How Micro-Influencers can Help Brands Increase User-Generated Content and Engagement?

In the world we live in now, which is dominated by social media, the term "social media influencer" is becoming the gold standard.

But it can be hard to get a hold of the secret sauce behind marketing strategies that use micro-influencers. Still, brands and digital marketers are starting to realize how important it is to use micro-influencers for more strategic and cost-effective influencer marketing. Influencer marketing, which is the process of using social media influencers to create branded and paid content, is known to be a simple and inexpensive way to market. A recent report from Influencer Marketing Hub says that more than 50 million people around the world think of themselves as social content creators. This has helped social commerce grow, which is expected to make up 17 percent of eCommerce by 2025. With so many people making content for social media and most people spending a lot of time there, brands are looking to micro-influencers and user-generated content (UGC) to increase their reach and keep people interested in their brands. At the same time, brands and marketers are seeing more user-generated content (UGC) like reviews, testimonials, and other posts on social media. It's not a coincidence that as the number of social media influencers grows, so does the amount and value of UGC from customers. Let's take a closer look at the pros of using micro-influencers instead of influencers and celebrities, how they affect user-generated content, and some marketing ideas you can use.

What do "micro-influencers" mean?

Forbes says that micro-influencers are people who use social media and have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. This number is still debatable, though, because some, like Harvard Media, think that micro-influencers have between 5,000 and 10,000 followers. Macro-influencers can have anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million followers. A person is considered a celebrity influencer once they have 1 million followers. But there are many rules that go along with the appeal that brands see in using influencers. Advertising with famous people who have a lot of influence usually involves complicated contracts and high costs, and it doesn't always lead to a rise in engagement. Instead, marketing with macro-influencers and celebrity influencers is better for brand awareness and rebranding when there is a negative sentiment or an acquisition. Here's where micro-influencers come out on top. The smaller and more approachable number of followers that micro-influencers have led to more engagement, less cost for brands, and a higher return on investment. This is because micro-influencers can interact with their audience through comments, stories, direct messages, and other niche interests, which helps them build a deeper emotional connection with their followers.

What is a strategy for marketing that uses influencers?

Influencer marketing takes place on social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Even though each of these platforms can help your brand grow, it's important to think about where your ideal customers and target audience spend time. Do they look through Instagram, watch and make videos on TikTok, or stream videos on YouTube? The first step in making an effective influencer marketing strategy is to find out where your target audience spends the most time.

Source: The Chat Agency More specifically, an influencer marketing strategy is a type of social media marketing that depends on product mentions, endorsements, and promotions from one or more influencers (personal social media accounts). We'll talk about how to make an influencer marketing strategy later, but first, here are the most important benefits of micro-influencer marketing.

What benefits does micro-influencer marketing have?

1. It helps keep costs down

Influencer Marketing Hub says that most micro-influencers charge between $100 and $500 per post. This number goes up a lot when brands use influencers, who can charge between $10,000 and $1 million per post (the higher end being household celebrity names). Because engagement rates for micro-influencers are usually higher than for celebrity influencers (3.86 percent on Instagram vs. 1.64 percent), brands can get a bigger return on their overall digital marketing spend.

2. Makes and encourages community and participation

When choosing a micro or large influencer to work with, engagement is more important than cost. Engagement rates are a way to measure how involved a person's audience is with an influencer's content. This includes, but isn't limited to, followers, resharing of stories and posts, comments and likes on posts, etc. When measuring an influencer's engagement rate, all of these things are taken into account. Most of the time, micro-influencers have higher engagement rates than other types of influencers.

Micro-influencers can get more interaction and real engagement from their followers because they have a smaller number of followers and a more specific audience. Statista says that the engagement rate for micro-influencers with about 5,000 followers was 5%. This is much higher than the average engagement rate for macro- and celebrity-level influencers, which is 2.2%.

3. Boosts UGC and gives customers more power

Similar to how engagement rates work, the ability of micro-influencers to connect with their audiences on a more specific and personal level makes it easier for customers to share UGC and user-generated visual content (VUGC).

For example, let's say that an Instagram user with 800 followers sees that one of their favorite micro-influencers, who has about 9,000 followers, is sharing content about a brand that they have also bought from. In that case, people are more likely to feel like they can talk about their own experiences with that brand or product. This is mostly because of the psychology behind influencer marketing. For example, Forbes says that sharing personal photos and videos "gives audiences a look into the real life of influencers, which can make followers feel personally connected."

