Building a Micro-influencer Marketing Strategy

The use of celebrities and top tier bloggers, with a huge following for marketing strategies is starting to die down. That’s not to say that influencer marketing itself is dying down. In fact the influencer industry is exploding. However brands are choosing to work with a different kind of iinfluencers, those with a smaller following aka “micro-influencers”.

Sounds crazy right? Well not as crazy as you may think.

Micro-influencers, if you haven’t heard of them already have a following of roughly 1,000 to 10,000 on their social media channels. Asking a micro-influencer to promote a product, may not necessarily create a buzz per se but collaborating with many micro-influencers may cause a greater buzz than that of any celebrity or top tier blogger.

This is because:

• As the number of followers increases, typically engagement rate decreases, meaning that micro-influencers have a more engaged audience. Engagement translates into real customers. It’s much more important and a better indicator than reach in terms of swaying consumer decisions.
• Micro-influencers’ audience is more focused as they have more of a niche, focusing on specific content which speaks directly to their localized and dedicated following.
• Micro-influencers are considered to be more believable, knowledgeable and credible by 94% of consumers (Experticity).
• Influencers with a greater following are more expensive, and can sometimes go beyond a brand’s budget. Micro-influencers charge less which means you could use more than one, reaching out to a greater and more specific audience.

The influencer industry is currently exploding, yet a lot of brands are still unaware of what the best practices are. So we have tips on how to get your micro-influencer strategy kick started.

Finding your micro-influencers

One of the reasons brands didn’t collaborate with micro-influencers was because they are much more difficult to identify. Brands with limited knowledge of the distribution of their respective audience across all channels, struggle, and spend too much time trying to find the right influencer. Today platforms like ZINE make it much easier to identify such influencers with the following and  engagement you want on any social media platform, in your niche.

Approaching your Micro-Influencers:

Micro-Influencers are easier to approach, this doesn’t mean however that they’ll accept whatever you give them. It’s still important to be professional. When reaching out to them, tailor and personalise your messages, add their name to the start of the email and maybe mention a post of theirs you found particularly interesting. No excuses; if you’re using ZINE all that information is displayed on their profile. Bear in mind that you are dealing with an individual, not a corporation.

Managing your Micro-influencers:

Using micro-influencers rather than celebrities means you can afford to use more than a few. However, brands typically struggle, being unable to manage and keep on top of their collaborations when working with more than one influencer. There are however ways around this. ZINE will soon be launching influencer collaborations campaigns, making it much easier to manage your campaings and their outcome. Until then however, take note of who you agree to collaborate with and ask them to send you a link directing you to their posts, note down the number of likes they received. Finally you could measure the success for each influencer’s post, if you ask influencers to caption their posts with a voucher code specific to their name. It is then easy to track sales which come from each influencer.

Joanna Karamanis

I’m head of Content at ZINE, where I use my expertise in fashion consumer psychology to empower brands and influencers in their marketing campaigns. I love to travel, bake as well as shopping online.