We’ve all heard of using influencer marketing to boost a marketing campaign, but not everyone can afford to run a campaign with Molly-Mae Hague or James Charles. That’s where micro influencers come in! A campaign with a micro influencer can help small to medium sized businesses to increase their reach and build brand loyalty on social media.

A micro influencer is a social media personality who has a smaller following than big celebrities, but their posts usually get very good engagement. These are ‘everyday people’ who don’t necessarily have tens of thousands of followers, but they do get lots of likes, comments and clicks on their posts. Micro influencers are comfortable in their niche and almost everything they post about revolves around that topic – be it beauty, fashion, fitness or even cleaning!

These social media users are passionate about what they are posting about and are usually seen as trustworthy and authentic. This authenticity is hugely important – especially with Millennial consumer audiences.

Why use a micro influencer?

You may find this concept confusing, seeking out people who have a smaller following than large brands or bigger influencers, but there are a few key reasons why we think that a micro influencer is better for your marketing strategy.

Simply put – micro influencers give you better return on investment for your marketing campaign. Studies from Markerly have shown that as an influencer’s number of followers increases, their number of likes and comments from followers actually decreases. They saw better conversion rates from using micro influencers for a campaign than using uber-celebs like the Kardashian-Jenner sisters. So micro influencers are a great way to reach your target audience and get conversions, at a much more affordable price to you.

Micro influencers tend to have a more engaging and targeted following base. According to research from HelloSociety in 2019, influencers with 5,000 to 10,000 followers have 6.3% engagement, and influencers with 1,000 to 5,000 followers have the highest engagement at an engagement rate of 8.8%!

Working with micro influencers gives you the opportunity to promote your products or services on a larger scale than you could reach on your own organically. Plus it’s way more affordable than if you asked for a sponsored post quote from some of the bigger celebrities or influencers.

On a practical note it would also be good to think about how you are going to remunerate the influencer and this should be negotiated prior to the promotions taking place. Most micro influencers will have a set fee for a sponsored post, blog, video or brand mention. However sometimes if they are already interested in and/or posting about your products, they may accept a gifted sample of your product in exchange for these services.

Once the campaign or post is live, ensure that you engage with and share any posts/ blogs/videos that they do for you – this will not only reach your audience but theirs as well. It could also be worth putting their videos or images on your website if you have one. How the material is added and how they are credited should be negotiated with the micro influencer, but the actual task is usually very simple to do with the use of social media plugins.

How can you find a micro influencer in your niche?

The easiest way to find relevant micro influencers is through a hashtag search on Twitter or Instagram. This will help you find social media users who are already interested in topics related to your industry.

Searching for hashtags will allow you to find the best performing posts relating to that hashtag – for example, if you search for #weddinghair you will come across the posts using that hashtag with the most interaction. There will obviously be some big names within your search, but if you dig a little, you will find people who have a genuine interest in your topic, who have a good number of followers and good engagement to match. These are the people that you want to target.

Micro influencers in your local area

You may be a small business looking for local micro influencers in your area to help promote your products or services. If so, you can search for location based hashtags e.g #manchesterbloggers #bristol or you can search for local landmarks and points of interest and see who’s posted from that spot. Most micro influencers will have their location on their profile or in their bio, so this should help you to identify who is a resident of that area and who was just visiting.

Another good place to look for micro influencers is on Google or YouTube. By putting in keywords such as ‘beauty blogger’ or ‘food vlogger’ and the location, this should bring up results of influencers in that location, and you can usually find an email address to contact them on.

There are some specific influencer agencies out there, but a lot of those tend to only work with celebrities and influencers at the higher price-point. You should always be wary and check the credentials of these agencies too, as there are lots of duds out there that claim to represent influencers that they don’t!

Here at South Coast Social, we work with a growing database of awesome micro influencers. If you’re a brand, looking to include micro influencers in your marketing strategy, contact us today and we can make those all-important introductions for you.