Micro vs. marco influencer marketing

At the initial boom of social media influencers in 2010, businesses began collaborating with ‘Insta-famous’ influencers on marketing initiatives, diverting away from focusing on celebrities to be their go-to brand ambassadors.

But more recently, brands have also started noticing micro-influencers, with followers ranging between 1,000 and 10,000 on social media. So why would businesses work with smaller-scale influencers versus the ones with more followers?

Micro-influencers tend to garner genuine interest and can equally generate high engagement levels and bring ROI – depending on the quality of content they post and the target demographic they have in common with the business they’re partnering up with. Head of inbound marketing at Pulsar, Amir Jirbandey, elaborated on the importance of ROI in this scenario:

“The increased engagement rates achieved by working with micro-influencers means that there is often a much higher ROI. Traditional social influencers or brand ambassadors will have a large network, but often they are not well-connected. Engaging with a series of well-placed micro-influencers, who connect multiple networks, will result in a brand’s message influencing more relevant people.”

AEG home appliances manufacturer recently had a successful collaborative campaign to raise awareness around a ‘Tasteology’ documentary to demonstrate how users can take the flavour to another level in the kitchen, targeting psychology professors and purveyors of scientific gastronomy.

The campaign reached almost 8 million users across Twitter and YouTube, generating over 1000 clicks and 2000 retweets from just under 300 messages.

The only downside of partnering up with an influencer is that it’s hard to accurately measure the ROI of an ongoing collaborative campaign. However, the level of success can be determined based on the Google Analytics data analysis.

Whether you’re partnering up with a micro or macro influencer, collaborations with relevant bloggers have contributed to twice as much conversion if you compare it with your SEM or SEO efforts without partnerships.

Influencer partnerships are a great brand awareness strategy that can contribute to ROI. As a result, it should be included as a tactic within the marketing plan. The most important aspect for consideration is not relying on one tactic and looking at your strategy from a bigger picture. You can use influencer marketing throughout various campaigns to complement your marketing campaigns to help generate organic traffic. It is not the complete solution but an essential part of the marketing equation.

References:

SocialPubli: The importance of micro-influencers and getting influencer marketing into a more comprehensive campaign (2019). Available at: https://bit.ly/2OOAz5J]