Managing Director at TERRITORY Influence, the leading full service influencer marketing agency in Europe and North America
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Influencer marketing is very much in vogue right now. Brands all over the world are starting to include it in their marketing mix; however, many marketers do not know which type of influencers are best for their brands. For this reason, I’ve spent time looking at the types of influencers whom brands collaborate with and how they deliver value to marketing teams.
Consumers consciously or unconsciously decide what content is worth paying attention to. Messages that are transmitted through another person, especially someone a user trusts and respects, can have a greater chance of cutting through the ad clutter. This is why brands are increasingly turning to online creators and influencers to share branded messages on their behalf.
However, I find that many brands still confuse influence and popularity. Instead of looking at someone’s influence over others, they only look at the number of followers and fans.
We at Territory Influence believe that everyone is an influencer and has an influence on someone. Hence, we are looking at the effects different types of influencers have on engaging with and impacting other people. To measure this, it is important to look beyond the number of followers and start analyzing influencer credibility, audience engagement, content quality and the power to drive actions and impact sales. So, it is clear that there’s a variety of factors marketers must consider before starting a collaboration with any influencer, online or offline, to maximize the marketing impact.
Based on what I’ve seen these days, celebrity influencers have been used so often by brands looking to promote themselves that some consumers believe they can’t be taken seriously anymore. This creates a problem for brands that are not only looking to create awareness but also impact. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of followers don’t automatically make a campaign more successful than working with an influencer who has fewer followers.
Micro-influencers have established themselves as a new opportunity for marketers to be more relevant to their target audience and send their messages in a more authentic way. What does “micro-influencer” mean? Micro-influencers are people with smaller communities of followers on social media, but those followers are often much more loyal and active than those of influencers with higher numbers of followers. In general, there is an inverse relationship between the number of followers on social media and the engagement percentage rate — the larger the influencer’s following, the lower the percentage of engaged fans.
At Territory Influence, we define micro-influencers as people who have built a sizeable community (between 10,000 and 100,000 followers) based on their specific interests and expertise. Based on that expertise and passion for a topic (which could be anything from cooking to travel, from pets to DIY, or from beauty to fashion), their audience is often highly engaged (subscription required) and puts a lot of trust into the content creator. While considered a trusted topic expert, micro-influencers are still personally connected and have established relationships with most of their followers due to the personal touch that larger companies and social celebrities often lack.
That’s why micro-influencers, indeed, also have influence over their fans and followers. According to one study, “micro-influencers have up to 22.2 times more ‘buying conversations’ that include product recommendations each week than an average consumer.” Further, “Influencers are more direct in their recommendations with 74% encouraging someone to ‘buy it or try it,’” and “82% of consumers are ‘highly likely’ to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.”
Considering these figures, it is critical that people pay closer attention to micro-influencers because they clearly represent specific interests and lifestyles your brand may be looking to reach. At the same time, I’ve also found that micro-influencers are more approachable and relatable. With a smaller yet immensely dedicated fan base, they are keen to listen to and react upon their product recommendations.
Yet, micro-influencers are often overlooked by marketing teams and their agency partners when developing influencer marketing and social media campaigns. I believe this is driven by an obsession in marketing to simply focus on reach as the only key performance indicator (KPI) and the complexity involved in scaling up micro-influencer campaigns to reach your target group.
Smart marketers are looking beyond the number of social media fans and developing campaigns focusing on marketing impact. Engaging groups of micro-influencers can provide significant sales impact and return on investment. Especially with the tools available today, it’s feasible to set up campaigns with hundreds of micro-influencers who deliver similar online reach as social celebrities, but with higher engagement, more value to your customers and bigger impact. It’s not all about reach — it’s also about relevancy, resonance and real impact.
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