Micro influencers vs influencers

With the amount of people using ad blockers constantly on the rise, Influencer Marketing is having its pivotal moment within Digital Marketing. What used to be called “Referral Marketing” with word-of-mouth at its core before the era of the internet, has turned into a whole new field of marketing: Influencer Marketing. Influencer Marketing includes identifying relevant influencers, finding their ideal target group, and activating them for referrals - today, all of this mostly happens online.

When thinking of influencers, most of us imagine the Kardashians, celebrities or social media personalities with a huge following. While these indeed are influencers, there is a whole different group of people that can have a huge impact on brand growth and targeted marketing: Micro-Influencers.

What’s a Micro-Influencer?

We all know micro-influencers. They’re those friends and family members that form strong opinions about products and aren’t afraid to recommend them to their peers. You might be one of them yourself. Even though micro-influencers don’t have a strong social media following, their connections value their opinion and as they are much closer to their connections than a major Influencer, their referrals have a strong impact.

Look at your social media connections. Most of them probably share your interests, live in the same location or work in a similar field. It’s very likely that they would be interested in the same products that you are. So even though a micro-influencer’s referral will reach less people, than one by a Kardashian, the people it reaches are most likely highly relevant to the target group while at the same time in personal connection to the influencer and therefore more likely to trust his or her opinion. This is a huge advantage. Let’s dive into the fundamentals of Influencer Marketing to understand why.

Influencers - The Pros and Cons

Influencer Marketing is easy: find people with a great influence on your target group and activate them to become ambassadors for your products. Influencer Marketing can have immediate effect if you find the right person. It’s also a great way to boost other marketing activities, such as branding and emotional retention. Influencer Marketing can easily be used alongside other marketing practices. It has word-of-mouth at its core, which has proven successful since the invention of marketing. If Influencer Marketing has such a high success rate, why isn’t everyone using it yet?

Although the potential of Influencer Marketing is great, a bought mention only gets the word about your product out there. In some cases, this isn’t enough to convince consumers to buy. This is why many companies work with several influencers on one target group at the same time. However, pushing a product too much via Influencer Marketing can quickly feel fake and therefore looses a lot of its referral value. Other disadvantages include:

• Influencer Marketing can be very expensive
• Relying only on other’s influence is less sustainable than organic brand growth
• General risk of picking the wrong influencer or targeting the wrong people

You can conclude that you should only go for traditional Influencer Marketing, if you have a clear idea of what you’re doing and it’s directly complimenting your other marketing activity - not replacing it. Oh, and yes, you should have a big budget ready as well. Not convinced you should invest in an influencer? Lucky you, as Micro-Influencers may just be the right pick for you to try.

How to (micro-)influence

Micro-influencers come with most of the benefits of a major influencer, but way less disadvantages. Their main advantage being that they share authentic experiences that are trusted by peers - while also being cheaper.

Now, how effective are micro-influencers? Isn’t “micro-influencer” just a fancy term to make companies who can’t afford real influencers feel less bad? You can start by thinking of micro-influencers as customers directly recommending products to potential customers. But it’s not just that simple. Micro-influencers, if activated efficiently, can not only promote your brand, but also offer an expert and “real” opinion of a product - which is much more trustworthy than a major influencer’s opinion. 

Studies have shown, that having a smaller reach or following actually leads to double the engagement. The reason for this is simple: credibility.

So how can you find micro-influencers for your product or service? And how do you activate them? Start using the Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter Score - Identify, Target, and Activate Micro-Influencers

The Net Promoter Score (short: NPS) is a one-question survey you send out to your customers post-purchase. Customers rate how likely they are to recommend your product on a scale from 0 to 10 which gives you the necessary knowledge to define the Promoters among them. Promoters are those customers who give you a 9 or 10 answer in the survey. Congrats, you found yourself some potential micro-influencer.s Now you just need to target them in a way that activates them for referrals.

You can activate them by sending instant emails and text messages with promotion codes post-purchase. Sending special offers to Promoters, encouraging them to share their positive experience with your product has proven efficient in terms of finding new customers and boosting revenue. You don’t waste any time and can directly use the positive emotions triggered by the experience with your product to direct influence towards potential customers.

Conclusion

Instead of potentially wasting a huge budget on traditional Influencer Marketing, why not use your own happy customers to spread the word? Turning satisfied customers into micro-influencers doesn’t have to be expensive, and has benefits in terms of credibility, measurability and hitting the spot with the right target group. Use tools such as the Net Promoter Score to identify and activate micro-influencers and grow your revenue today.

Ready for more? Read our step-by-step guide about how to scale influencer marketing by turning customers into promoters.