Benefits to Using Micro Influencers For Marketing

If you use any social media platform, you are probably already familiar with the concept of influencers. Influencers have very large social media followings and post content that promotes certain products and services in order to encourage their followers to make purchases. Businesses pay these influencers in return for the influencer promoting their products and/or services to their social media followers. There are several benefits to using micro influencers for marketing. 

Even if you have basic knowledge of what an influencer is, though, you might still be in the dark about micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are social media influencers with relatively low numbers of followers. These micro-influencers usually have followings of between 10,000 and 100,000 people. Macro influencers, on the other hand, often have thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers on a single one of their social media accounts.

Isn’t the point of marketing to convince as many people as possible to buy your product or spend money on the services you offer? If macro-influencers reach such a wide audience, why do so many companies even bother to do business with micro-influencers whose reach is so much smaller? 

There are many reasons why businesses might choose to strike up a professional connection with a micro-influencer rather than an influencer with a larger base of followers. Keep reading to discover 3 benefits of using micro-influencers for marketing campaigns. 

1. More Affordable 

One of the main reasons why many businesses opt to hire micro-influencers rather than macro-influencers to promote their products is affordability. Because micro-influencers have fewer followers than macro-influencers, they have fewer companies clamoring to do business with them. They are considered less valuable and their posts are thought to be less lucrative than those of macro-influencers due to the difference in their number of followers. 

Micro-influencers are also less well-known than macro-influencers as a whole. Many business owners are unaware that they can hire social media users with lower numbers of followers to promote their products or services.

Because of the low demand for micro-influencers and the fact that the products these influencers promote reach a fairly small audience, hiring a micro-influencer to promote your product is much more affordable than hiring a macro influencer. 

While some businesses shell out thousands of dollars to hire macro-influencers to publish a single promotional post for them, hiring a micro-influencer to do the exact same thing can cost as little as a few hundred dollars. For many businesses— especially smaller businesses with tighter budgets—hiring micro-influencers is much more practical for these businesses than spending their entire marketing budget on hiring one macro influencer to promote their products. 

2. Authentic Engagement 

Micro-influencers tend to focus on a specific niche on their social media, whereas macro influencers tend to post broader content that spans a wider range of topics. 

Hiring micro-influencers for marketing to promote your business and its products can actually result in more authentic engagement with potential customers. Many people follow macro-influencers simply because they are very popular and well-known. 

People who follow niche micro-influencers, on the other hand, are genuinely interested in their posts and are more likely to be engaged and moved by their content—including promotional content. In fact, recent statistics show that micro-influencers have, on average, a 60% higher engagement rate than macro-influencers. 

3. Higher Influence 

Having more followers doesn’t necessarily mean more people are actually listening to what you have to say or taking your advice. In fact, the opposite is true in many cases when it comes to influencer marketing. 

Micro-influencers tend to come off as more “human” and many of their followers think of them as friends rather than strangers. Macro influencers seem more distant and removed from you because they have so many followers. 

People are much more likely to trust the advice of people they know—or people they feel like they know—which means many people are much more likely to take action to purchase something that is recommended to them by a micro-influencer than something that is recommended to them by a macro influencer.

Given these reasons, it’s no wonder we have seen a rise in the use of influencers for marketing strategy.