Influencer marketing has been so successful in the last decade that we now distinguish different types of influencers, including micro, macro, and mega influencers. As social media platforms increase in numbers, influencer marketing has become one of the fastest ways of reaching new customers.
Micro-influencers can be better than larger ones because their audience is more loyal and, therefore, more likely to listen to the influencer. This means that products advertised by micro-influencers enjoy higher conversion rates than those offered by larger ones.
The massive popularity of influencer marketing drives brands to approach major influencers, thinking they could capitalize on their fans’ huge followings.
Their audiences are highly engaging; therefore, if a brand works with an extremely relevant micro-influencer, they can dramatically increase reach and engagement. The advantage of using a micro-influencer is that their audiences are much more engaged. If you can find one within your specific niche, your products will resonate much better with audiences. A macro-influencer may reach a wide range of people simultaneously, whereas micro-influencer campaigns enable your brand to reach a specific niche audience more accurately.
Macro and Micro Compared
While a macro influencer may have more reach from a followers perspective, micro-influencers are highly engaging, and that can push a piece of content into higher visibility and greater credibility. The space your brand would get using one influencer with several million followers would be much higher than using multiple micro-influencers; even though micro-influencers have higher engagement, they cannot compete with more prominent influencers based solely on numbers.
The stats prove this to be accurate, too, with micro-influencers on average getting about 4% engagement (some super-micro-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers get up to 25% engagement), while mega-influencers (with more than a million followers) are clocking in at under 2%. If you are working with an influencer with a wide-ranging 500,000+ following, then not everyone from a 500-strong wide-ranging audience will be cycling.
If the influencer has lots of followers but rarely engages with them, or their followers are not engaged with them, they will not help you with a promotion campaign. A micro-influencer in the fashion industry is unlikely to have followers who are not constantly resonating, as may be true for many macro-influencers.
We can expect lower engagement numbers than we would with a micro-influencer unless the macro-influencer has a different headline, helping followers feel like they have a real connection to the macro-influencer. As long as you have similar audiences, and Micro-influencers and average folks actively engage their followers daily, they can be as helpful as Macro-influencers.
The Influence of Macro Influencers
Macro-influencers can reach audiences over 20 times larger than those run by micro-influencers, which is helpful when brands are trying to get their message out to large, often diverse groups of people. Micro-influencers also know their audiences on a far more intimate level and can deliver content they know will resonate with them — making their sponsored posts seem more authentic (like a personal recommendation) and less like generic endorsements or ads.
Unlike outreach-based campaigns, which aim to put the product in front of millions of people and convert a tiny fraction of those, micro-influencer drives are designed to reach a much smaller, more nuanced audience once you understand which kind of influencer–micro-vs. Macro–best fits the goals of your campaign; proceed by carefully selecting a small set of influencers with followers who are a close match for your target audience.
The takeaway is to select your influencers according to their engagement rates and audience diversity. When determining what mix of influencers makes the most sense for your business, you should also consider whether you are looking to reach large groups of people or reach out to specific markets. One of the most significant decisions you will need to make revolves around choosing micro vs. macro types of influencers in the ocean of influencer categories, platforms, and channels.
Once you have decided on the influencers you want to work with and have agreed on the campaigns, the final step is reaching out to them. First, start by looking at your followers to find influencers who are already following you and any followers with a significant number (in the thousands) of highly engaged followers. Once you have put together a list of influencers you want to work with, you can start reaching out to them using tools such as the GroupHigh mentioned above or Buzzstream.
Tips on Influencer Marketing Campaigns
For many influencer marketing campaigns, you will have to find and reach a far more significant number of influencers. This means you could target many Instagram influencers in one movement. Many smaller-following influencers might not yet be on databases and marketplaces. If you run a social media hashtag search on your targeted keywords, the keywords you are targeting should bring up a few good options for micro-influencers talking about these terms.
If your brand sells fancy cheese, you are in the overall food industry; there is no question, though, that will be micro-influencers solely focused on cheese, which is followed by a much more engaged audience than larfoodie influencerscers.
For instance, if your brand sells yoga mats, then working with a yogi-influencer that has a respectable following of 6,000 people who routinely shares insights with their community of like-minded yoga fans makes sense compared with a fitness influencer that has one million fans that is more interested in running than practicing yoga mat practice.
Because micro-influencers have smaller numbers of followers, this usually means that they are much more engaging with them daily, compared to some hugely influential individuals with hundreds of thousands of followers, who might not be in a position to interact with their followers at high rates. Big Influencers are not as likely to have hefty price tags as big-time Influencers. Not every business can afford the influencers of famous names because they are so expensive.
