Micro-Influencer Marketing: How Does It Work

If you still running your business using traditional marketing tactics, it’s time to pay attention to micro-influencer marketing. NinjaPromo will tell you how it works in 2023.

The best advertising is the one that doesn’t look like advertising. All marketers know this golden rule. And for that very reason, influencer marketing has become so popular nowadays.

For your reference, Influencer Marketing is a method of promoting products and services through opinion leaders. There is a common misimpression that Influencer Marketing is only about promotion through popular bloggers. In fact, anyone can be an “influencer”: starting with the popular star like Kim Kardashian(Influencer writ large) and ending with a stay-at-home mom who writes some product reviews on cosmetics for babies on totalbeauty.com (a micro-influencer.)

Now, brands are increasingly turning to micro-influencers to support their marketing initiatives. Who specifically should be attributed to “micro” is a moot point, actually. For, instance, many mini-blogs have less than ten thousand followers and are devoted to fairly narrow topics, such as adventure tourism, athletics, or coffee addiction.

Add people’s sincere trust for other people recommendations to their being fed up with adverts and you receive the perfect solution which is micro-influencer engaging. Working with the micro-influencer, the brand gets the authority of a trusted person at its disposal.

Micro-“channels” are characterized by a high degree of user engagement, and when choosing a partner for cooperation, it is worth focusing on the level of his/her audience activity. In this case, the number of followers is not in the first place.

In addition, a successful micro-influencer project is a bit like magic: a partnership seems so natural as if a blogger accidentally stumbled into a good brand and decided to talk about it.

 

What Do You Get from Micro-Influencer Marketing:

• an increase of brand awareness;
• audience education (especially in the high-tech product segment);
• an increase in the number of subscribers and followers and their greater involvement in social networks of the brand;
• negative and conflict management (when micro- opinion leaders help to dispel myths about the harm or pointlessness of a product or service);
• increased sales;
• a boost of your confidence in a glittering future.

If to believe statistics, 65% of brands use Influencer Marketing to promote their products and services. 52% of companies have a separate budget for that.

According to broadcasts, the growth of the Influencer market is expected to be around $4–10 billion in 2019–2020. A very promising opportunity.

As you can see, whole influencer marketing is at its height. And for your knowledge, micro-influencer marketing shows no sign of forthcoming cease or decline as well. So, now let’s look at some micro-influencer marketing trends.

Trends of Micro-Influence Marketing:

• Freedom of expression. Due to this privilege, the genuine and sincere reaction of the target audience as an expression of their attitude to the content is increasingly evident in social networks. Thanks to that fact, brands get more opportunities to create truly emotional advertising, which has a greater impact on their consumers.
• Freedom of content. Social networks and content generated by micro opinion leaders are still not subject to harsh censorship or restrictions as compare to the similar content in traditional marketing formats on TV, newspapers, magazines or radio or even “macro-influencers”. That’s good news.
• The growth of corporate freedom. Do not forget about the companies and brands, which are accustomed to a high level of control over their prestige. Thanks to social networks, they found that there is nothing to be scared of in communicating with their audience freely and open-heartedly, especially through micro-influencers. Take a look at the banking sector, which now successfully take advantage of free communication with their customers.

Remember that, the key to an effective advertising campaign is the freedom of marketing experiments.

• The growth of market education. One of the initial (but successfully uprooted) problems of influence marketing was the blind following of major influencers: when brands slavishly chased the number of followers or the number of views of bloggers’ content. Not to mention the fact that some brands did not understand why and for whom they engaged influencers.

Nowadays, more and more brands pay attention to the gender, age, location of subscribers and followers of a particular influencer and compare them with the target audience of their products and services.

Moreover, brands began to have a better idea of how influence marketing can be used for their purposes and began to set clear goals in their advertising campaigns: reach, distribution, engagement, purchase. Here, a micro-influencer is a hands-down winner.

Moreover, brands began to engage in post-analysis of postings, studying the most important metrics when working with any audience: coverage, audience involvement in advertising content and its response to it.

• Multi-channel growth. Some researches prove that consumers are more likely to pay attention to advertising if they hear it from several resources. If they receive confirmation of marketing messages through several channels at once (like Instagram and YouTube), they are more likely to pay attention to such a message and to listen to it closely. Micro-influencers can simultaneously broadcast content to groups with narrow interests, increasing the effectiveness of getting into the target group and its problems, as well as into broad groups, increasing the coverage of their publications in an arithmetic progression.

That’s why most brands generally use a cross-channel approach working with bloggers.

• Multi-Influence growth. Brands began to use a combination of celebrities, bloggers, and micro-influencers to draw attention to their campaigns. Strengthened by the cross-channel approach, such advertising campaigns reach incredible heights.

Some brands began to mix product-for-review advertising formats, as well as influencer marketing + CPA, which is gaining popularity. The flexibility of the format itself opens up vast opportunities for marketing strategies.

Curious that influencer marketing is also used by B2B companies that find their own influencers even in narrow market segments.

• Technology growth. In terms of technologies, influence marketing goes even ahead — there are many solutions that allow brands and customers to find each other. We meet advanced analytics tools, tools for post-analytics are being developed, some recommendation systems are being developed based on artificial intelligence. No limits here.

Unfortunately, many marketers forget that marketing is a constant experiment and that the one who is the first to do something that nobody else has done before, wins. So stay tuned, shape your future-proof marketing strategy.

NinjaPromo wishes you good luck!

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