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You haven’t been hiding under a rock for the last 5 years, so you know what influencers are. PHEW! But now this new term "Micro Influencer" has come along and you're scratching your head.
What is a micro influencer?!! Is it a legit way to market products or just some new fad. No-one wants to use a faddy, headline grabbing strategy which doesn’t get results. That’s a sure way to get the boot. As always the first place to go when analysing such matters… GOOGLE TRENDS! There is no better way to get a feel for the market than Google’s bright, shiny graphs (which also make great screen grabs to show clients, by the way). Blue: Influencer Marketing Red: Micro Influencer Blue: Micro Influencer Influencer Marketing has been growing in popularity for the last 5 years and it is going through-the-roof right now. Micro influencer is a new term which has only just started to rise in popularity in the last year. It is still very, very new! The concepts which these terms represent have been around for a lot longer of course, there is just a new name for it. Product and service endorsement has been a technique used by marketing professionals for hundreds of years. Recently this technique has had a revival in response to the growing distrust from consumers at being “advertised to”. Influencers & micro influencers recommend products and services to their audience which leads to trust and sales. So, What Is The Definition Of A Micro Influencer? A micro influencer is an online personality with a small but highly engaged audience. It is so new that the industry hasn’t exactly defined “small” or “engaged” yet. As a rough guide, they should have over 3000 social media follows and several thousand pageviews a month to their blog (if they are a blogger). What is more important is the level of engagement + trust they have with their audience. A micro influencer is probably on a first name basis with many people in their audience, they will have regular readers who they speak to in the comment section of their blog. Many have even met up with their readers in person at blogger events. Why Are Micro Influencers Important For Brands? Let me ask you a question. Why do we even bother marketing products and services? Why do we need to generate ad copy and graphics and come up with campaign plans etc etc? We do it because we must generate trust. Trust is the most important asset a company has and everything we do as a Content Marketeer is about building more of it with potential customers. As Jones and Leonard states in this study, “It is fundamental for both the firm (in B2C exchanges) and for the individual (in C2C exchanges), to know how to generate trust and understand perceived risk so as to achieve satisfactory sales relations in an online context (Constantinides, 2004; Jones and Leonard, 2007; Chen et al., 2008)” Trust is so, so important, especially in an online context when clients often don't get to meet you. Working with micro influencers is like working with something who can recommend and ad their stamp of approval to your product or service. Micro influencers can spread word of mouth recommendation because they are actively engaged with their community and know some of them personally and face to face. But, they have a slightly wider reaching audience so they can also spread the recommendation further than 1-2-1. So, stop looking at smaller bloggers as just a low quality link building opportunity. NO! You are completely missing the point. They are very, very valuable people who have a small but high engaged following which can transform the success of your campaign IF you approach it in the right way. How Can Micro Influencers Fit Into Your Client's Marketing Strategy? When it comes to selling something to clients the first thing they want to know is ROI. You must be able to prove and show some measured effect you have created from your campaign. As such I recommend you fit micro influencers into your marketing strategy via Guest Posting. It is the simplest way to ensure you will always have some solid traffic growth to show your clients. At the same time you are also executing your micro influencer campaign & growing trust. Your guest posts build back high quality links to your clients which grows organic traffic. Your guest posts also start word of mouth conversation & improve positive sentiment which grows trust. Measuring trust is a little bit harder to prove to a client than showing them an organic traffic chart going in the right direction. Top Micro Influencer Platforms: The easiest way to find micro influencers is through a platform or by working with an Agency. Ginger Marketing can help you with your micro influencer campaign if you are targeting a UK audience, so get in touch via our Enquire form and lets chat! If you want to DIY your campaign but just need the connections there are several platforms you can use.
Guest Bloggers Wanted is a micro influencer marketing platform which is UK focused. If you want to make a big impact on a small budget then check it out and post up your projects for free.
