Influencer marketing is all the rage, with an average of 6.5 times ROI and $15 billion expected spend allocated towards Influencer Marketing by 2022. There are some great examples outlining the impact of influencer marketing success for conversions, awareness, and content, and other campaigns highlighted to inspire you. But before you roll your eyes and say “I can’t afford Michael Buble or Jennifer Garner to pitch my product,” consider that there may be an Inverse relationship between Influencers and engagement. Great may come in small followers for your brand.
There are different types of Influencers– Mega, Macro, Micro, and Nano. Michael Buble or Jennifer Garner would be considered Mega Influencers but as a small/medium brand, Micro or Nano influencers offer a stronger return-on-engagement and Instagram is a melting pot for micro-influencers. In fact, according to the 2019 State of Influencer Marketing, 57% of marketers reported that influencer content outperformed their brand-created content.
This is where opportunities translate from smaller influencer categories. Studies have shown that micro-influencers have 7x more engagement than the average of all influencers, other research suggests nano-influencers have engagement rates of 7.2 versus Micro only 3.7% of their following, and Markerly studied Instagram engagement and their research breaks it out by category with mega/macro at 1.7%, micro at 2.4 – 4% and nano at 8% engagement. Micro – less than 100,000 followers.
Nano influencers are everyday people and typically have less than 1000 followers. They are not famous and have personal interactions with their followers. According to a New York Times article, nano influencers are defined as “Everyone who’s on Instagram has that friend who is just really popular and is racking up ‘likes’ and comments and has great content. They’ve probably never worked with a brand before, but they’re just really good at social media.” They have as few as 1000 followers and are willing to advertise products on social media.
Marketing is all about delivering engaging relevant content to the right people through the right channel at the right time. It’s what all marketers strive for, developing strategic marketing programs that offer ROI while meeting the needs of the customers and the brand. Yet today, there are so many channels to communicate and algorithms to navigate, which has opened the door to influencer marketing.
Social media influencers are individuals that have a strong social media presence across platforms. There are several ways that you can compensate these influencers to represent your brand. Whether you work with micro or nano influencers, think of them as an extension of your sales department.
Gifting free products or services to influencers in exchange
Guest posting
Sponsored content – paying for your content to be featured on an influencer's website
Co-creation – partner with an influencer to create content on their site or yours
Social media mentions – pay for brand mentions in a particular piece of content
Contest or giveaways – pay to drive traffic to contest
Influencer takeover – takes over the brand account to drive traffic and then connect with the target audience
Discount codes – The influencer’s code gets a commission for the sale when used
Brand ambassador – The influencer aligns with brand values and objectives; creates content, represents your brand, and exposes their audience to your product/services
When working with the right influencers, they can help to increase your brand awareness, build brand authority, and connect with the audience. The cost of micro or nano influencers may run from a free product to a few hundred or even a thousand dollars – depending on your agreement. But it’s important that your influencer is relevant to your brand and brand values. Micro- and Nano-Influencers are more affordable and authentic.
The best way to find Influencers is to utilize social listening techniques, looking at your own brand followers and who is engaging with your posts. You can also use tools like Buzzsumo using relevant keywords and filtering the results. Using Buzzsumo’s filtering offers the ability to filter by location, category, keyword, and sort by relevancy, website's domain authority, number of followers, as well as their average reply ratio to see how often they engage with their followers.
Growing your brand can be a challenge with so many channels and algorithms to tackle. Influencer marketing may be an opportunity to expand your audience and build more brand awareness. To get started, you need to Find and collaborate with your influencer, set a budget, verify their brand voice and tone alignment with your brand, and make sure to measure your influencer marketing ROI.