Digital marketing allows small businesses to compete with large enterprises for one particular reason: the available digital marketing instruments are affordable and measurable. Even on a tight budget, a small business can reach thousands of potential customers with a good marketing campaign. Even better, there are ways to fine-tune the campaign to produce the biggest impact and increase conversions.
For digital marketers, influencer marketing is one of the most valuable instruments to use. Today, however, top influencers are relatively expensive and aren’t necessarily accessible if you are on a tight budget. This is where micro influencers come in handy.
Who Are Micro Influencers?
In simple terms, micro influencers are anyone whose social media followers are in the range of 2,000 to 50,000. Micro influencers offer their social media accounts as a way for brands (and individuals) to reach new audience groups in specific segments.
There are a number of advantages offered by micro influencers. For starters, micro influencers produce higher engagement rate compared to larger, more prominent influencers. Influencers with around 2,000 followers are more likely to engage their users too.
As a result, it is not uncommon for micro influencers to have a higher klout score than big influencers. If you get 200 likes and you have 2,000 followers, you are looking at a base engagement rate of 10%. Getting the same number of likes when you have 20,000 followers means your base engagement rate is only 1%.
The higher engagement rate is only the beginning. Micro influencers also spend more time interacting with their followers. They reply to comments, engage users through questions and probing posts, and earn higher trust from their followers. The micro influencers’ audience is also more segmented.
It is only natural that micro influencers are now considered more appealing for digital marketing campaigns. Businesses and brands can be very detailed in selecting the right influencers to work with without ever going over their budget. That actually brings us to our next point.
Finding Micro Influencers
Influencer marketing platforms now offer direct access to micro influencers. They provide you with an extensive catalog of influencers, their follower count and klout score, and other details. Some platforms even display the rate of each influencer directly, so you can choose influencers based on the budget you have for influencer marketing.
Trusting influencer marketing platforms blindly, however, is not something you want to do. There are a number of problems affecting today’s influencer marketing landscape, and these problems can render your micro influencer marketing campaign useless.
The biggest problem of them all is the use of fake followers; well, inflated numbers in general. With influencer marketing becoming a hot business, more social media users want to achieve that “influencer” status. Unfortunately, not all of them pursue this through legitimate means.
You can buy fake followers for virtually nothing from many service providers. A lot of these bot social media accounts also use proxies and automation tools to appear legitimate. You can even order likes and comments, which means you can prop your engagement rate up.
For brands, however, fake followers don’t bring any value. What brands – and you – want is real followers that actually view the message, interact with the campaign, and become a customer in the long run. Fake followers cannot do any of that.
At the same time, influencer marketing is a competitive field. Not all influencers are available on influencer marketing platforms. In fact, some influencers only work with select platforms (or one platform exclusively), so you have to do a wider search to find influencers that suit your brand.
Web Scraping and Research
So, how do you find the best micro influencers to work with? While relying on influencer marketing platforms to help you is a great way to start, you still have to do your own research to find suitable influencers to hire. This is where web scraping becomes an invaluable solution.
You can scrape social networking sites like Twitter and Instagram for data. Scraping tools are easy to find and you can use the same proxy services used by bots to remain anonymous as you do your thorough research.
Data scraping reveals more than just the name of micro influencers. You can learn about their followers, study their social media posts – including the keywords or phrases that they often use – and make sure that genuine engagement can be found on those posts.
The more data you gather, the better your decision will be. Choosing the right micro influencer to hire is a matter of understanding who you are dealing with, knowing the audience segment you want to target, and making sure that the two aspects match perfectly.
Before you run your own influencer marketing campaign, make sure you use the tips and tricks we discussed in this article. Don’t forget to integrate automation into the mix; once you do a data scraping run, you can automate more tasks in your marketing campaign with ease.
