Why You Should Work With a Micro Influencer and How to Find Them (Pros & Cons)

The quickest way to boost engagement and conversions is by finding the right people to target. Micro influencers are the best way to reach a well-defined group of audiences with laser-like precision.

What are micro influencers?

Bigger always isn’t better, and that holds especially true when it comes to influencer marketing. Micro influencers have a small following of between 1,000 up to 100,000 on social media platforms. But most importantly, these influencers have a highly engaged niche audience.

This is a goldmine for brands and businesses because your marketing message will have maximum impact if you can target the right type of people. You cannot get this level of targeting with macro influencers. Macro influencers have a huge following and you might get a lot more impressions. However, their audience interests are varied and more impressions don’t always translate to conversions.

In addition, micro influencers have a very strong standing and opinion in the community. People engage with their content a lot more often so any product placements or promotions are likely to get higher conversions.

Why are micro influencers important?

Social media is full of noise and distractions. However, once in a while, you discover an influencer whose content truly resonates with your values, taste and interests. This influencer might not have a lot of followers but you still engage with them because their content feels like an “excellent fit”.

Not only do you enjoy their content, but you also take their recommendations seriously. Influencers like these have a very strong opinion in the community and that’s what makes them a powerful marketing tool for brands.

However, micro influencers don’t just work with anybody. They spent a lot of time and effort building their reputation. They will never collaborate with a brand whose values don’t align with their own.

How to find micro influencers?

Finding the right micro influencers for your brand might take some time. Here’s how to do it:

1. Figure out your marketing goals

Every market campaign has a specific goal. Are you looking to get more followers, send more traffic to your site or maybe you just want purchases? This needs to be clarified so you can find the right influencer and pitch them.

For instance, if your goal is primarily to get more followers, you can use an influencer to promote a giveaway. To raise your brand awareness, you would probably like a shoutout on Instagram.

Finally, if you want sales, then it’s a lot better to ask the influencer to use your product or review it in a video. The end-goal will serve as a starting point of how you design your campaign.

2. Research influencers

If you actively consume internet content in your niche then you probably already know a bunch of influencers. However, marketing is a number’s game to some extent so you can’t just work with one influencer.

Create a sheet and start compiling all relevant influencers with their contact details in it. You can find influencers either by researching directly on social networks or by using an influencer marketplace such as Paysenger.

What’s Paysenger?

Paysenger is a social marketplace where you can find content creators and easily pay them to create videos or content for you. In addition, if you’re looking for a micro influencer, you can easily use Paysenger’s search tool to filter by industry and demographic.

The platform also offers full social networking features using Web3 create-to-earn principles where you can earn cryptocurrency (EGO tokens) for creating great content. Of course, you also get paid for collaborating with influencers and asking them to produce content based on your ideas. It’s a great tool for content creators and businesses alike to achieve their long-term goals on the internet.

3. Send your pitch and offer a reward

How you pitch to influencers and what you offer in return really depends on your industry. While cold hard cash works in most cases, in some industries such as fashion, influencers offer shoutouts in exchange for free products.

Remember – you’re not working with the celebrity types with millions of followers. You’re working with average people with a small but strong social media following so they don’t necessarily need thousands of dollars to collaborate.

Since you’re working with micro influencers, you’ll want to make sure that any creative ideas you have should be inline with their brand. They will not agree to work together if your request is too off-topic. Some influencers might not even need any creative input and would rather do things in their own way. If their existing content is inline with your brand values then give them full creative freedom (it’ll save you time)

After considering these things, create an outreach message and start sending it out to all potential influencers in your list. 

Here’s an Instagram DM template just in case:

Hey [insert influencer name],

I loved your post about [insert description of related post]. At [company] we [describe your unique selling proposition].

We want to send you a special package with our [product] so you can give it a try and also share the experience with your followers!

Would you be interested? - [insert your name here]

4. Measure

You probably have a fixed influencer marketing budget. When measuring the performance of your campaigns, look at the campaign as a whole. Don’t judge the performance by looking at individual influencers.

Every influencer is different and social media is an unpredictable place. You’re not going to get the same results from every influencer. So instead of stressing out about individual performance, judge based on how the entire campaign performs with all of the influencers in your list.

