How to Identify And Use Micro-Influencers to Grow Your Business

Introduction

Having a great product or service at your disposal is one thing; getting people to notice your offering is another. So, how can you get your target audience to discover what you have to offer? Thanks to social media, buzz creation has become easy to achieve. For instance, all it took was Elon Musk to tweet, “You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin”, and the Bitcoin price skyrocketed. Later on, when he raised fuel energy usage concerns over cryptocurrency’s mining and suspended Bitcoin transactions for Tesla, its price dropped significantly.

So, influencer marketing can go both ways; it can either give a significant boost to a new venture or plummet the sales of a well-established enterprise. When it comes to growing a small business, micro-influencers can play a crucial role in creating an online buzz about the brand. It can help kickstart brand awareness, enhance user engagement, and convert leads in no time. A micro-influencer is someone with a strong niche market that can be utilised to promote a company’s products and build brand authority.

Micro-influencers are not your regular celebrities or public figures; still, their audiences are hyper-engaged compared to those of macro-influencers. Due to their increased expertise in a specific niche, most upcoming brands like to partner with them for extending their reach and user engagement. That’s because consumers listen to these niche experts and consider their verdict as final before trying out a new product or service.

How can you Identify Micro-Influencers for your Business?

Brands keep on testing new marketing ways to promote their offerings to target audiences. There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing plan you can use for different businesses. Finding the right marketing mix for your product or service is something not that straightforward to realise.

Today, more and more businesses partner with social media influencers with large followings to reach specific audiences. Check out these staggering numbers for engagement rates among Instagram influencers. Be it you’re opening up a new fast food outlet or a beauty salon in your local area; you can always count on the effectiveness of micro-influencers to position your small business.

It might take you years to increase your following on social media platforms. On the other hand, a single appreciation post from a trusted source can get your website, or online store noticed in no time. Next thing you know, your fully engaged user following is surging on different social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, you name it.

Influencer marketing can quickly become a wasted investment if you’re not working with the right micro-influencers in your niche market. While it’s tempting to focus on unique visitors or the total number of users/followers as a measure of influence, it’s essential to look deeper than you think.

Use the following tactics to determine the best micro-influencers for your business in your area:

Before you look into unique visitors and other static metrics, it’s crucial to see how aligned an influencer’s content is to your messaging. While looking at the blog section, make sure to go through all the archived blog posts to assess what consumer types they are targeting. Just because someone posts food recipes doesn’t necessarily mean they write content for consumers interested in organic food. A gaming enthusiast doesn’t make them a guaranteed match for your gaming app falling in the racing genre.

So, relevancy factors such as specific audience types rather than the total traffic play a vital part when looking at the right influencers within a particular niche. The audience's perception about a specific product or service application to specific topics, issues, needs, or interests will decide whether or not you should partner with a particular influencer.

Another indicator of identifying the right influencer for your small business is seeing how engaging content they share on their website or social channel. Let’s just say you’re researching a YouTube vlogger who’s offering a similar type of product or service in the same niche.

You can gauge user engagement levels by looking at their responses and comments on particular videos and how often they share the content. Factors such as percentage of returning users vs new ones, how much they engage with the publisher’s content, and how often they return to interact with the content are all vital factors that decide the degree of users’ engagement.

The total number of followers and monthly visits are only as effective as considering how much a specific influencer’s reach is concerning your target audience. While it may not be the most important metric to decide typical micro-influencers effectiveness in keeping their users engaged, we can still consider the total reach a good factor. However, reach should only be measured in terms of the total number of unique visitors only.

Apart from considering unique visitors, it’s also vital to see what social channels the majority of your target audience spends time on. If you’re planning to run a local food chain. In that case, it’s better to evaluate a micro-influencer with a sizable number of followers on Instagram than considering the one with a large following on Facebook.

Posting high-quality content on a website is one of the major factors that play a crucial role in improving a site’s domain authority. So, if you’re going to publish blogs on a specific topic in your niche market, then you must check out the viability of your potential influencer’s blog section. You can do this by evaluating their unique users and seeing how frequently return users interact on specific topics of interest and how much they comment, share, or bookmark blogs.

How to Use Micro-Influencers to Grow your Business

After you identify the right micro-influencer for your business, it’s time to develop a strategy to utilise them to the best of their abilities and what you can offer to your target audiences. More and more consumers want to listen to their favourite social media personalities before making purchase decisions. So, you need to be cautious while investing time and money in selecting the right influencer and asking them to pitch your offering the right way.

One of the best ways to get your offering noticed in the eyes of your potential users is to get your product or service reviewed by an influencer or a thought-leader in your respective niche or community. A simple recommendation can help increase your brand awareness and enhance targeted traffic to your website significantly.

Some of the biggest brands let YouTubers use their newly launched gadgets for free and get them reviewed to increase their sales. Same way, you can let your partner micro-influencer test your product for free, show your customers how to use it, and share it on social channels. This way, a considerable percentage of users are likely to trust the recommendation made by the influencer.

Some businesses utilise relevant hashtags on their posts specific to their niche. First, find some related hashtags for your business, then see how many people have shared the same content type. This will also help you narrow down a pool of potential micro-influencers for your brand. Look for accounts that already follow you or interact with your posts on Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. Since they’re already familiar with your product or service, it will be easier for you to reach out and ask them for recommendations.

Guest blogging is another good way to get your services noticed in your target market. Choose a relevant guest blogging platform, get your articles published over there to reach their audiences for increased brand awareness and drive traffic to your site. The more the online traffic, the more the comments and social shares for building quality links. The best way to choose the best influencer with a guest blogging option is to look for their domain authority, targeted end-users, and the frequency of comments and social shares on their posts.

There are some other important ways to scale your newly established brand through micro-influencers. These can include running a referral program, offering promo codes and discounts, producing targeted video content for immediate impact, creating and growing a mini-community, and supporting a local cause.

Finding the right micro-influencer for your brand is not that easy to accomplish. Even if you have entered a partnership with a social media influencer with a huge following, you might face certain challenges while working with them. These can include spotting fake followers, non-responsive influencers, irregular services, not following requirements, not sharing stats, and more.

To overcome these and similar kinds of challenges, always communicate your strategy upfront to avoid any confusion down the road. Building a quality relationship based on trust with your chosen influencer will help you truly measure the success of your marketing efforts to your target audience. Take it as managing a remote team because you’ll retain a micro-influencer and pay them for their services.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to deciding on the best social media channel for influencer marketing. From Instagram to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Blogging, you can choose any platform based on your brand. So, if one of your friends or colleagues is making it big on Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you would do too. The key is to research which platform your target audience uses the most and choose the right micro-influencer for your product or service type in your niche market.

The right micro-influencer will prove a business growth hacker when it comes to paid content. These experts are well trusted within their niche markets and can offer you increased outreach to your target audiences. They are your key to delivering authentic, engaging content at a low cost. When partnering with micro-influencers, the best marketers know where to look, what to look for, and how to get the most out of them.