How To Get the Most Out of Micro Influencers
There have been tons of articles written about micro influencers and how they can drive up your ROIs. Yet, people seem to be avoiding revealing the true secrets of how to get more from micro influencing campaigns.
Don’t Just Pay For Loyalty, Earn It
The common rule of thumb when using micro influencers is to hire them for their services. But as these people are very different from their celebrity counterparts, it is a lot easier to deal with them one-on-one and build a great rapport with them.
Consumers are really savvy about trending marketing strategies, especially the younger generation. Most of them can tell when someone is being paid to promote a product. By building a rapport with the “grass roots” micro influencers they are more likely to truly accept the brand as their own. In turn, this will show through their sincere energy.
The Best Micro Influencers Are Your Customers
Marketing costs money. We know that. Depending on what market you are in, you can spend from two percent to 20 percent of your gross review on marketing. For companies just starting out, spending that little (or that much, depending on what you’re actually spending) can burden you. Marketing is expensive. How do you solve this problem? How about turning your customers into micro influencers? You can do this by offering them special promotions.
A perfect example of this would be when the smartphone manufacturer OnePlus offered their smartphone to their customers for $1, and then selected 100 people who would be allowed to invite three friends and/or family each on the same deal if they made a video smashing their old phone. There is no solid data on how well it worked, but considering they are big contenders against iPhone at the moment, it seemed to work.
Everyone Likes Free Stuff
This kind of follows what I mentioned earlier, but with a slight twist to it. The best micro influencers are the ones you create yourself. Only the smartest of the smart companies apply this strategy to their marketing campaign – that means giving stuff away for free.
What OnePlus did was close their product sales to the public, making it invite only. Not every company is brave enough to do that. That’s okay. But what you can do is use branded merchandise as a tool to gain loyalty from consumers. As much as people share stuff on social media, there is a good chance that if they get some cool promotional merchandise delivered to their house for apparently no reason they’ll share it.
For example, let’s say you own a restaurant and you decided to offer a free dinner for two to 200 couples. Chances are, if they take you up on the offer, they’ll post about their experience on social media. This is what I call “organic micro influencers,” because you didn’t “pay” them to represent your brand, and their friends and family know that for sure.
Once Doesn’t Cut It in Marketing
Could you imagine purchasing ad space somewhere, putting the ad up for a day, then taking it down? What a waste of time and money. The same thing goes for your micro influencing campaign. So many companies go in with a small budget and end up using this micro influencing strategy only once or twice. This is a big no-no! You have to keep these types of campaigns going for some lengthy period of time.
This is because, in a study conducted by UCLA, it was concluded that most people can’t remember logo details of even major brands – Apple was one of them (imagine that! Apple logo was forgotten by people). It is normal for people to forget small details. It is our brain’s way of making room for more important things (not that your brand isn’t important!).
The best way to stay in that “gist” memory is by remaining there by way of saturation. What is so cool about this whole micro marketing trend is the ability to dig to the root of your consumers’ thought processes and stay there. No one pays attention to TV ads anymore. But they sure do pay attention to what their friends and families are doing and buying.
Related reading: Rise of Micro Influencers
