Micro-Influencer Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide 2023 (UPDATED)

Influencer marketing is not something new. We have seen celebrities endorsing products to us, resulting in brand popularity and easy acceptance in the market. But yeah these big influencers have a huge fee associated with them, and not everyone can afford them.

But hey! no one asked you to approach Kardashians to promote your brand! 4 billion people around the world using the internet, and there are definitely a few that can be part of your brand without burning your marketing budget. These influencers who work with a smaller but targeted reach are referred to as micro-influencers.

Micro influencer and the products they endorse has helped brands reach target audiences in more effective, authentic, and affordable ways. With following of 1K-50K, a brand can speak to genuine customers via Micro Influencers.

A survey from WhoSay reported on eMarketer, found that a massive 70% of U.S. agencies and brands agreed that influencer marketing budgets would increase in 2018. And 89% reported that influencer marketing is going to positively impact how people feel about a brand.

Reasons to use Micro-Influencers as Brand Strategy

Genuine Reach

There is no doubt about the fact that micro-influencers can have a macro impact, as their followers’ list will be more genuine and our go-to-market. With a low to decent followers list, a large percentage of their fan base will be people will be those who they actually know and therefore are more likely to trust their recommendations.

Reaching out to the right micro influencer shall be the key to success of your brand, as the possibility of bots and fake users reduces tremendously with micro influencer group.

Works on Small Budget

As a brand, investing in micro-influencers to reach your audience can reap better ROI than investing in higher investment campaigns like Adwords. Micro-influencers can even work for a product giveaway and/or a smaller payout.

Builds Trust

As per Neilsen’s report, 92% of customers trust recommendations even from individuals they do not know. It becomes all the more important for your brand to build trust with your target audience, and micro-influencers are trusted sources of recommendations for followers, as they are personally involved in the product and interest they pursue and give a recommendation to their followers.

Find Right Micro-Influencer For Your Brand

Finding the right influencer is THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE for a brand. Scanning influencers’ profile who have the right set of audiences that one can cater to is a time exhausting process.

Here are some of the ways that can you can use to involve the right influencer.

Scan Own Follower List

By scanning your own followers’ list on Instagram/Facebook, you’ll definitely get a couple of names that you can work with. As these influencers know your brand and its offering and can represent your brand in the best way to their followers. The best way to build a long-lasting relationship with these micro-influencers is to appreciate them for their support, follow them back, and send a direct message.

Using Hashtags #

As a marketer, you should use hashtags to make your search process more relevant, and smooth and trace influencers with the right set of audience and content. Narrowing your search, for example, if you are into skincare try using #acneissues #antiaging rather than using generic terms like #skincare. Focus on the requirement and problems and approach it.

Tools to Use

Using relevant tools can simplify your search to a great extent. Tools like Buzzsumo, and Ninja Outreach can save your time and provide you with a readymade list of influencers in your niche in an instant search.

Things to Consider Before Hiring Micro-Influencers

FTC Guidelines

FTC issued a guideline for brands who intend to use influencer marketing. FTC’s regulations to “improve disclosures”, is to help consumers understand which content is promotional, even if they are coming from a popular figure.

Asking for Insights

All of this data needs to be made available by the influencers from their platform insights. There is, however, a limitation to sharing insights for a platform like Instagram, as these metrics are private and belong to the influencer, one needs to rely on the influencer to provide it, being transparent is the key here. But I think that they will share it as there will be monetary compensation that is involved in the campaign.

• Scenario 1: For Instagram an influencer profile must be set as a business account, to see impressions stats, only then an influencer can share a screenshot of the metrics to the brand.
• Scenario 2: Facebook impressions or reach metrics is available to people who manage the page – under the reach metric we can see put a number on the target market that we have reached with our promoted posts.

Payout to Micro-Influencers

Here is a general payout structure that I follow for micro-influencers who I work with. The payout is per post basis:

• Up to 10K  followers, Free products, and or a negotiated payout of $40 – $80
• Greater than 10K – 50K followers $90-$200
• Greater than  100K  followers $300-$500
• And so on….
• Add an additional 25% for video content

Measuring Success of Micro-Influencer Marketing Campaign

Often a debated topic; How to Measure Success of Digital Marketing Campaign?  

Here is some analytical approach to measure the results of your influencer marketing campaign.

Defining Reach

Establishing reach is will be a vital element in measuring the ROI of our campaign. Our KPIs that define reach will be:-

• Followers: Followers or fan bases each of our micro-influencers have the reach of
• Impressions: Number of times our message flashed on the screen of followers/targets
• Traffic Generated: Hits generated via influencers to a landing page on our website

As mentioned above, all these insights must be made available by influencers themselves, especially for Instagram influencers.

Brand Engagement

Brand engagement plays a crucial role in acquiring new customers. You can do this by getting involved with your customers and by representing yourself as an engaged brand by addressing your customers directly you’ll get an involved audience who is engaged with your brand.

It’s simple to calculate the above metrics

For Example, an influencer X got 800 likes on their Instagram post along with 40 comments, whereas another influencer Y got 500 likes and 30 comments. This implies

Therefore a total of 1370 people engaged and consumed influencers’ content.

Link Tracking

UTM & bit.ly link tracking works great with Blogs and Facebook, especially for campaigns aimed at driving sales. A specific parameter for each influencer will make it easy for us to track the most beneficial influencer for use in analytics.

Coupon Codes

Having coupon codes for influencers has been practised widely by brands by giving each influencer a unique coupon code that will enable the audience to purchase a product and fetch an instant discount. We can easily measure the redemption of the coupon codes over analytics by enabling enhanced e-commerce tracking and configuring promotion data.

However, we can only follow this strategy if you want to pursue a discounted sales strategy.

Creating Landing Pages

By creating special landing pages designed for influencer campaigns aimed to drive sales and new customer acquisition, we can track

• Visitor Count
• Unique Page Views
• Actions Taken on the Page / Event Tracking

Analytics will help us in gathering this data and tracking sales on these special landing pages. This will be an important tool that will track online sales.

So here it is, my first post 🙂 but certainly not in terms of experience. The above points are made available after working in the field of digital marketing for almost 8 years now. I hope you’ll find it useful. Feel free to share your comments and ideas here.