Tribe is an influencer marketing platform which connects bloggers and brands together. If you are focused on a USA audience and have a larger budget then check out this platform! We hope you've learnt what a micro influencer is and encouraged you to add working with them to your strategy. As usual let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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Micro Influencer campaigns are more than a buzzword, they are capturing the attention of Marketers because they also deliver bottom line, tangible results. Show your SEO clients that you are looking out for them and that you want to deliver the highest possible value. 7 Reasons To Pitch Working With Micro Influencers To Your SEO Client
Hello Society, which was acquired last year by New York Times did a recent study which found micro influencers with fewer than 30,000 followers were more beneficial for Marketers to work with than larger accounts. One reason is that Micro Influencers are 6.7X more efficient per engagement than larger followings. There is a lot more visible interaction & two ways conversation going on, simply because a micro influencer is able to make their platform more personal as it is smaller. This feels akin to word of buzz and grassroots marketing, smaller and more trustworthy. Whereas working with a large influencer with celebrity status is akin to advertising and celebrity endorsement which consumers no longer trust. 2. Your Placement Will Get To The Homepage & Pick Up Visible Enagement Place your content on a large site like Huffington Post or Entrepreneur and it is unlikely to make it to the first page. This can leave a client, who is not always clear on the rules of PR and Digital Media feeling disappointed when the money they have spent hasn’t landed them a front page placement. This effects can get compounded if your placements is clearly hidden to the point that know one has shared it or commented. It is know longer just about the link. Putting a placement with a micro influencer, as long as you have set the relationship up first you will get to their homepage and what’s more you will also get social media promotion and engagement as well. All of which can be reported back to your client. 3. Your Clients Budget Will Spread Further Which They Will Thank You For There are services like Ginger Marketing Guest Posting, which focuses on delivering high quality placements at affordable prices. You are able to White Label our service, markup the price and still offer your SEO client value. A budget of £1,400 gets you 7 placements with Ginger Marketing Guest Posting Services. Comparatively, PR placements can cost £600 - £800. Clients who receive a report with 7 monthly placements are going to feel a lot happier than clients who get a report with 2. 4. Micro Influencers Drive More Conversions - Win, Win! Another study in 2016 found that it’s not just conversations that micro influencers spark but sales as well. “Our research shows that real life influencers who are passionate about what they are recommending have significantly more buying conversations, and consumers are more likely to act on their recommendations.” Find that hard to believe? Have a think about your own buying behaviour. Are you more likely to buy something based on a recommendation from a friend or a celebrity? There is a different tone to the authority that micro influencers have and you can’t beat this genuine trust that they have built up. 5. Boost Your Search Campaigns With High Quality, White Hat Links Let’s talk about links. After all, you are an SEO Agency and your clients are working with you to grow their search engine traffic. Micro Influencer placements can be very powerful. We’ve had comments about the rank results of our service such as “the client doesn’t even need us to prove we are doing a good job, they can see it themselves”. When feedback like that is given freely it is not only very exciting to hear, but it makes me very confident that our service provides bottom line ranking & organic traffic growth results. 6. Clients Like An Agency Which Delivers New Ideas & Innovates Consistency is good. Setting a strategy and delivering on it month after month, showing reports and delivering reports. But, clients also want to see innovation. They want to feel like you are looking after them, thinking about ways you can get them even better results. Clients who feel like you have forgotten about them and have moved on to prioritise newer clients will likely get restless and start to look elsewhere. What is more exciting than pitching a client with a micro influencer campaign and detailing out the provisional results they can expect! What’s more, using an Agency like Ginger Marketing, who specialises in providing White Label Solutions to SEO Agency’s, you don’t need to skill up or hire anyone else onto your team. You are able to bolt on this solution with minimal risk and keep your SEO clients happy. 7. Micro Influencer Campaigns Are Easy To Scale (with a specialist, hint, hint)
The best solutions are those that are possible to test and then to scale up. You want a solution which you can provide to your clients month after month and still provide great results. This is possible to achieve with specialist who already has the contacts and skills. Outreach starting from ground zero is tough to scale, but, with the right partner it is possible to do and maintain high quality. And, quality is important, especially when we are talking about scaling! We are easily able to mix up the content topics, niche and style of content two. Want to ask 20 fashion micro influencers to showcase a Winter Outfit and include your clients woolen jumper - we can do that. Want to ask 15 micro influencers to give their top blogging tips and include your client’s tool - we can do that. Want to spark real conversations about how to save money and include your client as one of the top ways to do so - we can do that. This is marketing at a grass roots level + it’s scalable too. Win, Win. If you’d like to speak