Trend Alert: Why Micro-Influencers Are Making a Mark on Big Brands

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As we enter a new age where AI and VR join with social media the power of micro-influencers are making a mark on big brands. This trend although not entirely new is surging. Years ago the micro-influencer was a driving force as YouTube, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Telegram became the trending platforms.

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Taken by surprise, big brands who were just becoming comfortable with using the old leaders, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were enlisting mega-influencers. The large ad agencies who were briefly out of touch with what was trending were repurposing old strategies. This included hiring star power celebrity influencers with millions of followers as Brand Ambassadors on social media.

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Repurposed ads with a “personal” touch just didn’t cut it on social media where interactivity is the key ingredient. Using the same “influencers” or celebrities in a unified pitch which included social media “commercials” seemed “old and tired” and not ready for “prime-time” in the age of new media. Although the mega-influencers came with millions of followers, making it easy for big brands to justify putting them on the payroll.

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Mega-influencers with millions of followers appeared to be a natural fit for big brands and social media. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when a network television show could draw a sizable portion of the U.S. population at the same time. This meant that a captive audience was watching a celebrity commercial together.

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Although television audience numbers have remained the same for network news shows according to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. population has continued to grow over the last decade with the exception of the last couple of years. As a percentage of the population, the TV viewing audience has slumped. This left mega-brands looking for a new way to reach mega-audiences.

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Their ad agency managers steered them to social media due to its exponential growth. According to the Pew Research Center, “When Pew Research Center began tracking social mediaadoption in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one of these platforms. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and today 72% of the public uses some type of social media”

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The demographic tracking is even more telling as noted by the Pew Research Center Data, “As more Americans have adopted social media, the social media user base has also grown more representative of the broader population. Young adults were among the earliest social media adopters and continue to use these sites at high levels, but usage by older adults has increased in recent years.”

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This gave rise to the preponderance of social media influencers now estimated to be over a million. Wait the numbers aren’t over yet. According to Big Commerce, a powerhouse in serving websites for brands, companies, services, organizations, and individuals,” 17% of companies spend over half their marketing budget on influencers.” That’s a lot of influence peddling.

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ROI can only be calculated for your brand by tallying up the numbers. Before deciding on what size influencer to approach, find a social media influence marketing specialist agencythat can guide you in this search.

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Back to the numbers, how are influencers categorized in the marketplace? The three major categories for social influencers are:

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▶ Mega – This is the big leagues where the large Fortune 500 began finding their influencers before the realization set in that micro might be better (a nd is) in the age of new media. Mega-Influencers are those who bring over a million followers to the table. Celebrities from all occupations including TV, Movies, and Sports are in this select, expensive influencer category.

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▶ Macro – This is a category of influencer that has a loyal following who is more likely to engage because the influencer spends the time to engage with them. Often the influencer and the followers have extraordinarily strong opinions. The number of followers may not be in the millions but are usually in the hundreds of thousands.

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▶ Micro - On the number of followers list, they may be the lowest ranking but in the engagement race, they are the winners. Because they are much smaller in numbers often less than a hundred thousand, they actively engage back and forth with their followers. Also, their size enables them to explain and talk about the product and service they are representing in greater detail. Up-and-coming influencer management agents cite engagement numbers anywhere from 25-50% for their clients. This is a phenomenal number for an internet interaction rate where websites without influencers hope for an engagement rate of 2%.

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The number everyone wants to know when cruising the influencer market is how much of my ad dollars will it cost and what is the ROI. Interaction breeds interaction and a higher ROI as Vling.comrecently discussed in a blog entitled, “How to Increase your ROI with Influencer Marketing in 2022,”the trend is to partner with an influencer for a higher ROI.

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With massive ad budgets, ad creation departments, buyers, accountants, statisticians, and data gurus, the big brands don’t miss much when it comes to engagement strategies. Sometimes they miss the boat like in the early years of social media when localized micro-influencers were sailing without them. Using speedboats they quickly caught up to micro-influencers with as little as four to five hundred followers by offering free products for their social media review and user-generated content.

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This is a great strategy for the smallest or newest brands that are hoping to make an impact with micro-influencers. Social Media Managers are becoming inundated with micro-influencer options and find the right match for just about any brand.

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The right match should include exclusivity, a good past and present reputation, and a personality that reflects the brand in the best light. By using micro-influencers the big brands learned the value of interactive engagements, it requires more resources to manage and monitor hundreds of micro-influencers than a couple or one mega-influencer, but the ROI is what counts.

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The big brands are pointing the way and have gathered the data, they know that micro-influencers give a bigger return on the ad dollar. As a new, young, or emerging brand looking to explode the ROI on an influencer budget, follow the lead of the big brands and test small.

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