Leveraging Micro Brand Influencers To Scale Your Campaigns

Whether you manage your own digital marketing campaigns or work with an agency, one of the more difficult tasks is to scale an effective campaign while retaining the original ROI or other metrics.

It’s common to launch a campaign and immediately have a certain level of success. But when you try to scale that campaign, the metrics consistently drop, leaving you scratching your head and wondering what the problem is.

The result is usually abandoning the original campaign idea and launching a new campaign, only to repeat the process.
If this is something you’ve dealt with on your digital marketing journey, you’re definitely not alone.

To help you break through that frustrating barrier, we’ll explain how top influencer marketing agencies use smaller brand influencers to maintain positive metrics while scaling up a campaign to reach new audiences.

How Scaling Influencer Marketing Is Different From Traditional Marketing

When businesses think of scaling, they usually think of going bigger. The idea is to take something that’s working on a small scale and introduce it to larger audiences to get similar results.

In traditional media and marketing, this works. For example, a quick-service restaurant chain may test a campaign in several smaller television markets. If successful, they scale the campaign with larger markets.

However, digital marketing and specifically influencer marketing can be different. It’s counterintuitive, but scaling a digital marketing campaign requires looking for increased targeting or more niche-oriented opportunities as you scale.

This maintains ROI and other metrics while still offering new audiences for scaling up the size and reach of the campaign.

The reason this counterintuitive strategy works with brand influencing is due to the number of channels and influencers available. You can find new audiences while still maintaining tight targeting.

Some social media-savvy brands that work with micro-influencers to scale their campaigns include Sephora and Banana Republic. Using this strategy, they can instantly promote new products and events to new audiences while maintaining high engagement across the entire campaign.

Understanding Smaller Brand Influencers

In the world of brand influencers, you can think of the total size as a pyramid. At the very top are the celebrity influencers with huge audience sizes in the millions.

As you move down each cross-section of the pyramid, the audience size decreases, but the number of brand influencers to choose from increases. It’s this concept that allows smart influencer marketers to maintain a campaign’s niche targeting while expanding to new audiences.

Below is a breakdown of the different types of influencers and their audience size. (check /specialties)

• Celebrity or “mega” influencers: Over 1 million followers.

• Macro influencer: 100k to 1 million followers.

• Mid-tier influencer: 20k to 100k followers. Some campaigns group this category with macro influencers depending on the campaign goals and niche.

• Micro influencer: 5k to 20k followers

• Nano influencer: 1K to 5K followers

How To Find And Work With Smaller Social Media Influencers

One issue with using micro and nano influencers as a strategy to scale your campaign is that it’s harder to vet and find the right influencers.

These smaller influencers make up over 80% of the total influencer population across various social media platforms. That’s a lot of influencers to go through and it can be a daunting task for many businesses.

When faced with this, most businesses either reduce the time vetting influencers or simply choose randomly based on a few key metrics.

At Hire Influence, one of our key strengths is the extensive vetting process we use for nano and micro-influencers. This involves looking at the influencer’s past, current, and future metrics.

We look for indicators that the influencer is doing everything right to sustain their current audience growth and engagement metrics.

The key to adopting this strategy for your own campaigns is to increase your vetting and selection process as you work with smaller influencers to scale, not the other way around. 

Learning how to vet influencers can take a little time, but the more effort you put into this phase of your campaign building, the higher the returns will be.

Try to focus on the following key areas when vetting potential micro and nano brand influencers for your campaigns.

Define Your Influencer Campaign Goals

Before vetting, have a clear idea of what your influencer campaign strategy is. Are you looking to drive direct sales of a product? Are you trying to build brand awareness by calling attention to a charity event you’re sponsoring?

Always define your campaign’s goals first and then use that to narrow down your list of influencers who fit your objectives.

Check Engagement

Smaller influencers should have audience engagement that directly matches the post’s content. If you audit the account and find that the audience is usually talking about topics other than the content posted, this could be a mismatch.

However, some unique creators may have inside or ongoing jokes with their audience. This can make it seem like there is a mismatch of engagement, but it’s not.

This is common for influencers who focus on humor, internet culture, and the latest social media trends. So make sure you understand the influencer before making a final decision.

Tone And Language

Check to ensure the influencer’s tone and language will match your own brand. You want to look for disqualifiers that go directly against your own brand messaging.

Just remember that this step requires a little flexibility on your part. Most influencers don’t communicate with their audience via a completely filtered, corporate style. So you have to accept a certain degree of the creator’s own personality to shine through.

Ask About Past Partnerships

Don’t be afraid to ask for details on past relationships and partnerships. With smaller influencers, you’ll likely be working directly with the influencer and not a management company. This means they may not have full breakdowns and metrics.

But they should provide enough information that you can check the engagement of past sponsored posts and whether or not the campaign continued due to success.

Benefits Of Working With Micro And Nano Influencers

The reason that scaling your campaign using smaller influencers works is that you can maintain the core aspects of your campaign’s strength. This includes the targeting and audience overlap that drives engagement.

You can maintain these key metrics while still expanding your reach and exposure.

Below are other important benefits of working with smaller influencers.

More Cost-Effective Influencer Campaigns

Smaller influencers can deliver great results at a lower price point. This is a great option for smaller businesses with limited budgets or for brands who are still fine-tuning their message with smaller campaigns.

Increased Authenticity

Smaller influencers will have a more direct connection with their audience. These smaller influencers generally still respond to a good deal of feedback on their posts, so the connection and overall authenticity are higher than with larger accounts.

Ongoing Relationships

Due to the lower costs and other factors, you can more easily enter into longer-term relationships with smaller influencers. This helps for brand loyalty campaigns, but it also helps to build trust with an audience as your brand is seen as a supporter of the creator.

Niche And Targeting Benefits

We’ve already touched on this aspect and the targeting that smaller influencers can provide is one of the main benefits of this strategy. It’s what helps keep your metrics strong as you scale your campaign for more exposure.

Possible Risks Of Working With Smaller Brand Influencers

There are many upsides to working with micro or nano influencers, but there are a few pitfalls to be aware of. Understanding these issues can help you with contract negotiations and any unforeseen circumstances that may arise.

Lack Of Experience

This isn’t always the case, but newer influencers may lack experience when dealing with brands and partnerships. Make sure you take this into account when dealing with the influencer as they may not readily understand certain concepts that brands and marketers take for granted.

Can Change Tone Or Voice

Influencers are running their own business, just like you are. This means they occasionally have to shift strategy, especially early on if they want to keep growing or reach their goals.

Sometimes, this means a total shift in tone or audience for the channel. For example, a channel that focuses on reviews may suddenly shift to being a response channel that flirts with controversial topics across social media.

Larger accounts generally don’t make sudden shifts in tone or content, so this is something to be aware of when dealing with micro or nano influencers still finding their footing.

You may need to end partnerships if the tone of the channel or content suddenly changes.

Dealing Directly With The Influencer

In most cases, you’ll be dealing directly with the influencer. Sometimes this is a benefit as it streamlines the process and usually reduces costs.

However, that can also mean difficulty when it comes to contracts or other issues.

Increased Management Overhead

Managing 10 micro-influencer campaigns involves more work than managing a single mega-influencer. Between the contracts, briefs, content, and fostering relationships, it does start to become more difficult to manage.

This is something to be aware of so that you don’t overextend your resources and start losing control or oversight of the overall campaign initiatives.

When scaling up using micro or nano influencers, start small and add new influencers to the campaign methodically so you can work out any management kinks along the way.

Remember, the goal of scaling with these smaller influencers is to maintain the quality and targeting. So staying on top of everything is crucial.

Help Finding The Right Micro-Influencers For Your Campaign

One of the more time-consuming parts of scaling a campaign with this strategy is finding the right influencers.

To narrow down your search, use some of these tips to speed up the process.

Use Social Listening Tools

Using a social listening tool, you can find where your industry, product category or even brand is being mentioned. You can then put together a list of influencers to further audit.

Competitor Research

Investigate if any of your competitors are using smaller influencers that may fit your campaign. It’s possible they used certain influencers for a past campaign that would work great for your current goals.

Hashtag Searches

This one is common and a little tedious, but it still yields good results. If you’re on social media anyway, you might as well prospect potential influencers and add them to your list for potential outreach.

Influencer Marketing Platforms And Agencies

Influencer platforms and agencies can help you connect with pre-vetted influencers that match your goals.

Final Tips For Scaling Your Influencer Campaigns

When scaling like with this strategy, you should already have a solid influencer marketing campaign that has shown success.

To scale effectively using smaller brand influencers, you want to focus on the quality of the influencers and their audience. With your campaign’s messaging and goals already in place, a majority of your effort can be used to secure new influencers.

Just remember that scaling an influencer marketing campaign isn’t about using the “kitchen sink” approach. Instead, use a careful strategy of hand-picked influencers to keep your metrics and ROI trending in the right direction.