to us about our Guest Posting Service then get in touch. Speak with Director, Cheryl A Clarke and see if Ginger Marketing can assist you. In May we asked SEO Agencies for their top SEO tips in 2017. It was fascinating to see so many of the answers centered around creating great content for the audience. Out of 15 responses, just 12 were relating to improving the quality of the content either on or off site. It is clear that many SEO Agencies have transformed into Content Agencies. That’s exactly what Google was wanting to happen, however, it does come with many challenges. The main challenge is, traditionally SEO was a technical discipline suited to data driven and technically minded people. Increasingly what is needed are creative & imaginative people who are great at creating content. Content which connects. Which - let’s face it - is easier said than done. Just 34% of B2B & 35% of B2C Marketers say that their Content Marketing Strategy is effective in helping their company achieve its goals, despite a 75% increase in content marketing investment. Pouring money at the problem isn’t helping. We have an issue! The point is not to put down all of the hard work that goes into Content Marketing. It is not an easy task. Competition is fierce and it is very difficult to be heard with consumers spending less time than ever concentrating on any one given screen. We are transitioning from the click web to the attention web. And I feel that needs a bit of explanation as it is a very interesting topic brought up by the CEO of Chartbeat. Click through rates used to be one of the most important metrics. Just tell me how many people actually came to your site. This is no longer the case. Now it's about dwell time. Tell me how many people actually read your content and enjoyed it. This is the challenge that content marketers face. Amidst this challenge we also have the even tumultuous client - agency relationship. Very often it is not the Agency’s fault that the content is less than creative. Clients, especially large ones tend to push back on big ideas because they are too risky. Whilst I don’t have a magic wand to wave and solve an entire industry's problem - Seth Godin, can you help? I do have one potential solution. Micro Influencers. There are a very large group of people that spend the vast majority of their spare time creating content for their audience. I’ll admit, there are some that haven’t quite cracked it yet, but there are many that do an exceptional job. For example, Ana from Faded Spring. Like many micro influencers, Ana has a background in journalism which means her content is outstanding. Despite only blogging for several years she has attracted over 11k Instagram Followers who follow her vibrant, straight talking and edgy content. Her engagement is through the roof because she is honest, raw & speaks to her audience in a way which a corporate brand could never do. At this point you might be thinking, bloggers, yes we know about bloggers they are a great way to build links. And that I fear is the problem. As SEO’s we just default back to links and it’s the wrong way to look at it. This is the reason there is such a tense relationship between bloggers, companies & agencies when in fact it is a match made in heaven. We have a ton of SEO Agency’s who are finding it difficult to create epic content. We have a ton of micro influencers who are very good at that. HUM. Are you connecting with the difference here? It is very subtle, but I believe it is a profound shift in thinking that could benefit everyone. Here are the core areas we can shift our thinking when working with micro influencers. Give More Freedom We need to take a bit more of a backseat when working with micro influencers. Instead of dictating exactly how they should create the content why not give direction and then allow them to use their own creativity. We should be looking at micro influencers as content creators not handy link building opportunities. Stop Obsessing Over pure traffic, DA + trust flow metrics This includes only reporting on these metrics. What about reporting on the engagement of content? The conversation that is sparked around the product or service? Many SEO Agency’s are still focusing on metrics which report on links not on the content. This means many micro influencers miss out because they don’t have the stats you are looking for - despite the fact that they have a highly engaged audience and they produce very high quality content. (this guest post we produced for one of our clients has over 2000 pins)
Speak About Engagement With The Micro Influencer Make it clear that engagement is a metric you are tracking, and that you are looking for content which connects with their audience. This will put them into a different frame of mind when creating the content and results in more creativity which is the reason you are working with them. Take A Long Term View It is still true that many Agency’s don’t form proper, long term relationships with micro influencers. It is tough to do that when you have a multi discipline Agency and this is just one part of the strategy you are delivering to the client. But, taking a long term view and building good, lasting relationships does result in better content. Micro influencers put more effort in if they are respected, just like any human being does! A great way to ensure you are keeping that long term view in mind is by hiring an Agency who specialised providing high quality placements with micro influencers. An Agency like us, Ginger Marketing. We supply SEO Agencys with content which sparks conversation. We work with micro influencers in the UK & the USA across a variety of different niches and we’d be more than happy to discuss your project. |
AuthorWritten by Cheryl A Clarke Chief Happiness Officer & Content Marketing Freelancer @ Ginger Marketing (unless stated otherwise) Blog CategoriesPopular content marketing postsTotal Social Media Share Count
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“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI