5 Things you should know before starting a micro-influencer marketing campaign

It’s no longer a secret that companies collaborate with social media influencers as an effective marketing method. We live in a world that 70% of consumers ask social media before deciding to buy something or not. A survey carried in 2016 revealed one of the most interesting facts about micro-influencer marketing that will grab the interest of every marketer.

According to the study, micro-influencers have nearly 22.2x more conversion rates about advice on what to purchase. 82% of consumers who participated in the survey reported that they are highly likely to follow recommendations of micro-influencers. This proved the significant power of their influence.

As stated by Brad Fay, co-founder and head researcher of the Keller Fay Group, a high percentage of marketers tend to use celebrities as their marketing solution; however, they miss out on a much bigger opportunity. This study shows that micro-influencers who are excited about what they are recommending have significantly more purchasing conversations.

1. Who are micro-influencers?

They are active social media users with the 5.000 to 100.000 followers, with the ability to generate inherent engagement rates and high conversions.   

Generally, when we speak about influencers, we are referring to those with an active presence in social media platforms, with significant influence and authenticity. It’s worth noting that they also could be a perfect brand ambassador; however, not all influencers have this potential to be a good match with a brand.

We have classified them in the following three categories:

Creators

They are expert content creators with a like-minded audience. They disseminate content across nearly every social media channel – targeting the best channel for any particular brand.

Engagers

They are masters at bonding connections with followers. Their audience has a more genuine interest in their content. These types of influencers get 10x more comments than the average that macro-influencers get.

Everyman (using social media)

They can be me, you, or your co-workers, who use social media on a daily basis and have influence over the small but loyal audience. They might have an average of 1.000 to 5.000.

2. Why collaborate with them?

Micro-influencers have strong, authentic personal brands and are committed to producing creative, quality content for their online communities. They usually choose authenticity over profit. According to the study, 32% of influencers think authenticity as a key, followed by 26.8% sharing quality content, and 27.1% engaging with followers. Because of our 3A principle collaborating with them worth your time and money.

Authentic

Like we always say, authenticity is a key in micro-influencer marketing. As consumers are willing to follow the recommendations of individuals when compared to celebrities, brands can easily build genuine connections with their target audience through micro-influencers. We don’t say that macro-influencers like celebrities are not credible, but when it comes to winning the heart of the audience, micro-influencers are the best bet.

When they share photos or videos of any product or service, we undoubtedly believe that they are real users of those products, and we don’t even question it – even if it is a sponsored post. So in order to run a successful micro-influencer marketing campaign, you should work with those who have more authentic relations with their online community.

Approachable

One of the more critical aspects of running a micro-influencer marketing campaign is that they are even accessible to businesses with a tight budget. Partnering with macro-influencers can get you a massive reach, but there is no guarantee that there will be high engagement around your product. While this is good for brand awareness and raising visibility of the specific product, campaigns involving micro-influencers will get you higher conversion rates with less effort, which is the affordable choice for small businesses or startups.

Collaborating with micro-influencers has this possibility to negotiate the quality of produced content and compensation options. For example, you can partner directly with an influencer who is a creative personality like often a musician or artist to create a kind of posts that represents your brand best. We call this kind of deal as a “creative collaboration” deal.

But what about payment deals? It is evident that a large percentage of influencers prefer monetary compensation. However, it is not the only method to compensate for them. You can offer a free product or discount coupons to benefit your services. In this way, you can provide them with an opportunity to try your product/service before saying something about it.

A  study made by Augure in 2015, reported that influencers are most willing to work with brands which help them to grow a strong status as opinion leaders and increase their reach, improve content quality, and develop their own image. Besides the aforementioned tangible motivators, make sure that you also help them achieve these key objectives.

Audience relations

They are more passionate about their niches, and this shines through in their contents, which makes their audience easily resonate with them.

They bring products to the awareness of hundreds and thousands of people with just a single post, which is excellent for the visibility of a brand. However, being aware of products or services does not mean there will be enough engagement. Here we can see the key difference between macro and micro-influencers. Although micro-influencers don’t promise a massive reach, what they do guarantee is a high engagement around your product, which is a result of their deep relations with the followings. But the audiences of celebrities consist of people with diverse backgrounds. A fraction of them may find a particular post appealing, many others, however, will show little or no interest.
Before starting a collaboration, bear in mind that not all micro-influencers might help your brand grow. So ponder these questions for the benefit of your campaign:

• How do they manage their social media accounts?
• How do they approach content creation?
• Is it similar to how digital marketers work, or are they playing their own game?

3. How to collaborate with them

These three points are crucial factors behind every successful collaboration with micro-influencers:

Emotional bonding

Make the first move: Brands need to establish a connection first if they want to work with a particular influencer. It’s in human nature to be prejudiced in favor of brands that take care of you, so when you put micro-influencers first, you create a connection that can lead to a collaboration.

Help them grow: About 40% of micro-influencers want to express themselves, and only 7% join new platforms to make money. For marketers, it means they expect brands to respect their individual voice. Besides, micro-influencers think about their prospects, so if you help them grow, they will never forget you.

