Micro and Nano Influencers: The new brand favourite

Brand promotions with few followers are tough & even with many followers, customer engagement can be low. That’s where influencers marketing come in handy…

People with thousands of followers have the potential to influence their audience by using their online presence. Taking advantage of this, brands have chosen influencer marketing tactics to reach their target audience.

Due to Covid, now more than ever, everything is online & consumers are looking for genuine purchases. Observing the ‘purchasing behaviour’ of consumers, it is clear that purchases are highly dependent on brand trust and brand-consumer relationships.

Influencers tend to create genuine relationships with their audience, and therefore, influencer marketing has become the preferred tactic by brands to connect with their target audience. Influencers get paid by brands to promote their products to the target audience & brands on the other hand are looking for reliable influencers to collaborate with. However, influencers with a massive fan following are too expensive for SMEs, making it difficult for small businesses to engage with their target audience in a bulk fashion.

What’s new for small businesses when they can’t afford expensive influencer marketing strategies?

The good news is the rise in micro-influencers.

Demand for genuine reviews by an audience and more cost-effective customer engagement has led to the rise of micro-influencers (between 10,000 and 50,000 followers) and nano influencers (between 1,000 and 10,000 followers). These are influencers that have high engagement with their audience and are, therefore, cost-effective if your target is conversions. Due to their attractive engagement rates and the rise of influencer marketing platforms, even high-end brands are now working with these influencers.

Due to the direct connection with the target audience, micro-influencers are deemed more authentic. They tend to work with brands they personally like, which makes their content seem trustworthy and genuine. This type of marketing allows the audience to develop an interest in a brand without fear of advertising deceit.

How are micro and nano influencers better than macro-influencers?

Markerly studied over 800,000 Instagram accounts with 1000 followers and observed that follower count increase led to a drop in audience engagement. Statistically, influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers earned likes at a 4 per cent rate. In contrast, accounts with over 10,000 only achieved a 2.4% like rate.

Who is better, nano or micro-influencers for influencer marketing?

This entirely depends on the business requirements and how much the brand is ready to invest since micro-influencers are costlier than nano influencers. A brand can capitalize on either nano or micro-influencers, as both can provide genuine customer engagement and new creative content. As you need to work with more nano-influencers than micro-influencers to generate the same number of impressions, we would advise subscribing to an influencer marketing platform to work with nano-influencers. Due to the pure numbers of people in any given nano-influencer campaign, the sourcing, onboarding and content approval can become burdensome without such a platform.

How do these Micro-influencers grab the audience’s attention for marketing purposes?

Some strategies that micro-influencers are using are campaign-specific hashtags that may trend, leveraging user-generated content, sponsored posts and Brand Storytelling.

Finding the right influencer is critical it can make or break a campaign. There are various tools to make this process simpler, one of the best and new tools brands are using is ‘Filed Social’- a platform to help you choose the best and most genuine influencers to work with, whilst doing everything at scale.

Influencer marketing is a symbiotic relationship: micro-influencers want to become macro-influencers and can do so by generating content through working with brands & brands are looking to improve customer engagement and gain awareness which they can do by working with micro-influencers.