4. Grows natural traffic and increases brand loyalty

Micro-influencers also tend to get more organic traffic and increase brand loyalty. According to a Business Wire report, 61 percent of social media users are more likely to trust a brand recommended by a friend or influencer on social media, but only 38 percent trust ads made by the brands themselves. When we think about how brand trust affects brand loyalty, we can see that the two are closely related. Our 2022 State of Brand Loyalty Survey showed that consumers associate the word "trust" most with "brand loyalty."

How to make a marketing plan for micro-influencers?

Here are five steps to think about when making and running a successful micro-influencer marketing plan:

1. Set milestones and goals

Finding the right micro-influencer is a key part of running a successful micro-influencer marketing campaign. Focusing on your brand's target audience, including the possible niche interests of your customers, is a big part of how effective and engaged your brand is. But before you reach out to specific micro-influencers, it's important to set goals and benchmarks that show how well your micro-influencer marketing campaigns are doing. Princess Polly is a brand that set up goals and benchmarks for its UGC strategy and micro-influencer marketing strategy that worked well. Princess Polly is a global clothing brand, and because of that, they have different marketing goals for different places. The Australian brand is more focused on getting customers in the US and other countries than in Australia. This means they have to make different marketing plans for the US and other countries than they do for Australia. By doing this early on, Princess Polly is able to use both successful UGC-driven marketing strategies and micro-influencer marketing on social media.

2. Find out about your audience and possible ways to reach them

In the same way, brands tend to have a general target audience, but customers in that audience will have different interests based on how they are segmented (e.g., age, location, purchase history, etc.). Micro-influencer marketing makes up for where influencer and celebrity endorsements fall short, which is that they may overgeneralize the interests of a brand's audience. It does this by promoting your brand to niche audiences, which may be better for some customers. Using existing UGC is one way to look for possible micro-influencers. For example, your brand can look at its "tagged" page on Instagram to see if any micro-influencers are already posting about it. Or, if you haven't found the right prospects on your brand's social media pages, exploring and analyzing existing customer data like UGC, VUGC, and reviews can help you narrow down potential unique interests that span multiple segments of your target audience.

3. Get in touch with micro-influencers and work out the details

Once you've found possible micro-influencers to reach out to, it's important to set budgets and timelines and think about other logistics before you reach out to them. So, if you are able to connect with one or more micro-influencers, you will have everything you need to start right away. Some logistical components to consider include: · Brand mission · Budget · Timeline · Format of content · Use rights · Messaging on brand · Engagement goals Setting up logistics also lets you talk to prospects in a clear way, so you can focus on making sure they fit with your brand's mission and style of engagement. Some things to think about during these first conversations are:

4. Report and evaluate how the campaign is going

It's important to track and measure the success of micro-content influencers after a post or campaign has been done with them. Brands can do this by giving micro-influencers trackable discount codes they can use in sponsored content, by giving UTM links to see which account site traffic is coming from, or by measuring how many people interact with a specific branded post. It's also important to see how much effort and engagement your micro-influencers put into the content they create. If the content isn't very good, the engagement won't be either. In a similar way, it's important to give micro-influencers more than one chance to post and support more than one post over time. This gets people to interact more naturally and seems more real to audiences. On the other hand, a sponsored post that doesn't have any follow-up might seem out of place.

5. Keep in touch with your influencers and make sure your marketing is connected.

In the same way, it's important to keep in touch with micro-influencers and make sure they feel like they're helping your brand achieve its goals. Collaboration is very important because the micro-influencers who talk to your audience every day know them better than anyone else. Influencer marketing has worked well for brands like Pura Vida because they work closely with their influencers to make them feel like they are a part of the process. In addition to staying in touch with micro-influencers, your marketing plan should set aside time and money to deal with unanticipated trends or content that fits the season. This keeps your brand new and important. Being active in your marketing strategy and linking your social strategy with your digital strategy can also help you reach more people, get more people involved in your community, and make people more loyal to your brand. This can look like reposting user-generated content on your brand's social media account or putting content on your site that features micro-influencers.

Micro-influencer's future: Using alternative channels

Word-of-mouth marketing can work well in the digital world with the help of micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are doing well on social media sites like TikTok, and as the online world grows, it's becoming more important than ever for brands to use micro-influencer marketing. Micro-influencers make it possible for "normal" customers to share branded content through UGC and VUGC, which increases organic traffic to your site and makes it cheaper to promote new products and campaigns. This idea says that brands whose user-generated content (UGC) is growing are unknowingly making an ecosystem of micro-micro-influencers.

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How Micro-Influencers can Help Brands Increase User-Generated Content and Engagement?

What do "micro-influencers" mean?

What is a strategy for marketing that uses influencers?