Word-to-mouth marketing has consistently remained an extremely popular and beneficial form of marketing. With growing competition in every industry, brands are looking for newer ways of marketing, especially influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has emerged as one of the hottest marketing trends and companies are willing to spend more and more resources on the right influencer for marketing purposes.
Although there is no dearth of influencers around us, finding the right influencer for your brand is crucial. It needs time and research. The most popular influencer your team can think of may not always be the right choice for the brand. Gone are the days of using the same five influencers for promoting everything, from weight-loss supplements to cars. This is the age of using “micro-influencers” to promote brands, especially for the millennial audience.
Who are micro-influencers?
Micro-influencers are those influencers who have an average of 10000-30000 followers on their social media handles. The maximum number of followers they have is up to 100,000 followers. This new subset of influencers recently attracted the interest of marketers. Let us see why micro-influencers are becoming more popular.
Why are micro-influencers gaining popularity?
According to research conducted and as pointed out by Google trends, there are three primary reasons for the increasing popularity of micro-influencers.
- Such influencers have higher engagement rates than uber-popular mega-influencers.
- Micro-influencers are more trusted than bigshot celebrities.
- Smaller brands can afford to engage micro-influencers as a part of their brand promotion strategy.
Research suggests that micro-influencers can prove to be 6.7 times more efficient per engagement than mega-influencers with large follower counts.
The concept of using micro-influencers for brand promotion is still relatively new. It will definitely take some time for popular brands to fully embrace the concept. The only possible delay in the adoption of this strategy by big brands is the lack of means to find the right micro-influencers.
Read on to know how you can find the right micro-influencers for your brand.
Finding the right micro-influencer for your brand
Finding the right micro-influencers can be difficult because most companies are still looking for influencers manually. Even Google cannot help you find the right micro-influencers as more often than never, they do not show up as results.
Considering this, the two most effective ways to find the right micro-influencer are as follows:
- Using specialized tools for finding influencers: These are databases that contain information about thousands of influencers. However, most of these databases are opt-in in nature. This means that unless influencers sign up on their own, brands cannot find their information on these platforms. So, although it saves time, it might not be quite effective for brands.
- Using social listening solutions: Social listening tools like MediaToolkit, scan the internet and social media channels to find which influencers have posted using the hashtags or keywords related to your business. They are a more cost-effective way. However, you won’t have first-hand knowledge about whether they are willing to work on your brand.
The best strategy to find the perfect micro-influencer for your brand would be a blend of both the tools mentioned above.
Let us take a glance at some of the most important tips to keep in mind while choosing a micro-influencer for brand promotion.
Tips to choose the right micro-influencer
Following are some essential tips to bear in mind before starting your search for the perfect micro-influencer for your brand.
- It is important to make a profile of the perfect micro-influencer for the role before starting your search. It gives you a clear picture of exactly what you will be looking for while searching for micro-influencers for your brand’s promotion.
- Have a keen eye for hashtags or keywords related to your brand. Be creative with the kind of hashtags you associate with your brand.
- It is important to filter and sort your results by their reach. If you want to reach out to an international audience, search your results for all countries. If you are looking to target a more local audience, filter out your results by country.
- Then you can further filter those by arranging them according to the date, audience, or virality of their postings. You can focus your search on particular channels.
There are some dishonest influencers out there that purchase false followers to give the appearance that they are well-known. The simplest way to spot them is by the low level of interaction on their posts. Beware of such fake influencers and follow the tips given in this article to find the perfect micro-influencer for your brand.
Tracy is the Design Manager here at Redwood Creative. She’s been designing amazing graphics and web layouts for large and small businesses for upwards of 7 years.
