Social media is one of the big players in the world of content marketing. Whether you’re looking for conversions, leads, or brand awareness, content reigns king. Unfortunately, unless you’re in social media marketing, your business probably doesn’t have a huge social audience.
And that’s okay! You could spend thousands of dollars to grow your following, but why would you? That’s not why you got into business. So what do businesses do to get the benefits of a large social audience, without the whole “building an audience” step?
Work with someone who’s already built one—an influencer.
All Right, but what’s the fuss about?
To start: by working with influencers, your company is tapping into an industry with a market cap of somewhere north of $14 billion (as of 2022).
Not bad, right?
Partnering correctly, though, is a huge piece of the success puzzle with influencer marketing. Not just with the specific influencer, but with the right type of influencer as well.
There’s a reason brands are utilizing micro-influencer partnerships ten times more often than they are working with “mega influencers”.
Let’s dive into why:
Micro-Influencer 101
Influencer marketing is no longer a secret technique; brands of all sizes are implementing it into their marketing plans.
As it’s grown in popularity, the amount of data on it has grown as well—giving marketers and business owners information into best practices, pitfalls, and the difficulty with influencers.
In the “early days” of influencer marketing, it was as simple as partnering up with anyone with a halfway decent sized social following. Today, there’s a bit more science behind it.
Not all influencers are created equal.
You’ve got mega influencers with more than one million followers across all of their social media channels. These are the perceived “movers and shakers” in the online world—often A-ist celebrities in their field.
Obviously, working with these kinds of influencers is expensive—barring everyone from doing so but the largest companies.
Budget isn’t the only reason why brands shy away from working with mega influencers, though.
Having that many followers means that you have wide appeal. While that’s good news for global superstars, it means that marketing efforts run through these kinds of influencers would cast an extremely wide net.
Good for Pepsi and Apple products, maybe, but not for the rest of us.
Most industries, companies, and brands are not made for everyone. Working with too large of an audience dilutes your brand (and your wallet) quickly.
Micro-influencers don’t have this issue—their audiences range from one to ten thousand individuals focused on a specific topic. They trade all-out scale for personal connection, authenticity, and a laser targeted reach.
The Benefits of Building Your Brand with Micro-Influencers
There are some huge benefits to building your brand working with micro-influencers, and we run through some of the most important ones you’ll want to remember as a savvy marketer below.
Sky High Engagement
For starters, micro-influencers often have significantly better engagement rates than any other type.
According to Instagram, users that have somewhere around a thousand followers (or less) generate likes about 8% of the time. Users with one to ten million followers are producing likes only 1.7% of the time.
That’s a big difference.
Other industry reports have shown that micro-influencers are capable of producing 22 times the conversions than your average Instagram user. High engagement is no joke.
Much Lower Upfront and Ongoing Costs
It isn’t unusual for your mega influencers, your A-list stars, and your globally recognized social media accounts to charge north of $75,000 for a single promoted post on a platform like Instagram.
That might be feasible for big businesses with bottomless marketing budgets – but it’s not for us. On the other hand, micro-influencers often charge less than $500 for a promoted post.
Much more reasonable prices, combined with sky high engagement rates open a unique opportunity to roll out highly effective campaigns – and more of them – for less money.
That’s a no-brainer.
Deeply Personal Connection with Audience
Micro-influencers have a much less watered down relationship with their followers and their fans than the “Big Guys”.
These influencers often don’t treat their accounts like a corporate asset. They are real, authentic, and have a level of credibility that bigger influencers just don’t.
That connection is the key to micro-influencer marketing – now you just have to pick the right one.
Where is Your Audience?
Hopefully, you’ve already discovered and researched your audience thoroughly – finding their likes, dislikes, habits, and pain points (to name a few).
Now, find the media your audience consumes – what topics do they engage with on social sites? That question will lead you to the influencers you need. Do you even need video marketing?
How We Can Help
Of course, partnering with the right micro-influencers is just one piece of the success puzzle. These kinds of influencers are often already getting offers to partner all the time – how do you stand out?
You’ll need to produce content that cuts through the clutter; not just to reach their audience more effectively, but to excite and entice them to want to work with you (and really promote you), too.
There’s no easier way to pull that off than with slick, polished, and effective video marketing.
Our agency – FF Branded – understands exactly what it takes to produce big breakthroughs leveraging the power, reach, and authenticity of micro-influencers.
The small business owners and marketers that partner with us to produce video content for micro-influencer campaigns are able to hit the ground running with an (almost) unfair advantage over their competition.
We handle all the heavy lifting when it comes to producing these videos, handing over the finished product to our clients ready to rock and roll – right out-of-the-box – across micro-influencer platforms.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you unlock the potential micro-influencers offer all strategic small business owners and marketers today, reach out at your earliest convenience.
We’d love to talk a little more about how our video marketing services can supercharge your business, helping you to more deeply connect with your audience and your market, tap into the leverage micro-influencers offer, and help you ring the register a little more all at the same time.
Check out our website (click here) now, or feel free to send us a chat.