Social Media Marketing not only costs 62% less than traditional marketing methods but also attains an ROI that is 3X greater.
Furthermore, 53 percent of shoppers have stated that the information they receive from vloggers and bloggers was more important and more likely to impact their purchase decision than other channels of information.
It’s no wonder then, that in a recent survey of companies that 39% of respondents said that they were planning to increase their budgets that were devoted to influencer marketing in 2019.
So, how do you go about using influencers to grow your business?
First things first, it’s worth noting that there are 2 types of influencer on social media. We can classify these people into 2 groups, Macro Influencers and Micro Influencers. If you follow Forbes, they have put together a Top Influencer list that covers categories such as Pets, Parenting, Fashion, Gaming, Tech etc. It’s a really insightful list and can be found here.
These people have upwards of 300k followers and wow, if they were going to tweet about you, then you would gain some instant traction overnight. However, it is mightily difficult to gain endorsements from accounts with these many followers. See Chiara Ferragni for example, if she puts a tweet out, then she’s got 376K followers – oh my word!
That’s where the micro influencer comes in. Typically, these accounts have 1000+ followers, they are actively engaging within the same categories mentioned earlier, but – and this is a big but, they have much more loyal followings. When a micro-influencer says something, their follower base tends to listen more, and you will see a greater conversion rate from these users. 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals, rather than from brands.
It’s worth stating also, that these micro-influencers operate across multiple platforms, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being the most popular.
So, how do you get these micro-influencers on-board with your brand?
The first thing you need is a strategy, because a simple goal of “We want to get 100 new followers a week” is great but it won’t get you there alone. You need to work out how you are going to get in front of them, their demographic, what will your posts look like, what’s the end goal, where are you going to send them, where you may need to do in order to pivot your thinking, what your budget it going to be etc.
Once you’ve worked out who you are going to target, you need to start listing down the influencers in your industry, see who is posting on a regular basis and which influencers followers are growing on a regular basis. There are of course, tools out there which can help with that. Follow these people.
Next, get yourself on their radar, start posting articles that they may be interested in, comment on their posts, ask questions using an @mention and engage with them. Once you’ve got their attention, don’t stop but keep it reasonably low-key.
Once you’ve got their attention, make a list of which ones you then want to reach out to for the purposes of promoting your product or brand. Having established a relationship with them before reaching out directly will mean they are less likely to ignore you.
Prepare your content, work with the influencer and be sympathetic to their style and way of doing things (without compromising on your message).
After all of this is done, you should start to see your micro-influencer marketing flourish.
There are of course tools that can automate a lot of this work for you:
Influence Network is a new player in the market that is on-boarding micro-influencers at the moment, their algorithms are designed to target the right influencers for your end goals. There are several others too that we’ve found along the way.
If you would like to chat more about getting your social media channels off the ground, please get in touch.