The size of your social media following that is.
Influencer versus micro-influencer leads to an interesting look at how mass numbers of followers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best fit for your brand. Throwing money at high-profile celebs to represent your brand will always be a solution for some, but for others, finding the micro-influencers that have a niche following with truly dedicated followers could reap significantly better results.
The joys of micro-influencers like @amandafrederickson is that she can really engage with her audience on a very personal basis, and her followers absolutely love that about her. Also, chances are that micro-influencers’ sponsored post rates are considerably lower than that of big-name celebrities.
The wonderful team over at Buffer social give us the 5 main points to making the most of your influencer campaign.
- Planning
- Finding
- Reaching out
- Coordinating
- Analysing
Within these they break it down into little ‘to-do’ lists of sorts for each before you move into the next point. In the planning stage, you’ll be looking at setting the goals and KPIs you’re looking to get out of this campaign, and choosing which of the social media platforms you’re looking to target—this will also determine which micro-influencers will be suited to your brand.
Finding your micro-influencers can be time consuming, you can either Google your way around or search through the different social media platforms you’re considering. There are filter features on both Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram you’ll simply search for people with the ‘search’ aimed at whatever your campaign is about.
On the other side of that, is using an agency or a platform—the guys over at Tribe are doing an amazing job, and you’ve got plenty of options like Buzzsumo, Clear, TheRightFit…the list goes on and on. There’s many things to considering when choosing which influencers will be best for your brand, so do a bit of research about their activity and their followers and outside of their social media page—how they are seen in the media. A micro-influencer with a skeleton in the closest could come back and bite you in the…yep.
Reaching out is an obvious one—email them, call them, direct message them, whatever you need to do to try and get in touch. But be aware there’s a limit to how much you should try before you should just let it go if they don’t respond. You don’t want to come across as desperate, needy or just plain creepy. GaryVee shared a great example of how to reach out via Instagram, and a also commenting on peoples posts mentioning being interested in collaboration could always do the trick.
So now we’re onto the coordination. This includes:
- Getting your goals out in the open so everyone is aware of what’s expected of the campaign
- Setting any guidelines regarding your brand and its image or persona, etc
- Working out how much of your campaign you want to invest with them—maybe they have multiple social media and even a blog and you want to target all of those avenues over a four-week period, for example.
Once it’s live, time to bring out the measuring tape. Pulling analytics on social media and website figures has never been easier, a click on a mouse and you’ve got figures on the reach, engagement and all the rest. Compare against the goals for your campaign, how did it measure up? Should you have done something differently that you might employ next time? It’s a trial and error process to some extent, some micro-influencers and their audience may not work for your brand even though all the signs pointed in the right direction. Just remember, there’s a reason that 48% of marketers decided to up their influencer marketing budgets for 2017 (according to eMarketer).
Katherine Auchterlonie
SOCIAL MEDIA & DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER
