Partnering With Micro-influencers To Increase Your Brand’s ROI

Influencers are among the primary tools for digital marketing today. It’s not difficult to see why. After all, your campaign gets to benefit from the creativity, associated trust, and reach of well-established content creators.

Yet, many brands find themselves hesitant to engage with this approach to digital marketing. Usually, this comes down to a matter of cost. These businesses can feel that the most popular influencers are outside of their budget range or may not represent a good return on investment (ROI). But it’s important to note that you don’t need to utilize the higher-priced or celebrity influencers to be effective.

Let’s take a closer look at the potential for micro-influencers to increase your brand’s ROI.

What Is a Micro-influencer?

By strict definition, micro-influencers are content creators with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. They certainly don’t have the lowest influencer follower count, with nano-influencers usually clocking in between 1,000 and 10,000. As such, they’re in a practical reach range to ensure your brand can connect with a reasonable number of potential viewers.

That said, the numbers are not the only important characteristic of micro-influencers. Perhaps the most salient point to understand is that these content creators usually operate within a strict niche. This is often the reason behind the lower follower count, but it also tends to mean these creators attract a more passionate and engaged group of people within that subject matter. 

Another common characteristic of micro-influencers comes down to public perception. With macro- and mega-influencers (up to 1,000,000 and over 1,000,000 followers respectively), brand partnerships and sponsorships can be seen as the primary driving force behind these accounts. As such, there can be a lack of trust or a sense there is no genuine belief in the products they’re promoting. Micro-influencers are generally still focused on creating quality content they care about. This lends them and the brands they work with a perception of authenticity. This may be one of the key reasons micro-influencers have by far the highest level of influencer engagement per post — around 18%.

Gaining More Relevant Collaborations

Making certain the influencers you utilize gain significant engagement with audiences is an important consideration when it comes to improving your ROI. Micro-influencers have smaller audiences that are generally more focused on a core subject area and are keen to engage. As such, there are opportunities for more relevant and impactful content collaborations.

This tends to affect the approach your brand needs to take to identify the right influencers. Rather than matching for numbers, you’re matching for a close and genuine connection to your company’s area of expertise or interest. Not all micro-influencers will operate within niches suited to all brands.

Therefore, certain industries are generally better suited to micro-influencer strategies. These include real estate, travel and tourism, technology, and food. Though, there are also some emerging industries. For instance, publishing is benefitting from micro-influencers in the BookTok trend. The potential for relevant and impactful collaborations is growing.

However, this is also why your brand needs to have teams with specific experience in this field. While the departments every business needs are unique to the specific company, having a dedicated social media influencer marketing team helps direct your efforts more effectively. They can work closely with micro-influencers to communicate the intentions of the project and more accurately assess the most appropriate partners. They can also develop closer relationships with your influencers and guide mutually beneficial collaborations.

Utilizing a Nuanced Tool

Many brands utilize influencers on social media in a marketing strategy to simply gain top-of-funnel discovery. However, micro-influencers can be a more nuanced and targeted tool. For instance, Google has recently partnered with artistic micro-influencers to specifically promote the creative potential of a new product and gain engagement from the arts community. Part of getting the best ROI from micro-influencers involves understanding how you can receive the best value from them.

One way you can approach this is by taking their use beyond raising awareness in favor of forging longer-term relationships with audiences. After all, focusing on retaining customers rather than achieving a single conversion tends to see a better ROI from your marketing budget. Alongside a retention strategy that includes rewarding customers and personalizing customer experience, you can utilize targeted social media marketing. This should involve discussing the specific needs and intentions of campaigns with your micro-influencers. Together, you can produce creative solutions to key into the types of content that develop loyalty and repeat engagement in consumers.

Indeed, the nuances of your approach can form part of measuring the success of your influencer campaigns. Micro-influencers already tend to be more cost-effective than celebrity- or macro-influencers. But you also need to consider other metrics when determining value and ROI. For instance, when targeting retention, you can compare the post’s engagement metrics to any changes in your customer churn rate or your existing customer revenue growth rate. If you task your micro-influencers to drive traffic to specific pages, you can review the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tag statistics to see what traffic is coming from the influencer’s posts.

One of the most vital uses of these metrics is to inform your ongoing relationships with micro-influencers. Your wider marketing strategy should involve long-term relationships with select influencers. This allows you to have an ongoing dialogue in which you work together to fine-tune content based on your data to keep attracting consumers and hitting targets. You’ll also find this affects your ROI by creating strong partnerships over time rather than flooding capital into untested collaborations.

Conclusion

Micro-influencers can be among your brand’s most powerful collaborators that positively impact your marketing ROI. This isn’t just because they tend to cost less than macro- or mega-influencers. Their ability to garner authentic engagement from dedicated audiences and work with you to achieve more nuanced outcomes from your marketing is invaluable. 

It’s also worth cultivating relationships with micro-influencers to ensure your investment in them results in relevant and impactful outcomes. It can take significant work from a dedicated social media marketing department, but this approach has the potential to influence the trajectory of your brand.