3 Ways to Use Micro-Influencers to Grow Your Business

Influencer marketing has gained a lot of attention and popularity in recent years, partly due to the massive rise in numbers of influencers. Small, big and everything in between, there’s an influencer for anybody and everybody. Here you will learn three top ways that you can use micro-influencers to grow your business.

If you’re unfamiliar with micro-influencers, the term is used to describe influencers with a rather small audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers on social media. They can be anything from regular people with a larger than average audience, to thought leaders in your niche who don’t have a huge following, but still hold influence.

For many people, their first instinct is to go after the top influencers—the ones who have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers, the ones whose names are known worldwide. The downside is these people are more difficult to get, not to mention, much more expensive to employ; in fact, some brands have had to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few photos, and it’s not at all uncommon to pay over $1,000 for a single Instagram post.

But it’s not just costs that make micro-influencers so appealing; while sure, they don’t have the reach that a celebrity or macro-influencer can bring to the table, what they do have is a much closer relationship with their followers.
When researching social influencers, engagement is, arguably, the most important metric to consider. Numbers of followers don’t really count at the end of the day if the followers are not interested in or engaging with the influencer, or if the influencer isn’t engaging with the followers in return.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you’re much better off with an influencer who has fewer than 100,000 followers, but is actively engaging on a regular basis, rather than an influencer with over half a million followers, but who never takes the time to engage. The higher number of followers, the more difficult it is to catch up and to take the time to respond to mentions.

Because micro-influencers are more engaged, their followers are also more likely to trust them and their opinions. A study has found that 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

The best place to start looking for micro-influencer, is in your own backyard: your social media followers. These influencers hold the advantage of already being familiar with your business, and they may be already sharing your content with their followers  or engaging with you.

To find influencers in your follower base, you can use a tool like Agorapulse, which has a social media CRM tool that automatically tags any influencers in your list. The tool also tags any brand ambassadors, users who have been sharing your content in the past.

Next, to find more micro-influencers, you can use a tool like BuzzSumo. Better known as a tool for finding the best, most shared content in any niche, it also offers a powerful influencer search engine that allows you to filter results based on audience size, making it easy to find micro-influencers or influencers of any size you want. You can also check an influencers reply and retweet ration, their websites’ domain authority, as well as their average retweets and a list of the links they’ve shared on social media.

For the outreach part, there are several options for tools, such as Ninja Outreach, GroupHigh and BuzzStream.

One of the best ways to use micro-influencers is to get them to review your product or service. As respected thought-leaders and influencers in their niche or community, their recommendation of your product or service can help you not only increase your brand awareness and get more targeted traffic to your website, but it can also help you make more sales. As I mentioned earlier, a big percentage of customers are highly likely to trust and act upon a recommendation made by an influencer.

For best results, give the influencer full access to your product or service for free, as well as a demonstration on how to use it, if needed. This way, they’ll be able to take images and videos that they can include in their product review and on their social media.

In many cases, people need that extra push to decide to make a purchase from you. More often than not, that push comes in the form of a limited-time discount offer.

Influencers are a great tool to help you promote discounted offers. By sharing offers with their followers, the social influencers are also effectively showing their support for your product or service, so you can increase your chances of making more conversions.

Create an image that the influencer can share on their social media and provide a discount code for them to promote. Ideally, you should try to use the name of the influencer in your discount code; this shows that the discount was created specifically for this influencers’ fans, and it will also make it easier to track which of your new customers are coming from which influencer.

Another way to use micro-influencers to your advantage is with guest blogging. This way, you are reaching their blog audience as well, which can mean an increase in brand awareness, more traffic to your own blog or website, more shares and engagement on social media, plus it’s a great way to build quality links.

To start your outreach, first make a list of the influencers’ blogs, making a note of their domain authority, so that you can prioritize more easily. Make sure that their audience fits your own target audience and check to see how many shares and comments their posts get on a normal basis–the more, the better!

Then, look to see if they have any guest blogging guidelines that you will need to adhere to. When you start reaching out to influencers, you’ll want to show them that you’re not only familiar with their blog, but that you’ve also done your homework and know what guidelines they want followed.

Some might also want to see a complete draft of the article first; if that’s not the case, try to give them some headline and topic options that they can then choose from.

Micro-influencers are not only very effective marketing tools, but they may also be the most effective type of influencer. While they don’t have the reach of a macro-influencer or a celebrity, they have an engaged, targeted audience on their side that helps them get real results.

Post by: Lilach Bullock

Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach Bullock has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Lilach was listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.

Company: Lilach Bullock
Website: www.lilachbullock.com
Connect with me on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn.

The post 3 Ways to Use Micro-Influencers to Grow Your Business appeared first on AllBusiness.com