3 Ways to Use Micro-Influencers to Grow Your Business

By Lilach Bullock

Influencer marketing has gained a lot of attention and popularity in recent years, partly due to the massive rise in numbers of influencers. Small, big, and everything in between, there’s an influencer for anybody and everybody. Here you will learn three top ways that you can use micro-influencers to grow your business.

What are micro-influencers and why do I need them?

If you’re unfamiliar with micro-influencers, the term is used to describe influencers with a rather small audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers on social media. They can be anything from regular people with a larger than average audience, to thought leaders in your niche who don’t have a huge following but still hold influence.

For many people, their first instinct is to go after the top influencers—the ones who have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers, the ones whose names are known worldwide. The downside is these people are more difficult to get, not to mention much more expensive to employ; in fact, some brands have had to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few photos, and it’s not at all uncommon to pay over $1,000 for a single Instagram post.

But it’s not just costs that make micro-influencers so appealing; sure, they don’t have the reach that a celebrity or macro-influencer can bring to the table, what they do have is a much closer relationship with their followers.

When researching social influencers, engagement is arguably the most important metric to consider. Numbers of followers don’t really count at the end of the day if the followers are not interested in or engaging with the influencer, or if the influencer isn’t engaging with the followers in return.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you’re much better off with an influencer who has fewer than 100,000 followers, but is actively engaging on a regular basis, rather than an influencer with over half a million followers, but who never takes the time to engage. The higher number of followers, the more difficult it is to catch up and to take the time to respond to mentions.

Because micro-influencers are more engaged, their followers are also more likely to trust them and their opinions. One study has found that 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

How to find micro-influencers to help grow your business

The best place to start looking for micro-influencer is in your own backyard: your own social media followers. These influencers hold the advantage of already being familiar with your business, and they may be already sharing your content with their followers or engaging with you.

To find influencers in your follower base, you can use a tool like Agorapulse, which has a social media CRM tool that automatically tags any influencers in your list. The tool also tags any brand ambassadors—users who have been sharing your content in the past.

Next, to find more micro-influencers, you can use a tool like BuzzSumo. Better known as a tool for finding the best, most shared content in any niche, it also offers a powerful influencer search engine that allows you to filter results based on audience size, making it easy to find micro-influencers or influencers of any size you want. You can also check an influencer's reply and retweet ration, their website’s domain authority, as well as their average retweets and a list of the links they've shared on social media.

For the outreach part, there are several options for tools, such as Ninja Outreach, GroupHigh, and BuzzStream.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:

• Here’s Why Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Isn’t Getting You the ROI You Expected
• 5 Secrets to Becoming an Instagram Influencer—and Make Money Doing So!
• 10 Key Steps to Becoming an Instagram Influencer
• How to Make Social Media Your New Sales Channel
• Forget About Social Media Influencers—Here’s How to Better Market Your Business With Brand Advocates

How to use micro-influencers to grow your business

1. Make more sales by getting them to review your product or service

One of the best ways to use micro-influencers to grow your business is to get them to review your product or service. As respected thought-leaders and influencers in their niche or community, their recommendation of your product or service can help you not only increase your brand awareness and get more targeted traffic to your website, but it can also help you make more sales. As I mentioned earlier, a big percentage of customers are highly likely to trust and act upon a recommendation made by an influencer.

For best results, give the influencer full access to your product or service for free, as well as a demonstration on how to use it if needed. This way, they’ll be able to take images and videos that they can include in their product review and on their social media.

2. Drive more conversions and sales by having micro-influencers promote your offers

In many cases, people need that extra push to decide to make a purchase from you. More often than not, that push comes in the form of a limited-time discount offer.

Influencers are a great tool to help you promote discounted offers. By sharing offers with their followers, the social influencers are also effectively showing their support for your product or service, so you can increase your chances of making more conversions.

Create an image that the influencer can share on their social media and provide a discount code for them to promote. Ideally, you should try to use the name of the influencer in your discount code; this shows that the discount was created specifically for this influencer’s fans, and it will also make it easier to track which of your new customers are coming from which influencer.

3. Start guest blogging to increase brand awareness and drive more traffic

Another way to use micro-influencers to grow your business is via guest blogging. This way, you are reaching their blog audience as well, which can mean an increase in brand awareness, more traffic to your own blog or website, and more shares and engagement on social media. Plus, it’s a great way to build quality links.

To start your outreach, first make a list of each influencer’s blog, making a note of their domain authority so that you can prioritize more easily. Make sure that their audience fits your own target audience and check to see how many shares and comments their posts get on a normal basis–the more, the better!

Then, look to see if they have any guest blogging guidelines that you will need to adhere to. When you start reaching out to influencers, you’ll want to show them that you’re not only familiar with their blog, but that you’ve also done your homework and know what guidelines they want followed.

Some might also want to see a complete draft of the article first; if that's not the case, try to give them some headline and topic options that they can then choose from.

Use micro-influencers to grow your business and get real results

Micro-influencers are not only very effective marketing tools, but they may also be the most effective type of influencer. While they don’t have the reach of a macro-influencer or a celebrity, they have an engaged, targeted audience on their side that helps them get real results.

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