sponsorships from brands they trust, making them a reliable source of information for consumers looking to see if a product is worth adding to their cart.
Doing your due diligence will come a long way in your influencer marketing endeavors, so regardless of which type of influencers you’ve chosen to work with, you should always make sure they are perceived as reliable and trustworthy by their audience to help ensure your brand will also be reflected as such.
How To Set Up An Effective Instagram Influencer Marketing Strategy For Your Brand
Now that we’ve defined what types of influencers will best represent your brand, let’s look at how you can create a flawless influencer marketing strategy for your business.
1. Set Goals And Boundaries
Whether you’re a small business or an established brand, you should always set clear goals and a budget that will match them. This will help determine how many influencers you can afford to work with, the duration and overall reach of your marketing campaign, and many more factors that will determine its success.
These goals should also be shared with the influencers you’ve chosen to work with. From a content creation side, they need to know how to discuss and showcase your product or service to their audience and what not to discuss.
2. Prepare Creative And Written Assets
To set up an effective influencer marketing partnership for your brand, you should consider preparing a few creative assets to be used by the influencers you’ll be working with. These could be brand logos, product briefs, hashtags, and other significant guidelines. You can hire a creative agency to create and optimize your brand assets for social media reach and engagement.
3. Reach Out
An obvious yet essential step in your influencer marketing strategy should be reaching out to the influencers you’ve chosen to collaborate with. As with the previous steps mentioned above, there are also some factors to consider regarding how to approach influencers.
Regardless of whether you’re reaching out to an influencer with 100 or 100,000 followers, it’s important to send out a clear message that will establish what your brand and product are about. This message or email will optimally include your brand goals, a detailed description of what you’re trying to sell, and how your brand or product would make for a good match for their existing content.
Think of the influencers you’re reaching out to as potential clients. Why should they collaborate with you over other brands that may sell a similar product? This step is crucial as most influencers care a lot about their online reputation and will think twice before accepting any brand sponsorship. Furthermore, as influencer marketing has become so popular nowadays, influencers will often receive an overwhelming amount of offers from different brands.
To make your brand stand out from the crowd and put your best foot forward, you should provide all the information you can about your brand and be open to answering any questions influencers may have about it.
4. Measure Success Using KPIs
Measuring success is essential for any marketing campaign, but it is especially necessary when meeting the goals of influencer marketing campaigns. This is because sponsored content is typically posted through the influencers’ accounts rather than businesses’ accounts and therefore is harder to keep track of. This issue can be solved by setting up clear guidelines and goals prior to, during, and after the campaign launches.
There are plenty of ways to determine a successful influencer marketing campaign depending on your business goals, but we recommend keeping track of the following key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Social Media Engagement
- Follower Growth
- Conversion Rate
- Website Visitors
- Leads
- Reach
Conclusion
Whether you own a small business looking to boost brand visibility or a large company trying to reach out to the masses and promote more sales, Instagram influencer marketing is a versatile tool you can always keep in your marketing arsenal.
TBD
80-100
Est. 2013