If the net is positive, then you’re good to go! You can always let go of the lowest performing influencers and replace them with better ones. Play the long-term game. Always keep adding new influencers to the list until you find an ideal group of ambassadors for your brand.

Metrics to track

If your goal is to boost your social media presence, you can track engagement rates, which include likes, comments, shares, and retweets after running the campaigns.

You can also track click-through rates (CTRs), which show how many people clicked on your link or visited your website. Influencers with higher credibility generally have higher CTRs than others. To see how many people made a purchase or took another desired action, you can track conversions.

Examples of Influencer Collaborations

1. Dunkin Donuts with Aashika Jikaria

Aashika Jikaria has just around 12,900 followers on TikTok but she managed to score a deal with Dunkin Donuts. That’s because big brands understand the value of micro influencers and are slowly moving towards them.

In this campaign, Dunkin Donuts is offering a giveaway to boost engagement, followers, and views.

2. Lola Rose with Trisha Estrada 

Trisha Estrada, with her tiny 5,830 followers has collaborated with watch brands like Daniel Wellington and Lola Rose. The brands also repost her photos on their pages to get UGC content which also sends some traffic to her. A campaign like this is used to get purchases and to raise brand awareness.

3. Disney Cruise Line with Melizzablack

Melizza is a Disney-obsessed Instagram model who got offered tickets to a Disney Cruise Line. She has posted many times for Disney so she doesn’t only get free tickets to cruise ships but also gets paid for posting on Instagram.

Micro influencer marketing trends to watch

Brands are not only using micro influencers for promotion or brand deals but also to source user-generated content (UGC). UGC is any type of content that’s produced by real social media users instead of in-house marketing teams.

This type of content is generally much more effective because it comes from a very authentic place. UGC is also a lot cheaper to make in the long-run because you don’t need to spend your own time and resources to make it.

Brands like Sephora mostly post content made by other people on their Instagram page through micro influencer collaborations:

Brands are switching to this style of content creation to boost their credibility. If people see other “real people” instead of actors interacting with a brand they are much more likely to trust it. This generates goodwill and boosts your sales in the long-run.

Some tools to help you with micro influencer marketing

There are several tools that can help you with micro influencer marketing. 

Paysenger

Paysenger reduces the back-and-forth with influencers before you can request content from them. If you reach out to all of your influencers on Instagram, for example, you’ll have to send an unsolicited DM that’s likely to get lost in an influencer’s inbox full of spam.

Influencers are high in demand and they get a lot of messages. After they receive your message, they have to go through the hassle to discuss pricing and requirements and this wastes a lot of time.

On Paysenger, influencers simply create an account and advertise their “offers” on their profiles. For example, if an influencer is available to make a shoutout video for brands, they will post it on their profile along with their pricing. Depending on your budget, you can search influencers using price filters. Once you find an influencer, send a paid request and describe your requirements in detail.

Influencers have 5 days to respond. If they don’t respond, the money is returned to you. This is the best way to work with a lot of influencers in a short amount of time.

Upfluence

Upfluence is a popular influencer marketing platform that has a big database of influencers. You can reach out to influencers, make payments, and create full campaigns. However, a lot of micro influencers are too small to get admitted in Upfluence’s database.

It’s a full online platform with a number of features to allow you to run your influencer campaigns and also track their performance.

AspireIQ

AspireIQ has a smaller database but a higher user rating than Upfluence and is generally considered easier to use. Upfluence can get complicated to some extent so if you’re looking for a quick user-friendly solution, Aspire might be a better option for you.

It all depends on whether your industry and the type of niche influencers you need are part of the database or not.

Conclusion

Micro influencers are the future of digital marketing, and utilizing them can be a highly effective way to reach your target audience and drive conversions. Follow these strategies, to find the right micro influencers for your brand, build a relationship with them, and turn them into an ambassador for future projects. 

Order UGC, collaborate with influencers.. Or become an influencer yourself by joining Paysenger! It’s a social platform that helps content creators make a living and businesses to collaborate with influencers to achieve their marketing goals. 

Some of its features include on-demand content, a tokenized create-to-earn environment, collaborations, hashtag challenges, and more.

Try it now on iOS | Android | Web