Good Things Come In Small Packages: Why Micro Influencers Are Better For Your Brand
By Derek Bryce, NUVI
Social media has been one of the biggest catalysts in the marketplace, and among sales teams. The rise of social has given way to an entirely new array of marketing tools, strategies and practices.
Consequently, traditional advertising isn’t nearly as effective as it once was, especially for lead generation. For many companies in the B2C space, moving away from classic advertising towards influencer marketing has not only added substantial ROI, but in many cases, has kept them in business. Influencer marketing firm Tomoson has identified influencer marketing as the fastest-growing online customer-acquisition channel, beating organic search, paid search and email marketing. Furthermore, this growth shows no signs of slowing, as 59% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets over the next 12 months.
A major factor in the success of influencer marketing in the retail space is trust in peers. According to Nielsen, 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 33% trust ads. Thanks to social media, when a person sees a post about a brand shared by a friend, the trust in that information jumps from 66% to 83%. This implicit trust has made everyday influencers a key part of any successful social campaign. The engagement fosters an emotional relationship and leads to a better ROI for the retailer.
For many brands new to influencer marketing, there’s pressure to spend a significant chunk of the marketing budget on celebrity or “macro” influencers. While these macro influencers have a large following and can, in theory, reach a vast audience with a single post, they charge exorbitant fees and typically see lower audience engagement rates. On the other hand, micro influencers, with a fraction of the audience size and lower bill rates, give brands the ability to reach specific consumers more accurately and tend to see higher engagement rates than their larger competitors. A recent study by influencer marketing company Makerly found influencers with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers are four times more likely to receive a comment on a post than macro influencers with 10 million followers.
At NUVI, we’ve seen the positive impact of micro influencers first-hand. Using our platform, one of our large retail customers was able to identify and engage with local niche industry bloggers and loyal customers with a relatively large Twitter following (in this case, less than 10,000 followers). With minimal investment, the company was able to build relationships with these micro influencers, leading to the creation of valuable content and promotional posts. As brand awareness increased, so did sales. The company was able to increase their brand’s social conversation by more than 100% and social reach by four times, generating enough profit from their new audience to stay in business.
Successful relationships with influencers can be even less formal. Through our own data and customer conversations, we’ve found when brands engage in the conversation online, they see 3.4 times more mentions, 5.2 times more reach and 5.6 times more total social audience. Real-time interactions with your audience — sharing their content and answering their questions — can have a tremendous impact on social mentions and reach.
It may be tempting to hire the influencer with the largest audience. Common sense dictates the larger the audience, the more people will see the post, thus producing the greatest ROI. Keep in mind, however, that you are not paying for audience; you are paying for influence. Numerous micro influencers across multiple channels (blogs, Facebook, and Instagram are the top performing influencer platforms) will likely reach a more loyal audience and generate a much higher ROI than hiring a single big-name influencer. And when it comes down to it, a higher ROI means better performance for your company.
Derek Bryce is the President of Sales and Marketing at NUVI, the social media analytics provider. Bryce has spent more than 15 years as a leader in the technology sector. From the early days at Omniture to the large corporate structures at Adobe, he has led organizations through the rise of digital marketing. Bryce joined NUVI in February of 2017 to focus on helping organizations use social media as an effective tool for not only reaching consumers, but gathering unsolicited feedback, identifying and responding to crisis situations, and tracking consumer sentiment.