micro influencer marketing

Micro-Influencer Marketing: How to Scale Your Visibility

Jordan Arnold, Sr. Director of Outreach


Key Points

  • Finding and leveraging the right technology is crucial.
  • Micro-influencers (those in between celebrities and newbies) are under-utilized and highly effective.
  • Some influencers excel across multiple social media platforms, and others have huge followings in only one or two — you need both types.
  • Look to capitalize on the compounding benefits that occur when you gain traction within your influencers’ networks.
  • As a brand, your most dedicated “influencers” are your own fans and followers. Don’t forget to connect with them, too.

Don’t let the name fool you; micro-influencer marketing is a pretty big deal.

Collective Bias surveyed 14,000 U.S. individuals and found that peer recommendations influence 70% of millennial consumers’ buying decisions. The survey also revealed that 60% of respondents were influenced by a social media post or a blog review they read while shopping at a brick and mortar store.

The impact of micro influencer marketing on a brand’s bottom line can be transformative. In fact, it can deliver 11X ROI over other forms of digital media.

Holy cow! With numbers like these, you’d be crazy not to drop everything and ramp up your influencer marketing efforts exponentially.

But after a few weeks or months of frustration, you would realize that it can be extremely time consuming and difficult to scale influencer marketing.

Have no fear. We’ve got your back. We’re going to leverage our 10+ years of experience in micro-influencer marketing to reveal five effective ways to scale your program.

5 Ways to Scale Micro-Influencer Marketing

1. Use Technology

Security software enables you to thwart millions of potential threats posed to your IT infrastructure. Can you imagine doing that manually? Micro-influencer marketing is no exception. Technology helps you to achieve more, better, faster.

Marketing technology is exploding all around us. This trend is already evidenced in the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog’s annual martech infographic. According to the blog, the martech landscape grew from 350 marketing technology solutions five years ago to 6,829 solutions today. That’s a 19X increase.

Here at Terakeet, for example, we developed Chorus, a platform to connect and engage effectively with a database of millions of micro-influencers. That’s how we launch campaigns with thousands of online publishers at a time.

If you aren’t using technology to scale your SEO and power your micro-influencer marketing campaigns then you need to rethink your approach.

2. Look to the Middle

Many marketers who look to get into influencer marketing target the same overused celebrities at the top of the pyramid. There are several major challenges with that approach.

Think supply and demand.

When many brands chase the same group of celebrities, the price for any type of engagement is exorbitant. What’s worse, authenticity is often lost in what’s obviously a transaction rather than a passion. High-end influencers have a diverse group of followers, so many brand impressions could be completely irrelevant. On the other hand, the “beauty” influencer who makes cosmetics videos has an audience of nothing but makeup fans.

Although micro-influencers may not be celebrities in the traditional sense, they still have a highly devoted following of fans. Micro-influencer marketing will make your campaigns uniquely genuine and much more impactful.

3. Look Both Cross-Platform and within Individual Platforms

Certain micro-influencers are powerhouses across platforms. The benefit of engaging with these types of social leaders is that they can scale your message to a larger audience regardless of the individual social platform preferences of consumers. This gives you a certain level of broad coverage.

For example, Susie Bulloch is a powerful micro-influencer in the food and beverage space, and more specifically, on the topic of grilling. She boasts more than 608,000 Facebook followers, along with 38,200+ Instagram followers, and 8,000 followers on Pinterest. Mmm, sweet!

However, it would be a mistake to limit your micro-influencer marketing outreach to only those influencers with cross-platform appeal. Derek Wolf (“Over the Fire Cooking”) is also a grilling specialist, with more than 477,000 Instagram followers. Outside of Instagram, none of his social accounts reach 4,500. It would still behoove a food or beverage brand looking to get in touch with grilling lovers to connect and engage with Derek, as his Instagram followers are deeply passionate (and know an exceptional BBQ sauce when they taste one!).

Go broad, but also go deep!

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4. Set Afire the Network Effect

Every influencer who creates content about you sends ripple effects across their networks as they promote their content, discuss your brand, and spread positive sentiment about your brand. For every message disseminated, there’s an opportunity for more and more people to pick up on it and spread it to their own friends and networks. The more you do, the more traction you gain. It’s the compound effect, resulting in an accelerated level of interest among your influencer’s communities.

It’s not strategic to simply get an influencer to randomly blast out a Tweet about your brand, nor to disingenuously push your product.

What works more effectively in extending your reach and scaling your impact? Genuine engagement. By focusing on serving micro-influencers in a way that ultimately thrills their audiences, your efforts are aligned towards what gets attention, shares, and in turn, new fans, followers, and customers.

If you’re truly interested in scaling your SEO and micro-influencer marketing, though, your efforts cannot be “one and done”. The more you do, the more the network effect becomes a reality.

5. Don’t Forget Your Own Fans

While targeting influencers, don’t forget to engage with your own fans and community. While many in the community may not have as extensive a reach as the influencers you actively target, these are individuals who are already committed to your brand. This is low-hanging fruit.

Each member of your social community is an influencer with their own network, regardless of its respective reach. By going all in with your own community and showering them with love and VIP-level attention, you unleash many “super-micro-influencers” already eager to spread your message.

Summary

Does micro-influencer marketing really scale? A leading yogurt brand engaged Terakeet in a partnership to create engagement with influencers in the food and beverage space. We successfully designed and executed several campaigns, resulting in unique content being written and published by over 1,600 different influencers in the food space, yielding 29M unique brand impressions. That’s scale.

Without a clear SEO strategy and the technology to back it up, though, it can be extremely time consuming and inefficient to scale your micro-influencer marketing. Follow the steps listed above, and you’ll extend your marketing strategy’s reach exponentially.

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