For example, if you know that a micro-influencer wants to increase the following, offer something that can help him/her achieve his/her goal. For instance, you can stay creative and suggest cross-promotion – share his photo and tag his account to attract potential followers.

Long-term deal

Creating connections with them is not enough, you need to maintain and nurture those connections. It’s also an excellent opportunity for you, as they grow and become more popular, you can still collaborate with them for more affordable prices. Besides, they are going to be more selective in regards to partnering with brands. But if you would care about them when they didn’t have such a broad audience, it’s highly likely they are going to be open for future collaborations.

There are a whole host of reasons why long-term collaborations are beneficial. First of all, it is a practical way to invest in successive promotions with the same influencer, which will drive a considerable boost in sales without paying large sums. On the other hand, developing relationships with them can make them brand ambassadors. Brand-ambassadorship is representing a brand in a positive light, which helps to raise brand awareness and boost sales. That influencer is going to be your brand’s image and represents you in the market. As the market grows too fast, it’s not easy to keep brand ambassadors for an extended period. This is where long-term deals come to your assistance.

Scale and optimize

Recruiting the army of influencers with hundreds and thousands of loyal followers is a right approach toward micro-influencer marketing. To get the desired results, brands need to scale their campaign across hundreds and thousands of influencers. However, to collaborate with a large number of smaller influencers is a real challenge and requires the right set of methods.

Here you may face these challenges such as: finding the right influencers, negotiating the terms, payment options, following up, etc. Despite logistical challenges, continuously scaling and optimization is an excellent way to build awareness, gather leads, and increase sales.

So what is an optimal way of scaling your campaign with the right influencers? Let’s say you start your campaign with 50 influencers. According to their performance during the campaign, you will get a more precise view of those who did their best and those performed average. So after a year, when you launch a new product or campaign, you can definitely use the best-accomplished micro-influencers and recruit new influencers.

4. What do micro-influencers do?

Here are 5 of the most common micro-influencer marketing campaign types to complement your strategy. These are intended to help you understand what kind of campaigns work for a particular type of product.

Sharing the brand announcement

When you want to use social media influencers to create a buzz around your brand, let them share announcements on behalf of your company, such as event activations or new product launch. To achieve a better result, it would be better to work with multiple influencers.

Product reviews

When a product is launched, a useful review from influencers builds trust and credibility in the minds of consumers. They can be in many forms like youtube videos, social media content, and blog posts. It is an excellent way to generate leads and conversions.

Storytelling

Everyone has a story to tell! Compelling storytelling portrays consumers what a brand is and helps to connect consumers with the brand. It has been a part of promotions for decades. However, storytelling is not a one-off approach for your business. You’ll need to think of it as a long-term strategy, complete with ongoing relationships with the types of people who can spread the word about your brand.

Product Gift

If your campaign goal is to showcase your products in the market, this is the right kind of strategy. Such campaigns usually include an element of surprise, which makes it more exciting and engaging to participants. Most influencers also are thrilled at receiving free samples or gifts. Their natural reactions make for excellent content to start your campaign. This is also the right way to build relationships with the influencers, which will definitely be beneficial in the long run.

Giveaways

Influencer campaigns involving giveaways and contests can help you to increase social media followers, driving traffic to your page, or raising brand awareness. Giveaways are great at boosting likes, shares, comments, and tags on a brand’s content. You can ask influencers to promote a giveaway or contest to generate more sign-ups. These campaign types are great for generating buzz.

5. Keepface solution

Keepface is an automated platform that facilitates the process of reaching the right influencers, communicating with them and running campaigns using real-time analytics. Our platform allows brands to communicate and negotiate with influencers without a hitch. Our clients are agencies, brands, and startups. We cooperate with multinational brands such as Samsung, P&G, Tcell, Uber, Toyota, etc. Keepface achieved to run over 500 successful micro-influencer marketing campaigns so far.

Wide choice

With the database of 19.000 registered influencers from all over the world, Keepface gives companies a wide choice of the most relevant and right influencers. They can select and connect with the best matching influencers for their campaign without losing additional time. The platform facilitates the whole process through filtering by countries and categories.

Communication & Negotiation at scale

Through the platform, communication and negotiation processes are much more flexible than you think. We recommend prices based on data of influencers and content types, but we usually leave it up to you. Brands can directly contact with influencers, make offers, and negotiate.

Real-time orchestration

Our platform makes this easy to plan and manage your campaigns to get the desired outcome. It creates dynamic audience segments according to calculated metrics (engagement rate, followers, and audience) that updated in real-time as users take actions. It makes these processes like real-time reporting, planning, and management of campaigns super easy.

Trust & Control

Keepface’s first-and-foremost principle is to make sure that our clients feel safe and have full control over their campaigns. With the help of an automated platform, you are in control, and complete transparency in all operations are guaranteed. So all you need to do is to focus on ROI and achieve your micro-influencer marketing goals.