Micro-influencers have proven to be worthy to modern marketers than they ever have in the past. The reason is they tend to have a decent amount of dedicated followers which is beneficial for business startups.

Markerly statistics show that a peak engagement to follower ratio for a micro-influencer is 1000 followers. While on an average, campaign leverage of micro-influencer deliver 60% more customer engagement and is 7x more cost-effective. Also, it is proven to result in 22.2% higher conversion rates.

Who is a Micro-influencer?

Micro-influencers are those individuals who have followers ranging from 1000 to 1000000 and are considered as experts in an industry or niche. They may be travellers, food bloggers fitness gurus, local fashionista or tutors. They tend to connect to audiences on a deeper level as they have a smaller but more focused niche and can generate better engagement.

How does it work?

Factually, a 1000 follower’s influencer can generate 85% high audience engagement than those having 100000 followers. Also, the number of engagement decreases as the number of followers increases. Hence, staying between 1000 to 100000 followers can be an ideal sweet spot proven for a micro-influencer.

A small base of followers’ give more hands-on and personalized interactions which are considered as “Marketing Gold” and making a lot of sense to marketers nowadays. Moreover, considering a small number of followers, 84% of consumers trust recommendations from these micro-influencers over advertising because they feel them as peers rather than celebrities.
Hence, leveraging micro-influencers that your targeted audiences follow, will not only take your brand and services in front of your potential customers, but it will slap on the sugar coat of social proof.

Benefits of Micro-influencers for your small business

1. Higher Engagement Rates
As mentioned above, customer engagement is a considerable benefit of leveraging micro-influencers as it is better to experience for both companies and customers. Also, micro-influencers are able to interact more frequently with audiences through likes, follows, comments and responses instantly as compared to celebrity influencer accounts.

2. Affordability
A celebrity endorser or influencer may cost you hundreds of thousands for just a single post. Unless if you are a big brand, spending a tremendous amount of money may not be realistic or worthwhile. Hence, micro-influencers as more affordable; it just all depends on the number of followers and degree of engagement. On average, $1000 per post for 100000 followers is the rate hover around.

3. Higher Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are pretty straight forward. 49% of the customer’s trust recommendations by influencers for making a purchase decision. That should not be a surprising fact as; feedbacks, ratings, reviews and recommendations are enormous in creating a difference.

3. Niche Markets
Unlike most of the niche and influencer industries, you will often land to tap into a specific niche market. Micro influencer comes in every shape and size, and each of them has a defined area of style, brand, appeal and expertise to a particular group of followers. Hence, set your buyer’s persona and consider it before creating content.

Why are Micro-influencers so useful for Small Business?

Micro-influencers have the ability to connect and interact with followers on a more profound and personalized level because 1000 to 100000 followers surround them compared to a huge fan base of millions of followers that a celebrity or mass influencer has. As their fan base is tightly knitted, they are capable of creating personalised content and delivering it in a more authentic moment with fans. Also, engaging with a limited amount of followers is more accessible than managing millions of them. All of the above reasons make them a useful tool for marketing for small businesses.

Five ways to leverage Micro-Influencer for Small Business effectively

1. Listen For Your Brand and Competitors
Before starting anything, make sure you are ready to pounce on every available opportunity as your competitors do. As you get a micro-influencer, who is already out mentioning your name, get prepared to be in touch with a follow up quickly. Use Google Alerts to keep track of your brand mentions. Moreover, on top of having micro-influencers mentioning your brand, keep an eye on your competitors by including your competitors and keywords that are relevant to your industry.

2. Find The Right Kind Of Micro-Influencer
If you are a startup or a small emerging brand, most micro-influencers that you end up working with may not mention your brand naturally before you reach them out. Hence, to avoid the situation, choose them from the targeted one as one to reach out, one to pass on and one as an integral part of your strategy.
Use different tools like social media platform that has a pile of analytics to guide you and Google’s linked focused rankings that are best at identifying traffic based upon engagement and followings.

3. Promote Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers are more likely to work with small businesses if they go out of their way to promote and flatter them and take part in their conversations and content promotion. Here, the value of reciprocity is under defined necessity while promoting them without any other action is the best way to leverage them. Undoubtedly, it is an essential part of the marketing process.

4. Take Advantage Of Sponsored Posts
Sponsored post in combination with a micro-influencer is an excellent and incredibly powerful approach. While it may not seem like an inbound marketing strategy, it is still critical to approach the method carefully. Ideally, it is enough to sample your product free to the influencer so they can use it before posting a review or demonstrating your brand. However, by law, they are bound to disclose the fact that they have received a free product for a demonstration from you.

In some cases, micro-influencers may expect payment for the favour. Hence, you need to make sure both parties are obeying disclosure laws without violating audiences trust. It is recommended to take a look at a sponsored content they have done in the past before sponsoring a micro-influencer.

5. Encourage User-Generated Content

According to Kimberlee Morrison, 85% of the social media users find user-generated visual content more authentic and persuasive than posts and photos posted by brands themselves. You can use the following ways below to motivate micro-influencers to build user-generated content for your business.
Invite them to take pictures for your Instagram pages and write content for your posts and blogs.
Re-tweet and share their content across all of your social media profiles that are in favour of your brand.
Motivate them to mimic the concept of your product and services with a hashtag.
Ask open-ended questions and start a conversation with micro-influencers on your platform and ask them to join the discussion forum.
Embed content from the profiles of micro-influencers on social media within your content and blog posts.
Launch a user-generated content contest across your social media profiles and don’t forget to follow the rules of ethics. Also make sure you create a buzz as contests are entirely based upon the number of shares, likes and comments.
Reach New Markets with Micro-influencers
As mentioned above, conventional marketing approaches are not as effective in today’s fast-growing world. The customer of today is savvy because they do their own research. Most people are less swayed by brands and are witty copy than their caretakers. Micro-influencers establish more trust, credibility and personal connections with them that are more effective.

Reach New Markets with Micro-influencers
As mentioned above, conventional marketing approaches are not as effective in today’s fast-growing world. The customer of today is savvy because they do their own research. Most people are less swayed by brands and are witty copy than their caretakers. Micro-influencers establish more trust, credibility and personal connections with them that are more effective.

Hence, craft a campaign to make your influencers tell a connecting story and engage your potential prospects. Consumer’s buying behaviours are continually shifting and getting a micro-influencer on board will help you to reach untapped markets that you have not been there before.

This article was written by Amanda Jerelyn.

Amanda Jerelyn is a qualified digital marketer and a passionate analyst. She has worked as a professional writer with many firms as well. Currently, she is working as a Content Strategist at King Essay and contributing blogger at Crowd Writer.