How to Find Micro-Influencers to Work With Your Small Business

By Aljaz Fajmut

Ready to supercharge your sales? One of the most effective ways to boost your business is to implement an influencer marketing campaign. It’s one thing for you to love your product, and quite another when an influencer starts to rave about it. With an influencer's help, you suddenly have access to a much larger audience.

And an influencer doesn't need to have celebrity status in order to be effective. Here we will look at how to use the power of micro-influencers to grow your small business.

Micro-influencers vs. macro-influencers

While micro-influencers are defined as having 10,000 or fewer followers, their influence can be just as effective—if not more—than a macro influencer's. (When a celebrity macro-influencer gushes about a product, does anyone really believe they’re fans of it?) A micro-influencer's audience may be significantly smaller than a macro-influencer's, but it’s a loyal, engaged, and dedicated following. Moreover, micro-influencers also are much more cost-effective and will be more willing to work with you.

How to find micro-influencers

When searching for micro-influencers, you need to visit the social media platforms where they are most active. For example, if you’re in the fashion business, you should search on Instagram; if you’re involved in digital marketing, you should cast your net on LinkedIn.

Also, be aware that size isn’t everything. Even though a micro-influencer may have up to 10,000 followers, there are other factors to be concerned about, such as:

• Engagement. Having 10,000 followers means absolutely nothing if no one is engaging with the posts. Check out their most recent posts. What’s the engagement like? Are people liking, commenting, and sharing?

• Audience demographics. This is an important factor because an influencer's audience needs to align with yours. For example, if your product is aimed at men and their core audience is women, this influencer isn’t a good fit for you.

• Voice. What’s their style like? If it’s abrasive while yours is family-friendly, this won’t work.

For an influencer to be effective, they must be a fit. Their values and branding need to match yours—or be as close as possible.

First impressions matter

Once you’ve identified a list of potential influencers, it’s time to make contact. Approaching a micro-influencer is naturally a lot less daunting than approaching an A-list celebrity, but you still need to make your first impression count.

There are two ways to do this. One way is to first spend some time engaging with an influencer's social media posts, commenting on them and offering value to their community. Alternatively, you can shoot straight from the hip and send an email or DM.

When you finally make your approach, be brief, direct, and personable. Introduce yourself and outline what you want, explaining how it will benefit them. Usually, the biggest benefit is you have something their audience is going to love.

Working with an influencer

No influencer is going to do this job for free. While you can offer an influencer free gifts, you may want to consider a financial incentive, too. Micro-influencers are definitely more affordable than macro-influencers, and how much they charge will vary. Do you want a simple retweet? That shouldn’t cost more than $10 if they only have 1,000 followers. However, if you want video content, you’ll need to up your offer.

Because micro-influencers know their audience better than you do, collaboration is the key to a successful campaign. They know what type of content works with their followers and what doesn’t, so you need to be open to their suggestions. Moreover, they may have special skills you can leverage: they may experts at creating video content, podcasts, blogs, etc.

There are different types of campaigns you can run. A lot of marketers will have giveaway contests; they’re popular, and their benefits will extend to you, your influencer, and their followers. Contests are also really easy to put together—all your influencer needs to do is ask their followers to do something for a chance to take home one of your products.

Offering influencers free gifts works well, too. Everyone loves a free gift, and if it impresses an influencer, they’ll be more inclined to post a review on their social media accounts. If they do, be sure to ask them to add a link to a coupon code.

Sponsored social media content is another option; however, it can be a bit risky if a micro-influencer already posts so much sponsored content that their audience no longer trusts them. Research how often an influencer posts sponsored content before going down this route.

You can successfully use micro-influencers to grow your small business

As long as you are professional, and you approach an influencer with a friendly opening message, there is no reason why you can’t be successful with influencer marketing. Once a campaign is up and running, don’t forget to monitor it so you can figure out how to improve on it with your next influencer.

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