Is There Such a Thing as Being Too Popular?

When it comes to influencer marketing, there’s a serious trade-off between audience size and reach. That’s where your brand can benefit from micro-influencers.

Takeaways

• Instagram micro-influencers receive double the engagement of accounts with millions of followers.
• Popchips saw major success leveraging micro-influencers for their northeast launch.
• Influencer marketing is proving to be less about campaigns and more about building relationships.

Zontee: Is there such a thing as being too popular? When it comes to influencer marketing, there’s a trade off between audience size and reach, and that’s where companies can benefit from working with micro-influencers.

Hi, I’m Zontee Hou, senior strategist at Convince & Convert, and today I wanna talk to you about why micro-influencers can be a great way to build credibility and reach niche audiences for many brands. A recent article from Digiday highlighted a study that showed that organic reach for accounts on Instagram that are one to 10 million followers have 1.7 percent engagement rate, which is less than half of the engagement rate that is found for posts from accounts that are only one to 10,000 followers.

Now, on one hand that doesn’t seem so surprising, right? But it means that we can focus on working with many individual niche influencers who can then total to have more deep connection and deep reach with their audiences than just one single, large influencer. And for companies, this can be really beneficial because these are influencers who can speak more credibly to their specific niches, and they are more likely to be influencers who are engaging on a more frequent basis with their audience, and so there’s a high level of credibility.

And this level of credibility with these micro-influencers doesn’t have to exist just online. In fact, I’m reminded of a case study from the book Cooking Up a Business by Rachel Hofstetter in which she talks about the snack company Popchips. Well, you might have seen Popchips products all over the place now, but back when they were rolling out, they focused on having a big micro-influencer outreach during their rollout into the northeast through New York City. And what they did was actually reach out to people across, not only media, but also arts and other influential spaces and send them just a killer snack box. And once they received that snack box and enjoyed it, there was also a card in there handwritten by somebody from their actual team that said, “Hey, you know, Jane, if you enjoyed the snack box, we’d love the names of three other people who you’d like to share this with, and we’ll send it on your behalf.” And so, it really allowed them to tap into the network effect of these micro-influencers, and reach, not only them, but other people. Because here’s the thing: It’s not just about reaching people with the biggest stage. It’s actually about reaching people who are going to be advocates for your brand over time, and winning them over.

And so, that brings me to my last fact about micro-influencers. A recent article in Adweek highlighted it in the best way, which was that they said we have a big blind spot when it comes to marketers and working with micro-influencers. We have a tendency of thinking about influencer marketing in terms of campaigns, but the truth is that we have to build relationships over time in order to get these people to talk about our products again and again and again, and to be those advocates who are gonna share and spread the word about our products.

So, that’s the takeaway that I’m gonna leave you with, and as always, we wanna hear from you. So, if your company has worked with micro-influencers, or is thinking about it, we’d love to hear about what you think are the main challenges. Leave a comment in our blog post, or shoot us a note, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, and see you next week.

http://ift.tt/2p4SSGz