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How To Use Micro-Influencers As An Inexpensive Marketing Channel For Your Shopify Store

Two young women taking a selfie in front of a Shopify store.

In this article, we're looking at how to use micro-influencers to promote your products. Are you looking for a powerful marketing channel that can help you reach your target audience?

Micro-influencers can be an incredibly effective way to reach your target market. They have a smaller, more engaged following who are more likely to trust their recommendations. And because they’re not as well known as traditional celebrities, they’re often more affordable to work with.

If you want to create incredible content that will resonate with your audience, working with micro-influencers is the way to go. Not only will you get great content, but you’ll also benefit from the credibility and trust that these influencers carry with their followers.

Let's find out how you can start getting organic traffic utilizing this lesser-known strategy.

What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social media users with a relatively small but highly engaged following.

Unlike celebrities and other high-profile influencers, micro-influencers typically have more niche interests and specialize in a particular area. 

As such, they are often seen as more relatable and trustworthy by their followers. This can make them very effective at promoting products or services to their audience. 

While micro-influencers may not have the reach of a celebrity, their smaller but more engaged following can often result in a higher conversion rate, which is why they are becoming an increasingly popular tool for marketers looking to connect with consumers in a more authentic way.

Reasons You Need to Know How to use micro-influencers to market your products

Micro-influencers typically specialize in a specific niche, and their followers trust their opinion. Because of this, micro-influencers can be incredibly effective at promoting products.

Here are three reasons why you should use them to market your products:

  • Micro-influencers have high engagement rates

Because they have smaller followings, micro-influencers tend to have higher engagement rates than other social media users. This means that their followers are more likely to see and pay attention to their posts.

  • Micro-influencers are trusted by their followers

As we mentioned before, micro-influencers followers trust their opinion. This makes them more likely to listen to what they have to say about a product and be interested in purchasing it.

  • Micro-influencers are affordable

Compared to other marketing methods, working with micro-influencers is relatively affordable. This makes them a great option for businesses of all sizes.

If you're looking for an effective way to market your products, consider using micro-influencers. Their high engagement rates, trustworthiness, and affordability make them an excellent choice for promoting your business.

A step-by-step process for marketing with Micro-influencers

Here are some steps for using micro-influencers to market your product:

  1. Identify relevant micro-influencers in your industry. A quick search on social media will help you find potential candidates.
  2. Analyze their engagement rate. This will give you an idea of how responsive their audience will likely be to your product.
  3. Reach out and introduce your product. Ensure to include information about why you think the micro-influencer’s audience would be interested in it.
  4. Provide them with tools and materials. Anything you can give can helps, such as images, sample products, promotional codes, or access to specific tools like copywriting software for quickly writing social media ad copy.
  5. Monitor the results of the campaign and adjust accordingly. This will help you fine-tune your approach for future campaigns.

Going into more detail, this is the recommended process for reaching out and getting something started with micro-influencers whose niche market matches your own.

1. Identify relevant micro-influencers in your industry

Choosing the right content creator for your product is important, or you will not get much out of them. Do your due diligence with prospecting and following up correctly in the beginning.

A micro-influencers in the yoga niche will not be able to help you sell your email marketing products.

The best way to get started finding micro-influencers in your niche is to search for competitor product reviews or producers of content that you or your competitors have.

For example, if you were Samsung, you might look up iPhone or HTC phone reviews to find influencers who are into phones. 

Most content creators doing reviews or promotions are either paid to do it or are part of an affiliate program they think their audience will resonate with. This shows you that they are willing to do promotions.

Most Micro-influencers are fairly easy to contact. Look in their social media for contact details and emails, or use Apollo to extract contact details from LinkedIn. If it's too difficult to find, take it as a sign to find someone else.

2. Analyze their engagement rate

It's important to analyze how much engagement they tend to get over how many subscribers they have. These days subscribers can be bought, but real engagement is harder to fabricate.

Use tools like Google Analytics, HootSuite Insights, and Social Blade, along with your own eyes to browse their engagement and see if their audiences are responsive and engaging. Try to ascertain the language they use and the vibe of the audience.

3. Reach out and introduce your product

Many micro-influencers are new to content creation and being reached out by a business to promote their product often feels like a big deal. You might be the first one to do it.

Because of this Micro-influencers often attach the collaboration in and of itself as a form of prestige and are therefore willing to promote your product for very little. If you're not looking to pay too much consider offering one or more of the following.

  • A high-return affiliate program of 20% or more commission
  • Free membership to your product or service where applicable
  • A free sample of your physical product where applicable
  • Giveaways they can give their audience

Micro-influencers are also likely to be less experienced in negotiations. Therefore, if you are willing to pay for their promotion, use this post to figure out rates.

A lot of micro-influencers aren't making any money from their channel, and the first $50 you pay them might be the first money they've ever made online.

4. Provide them with tools and materials

Don't hold back with what you allow your chosen creators to use. Whatever you can give them and the more easily you can make their creative process the easier the content will be to create, and the better it will likely be.

5. Monitor the results

Not all influencers are built the same, unfortunately, so it is important that you monitor the results, especially those that come within the first 48 hours of the promotion.

Picking the perfect creator to promote your product can be somewhat of a numbers game, so you must pinpoint what to look for that makes a micro-influencer a good pick. Subscribers used to be the number one sign, but these days views and engagement are the preferred KPI to look at.

Key Considerations For Successfully using Micro-influencers to market your product

When it comes to marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, effective marketers tailor their strategies to fit the needs of their products and target audiences.

In recent years, micro-influencers have become an increasingly popular marketing tool thanks to their ability to connect with niche audiences. However, before using micro-influencers to market your product, there are key considerations to keep in mind.

  • Identify the goals of your marketing campaign

What are you hoping to achieve? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or boost sales?

Once you know what you want to accomplish, you can start identifying micro-influencers who align with your goals. For example, if you're trying to increase brand awareness, look for influencers with large followers who regularly post about similar products.

  • Consider your budget

Micro-influencers typically charge less than celebrity influencers, but depending on the size of their following and the reach of their posts, they can still be quite costly for some companies.

Make sure you clearly know how much you're willing to spend or what you have to offer as a value exchange before reaching out to potential influencers.

  • Don't forget about engagement

Not to beat a dead horse, but just because an influencer has a large following doesn't necessarily mean they're good at engaging their audience.

When evaluating potential micro-influencers, take a close look at the comments and likes on their recent posts. Are people responding positively to their content? Are they regularly starting conversations with their followers?

The more engaged an influencer's audience is, the more likely it is that your marketing campaign will be successful.

Taking it to the Next Level

When done correctly, micro-influencer marketing can be an extremely effective way to reach potential customers and promote your brand. However, to take it to the next level, you need to think long-term, which means building relationships.

Tune in to any well-known video content or podcast. You'll likely see a recurring theme: most influencers have a well-known and often meme-like association with certain products, which play a regular, almost character-like role within their content.

The product becomes part of the creator's own character.

This can only be accomplished by offering value on the front end, treating the creator with respect, giving them what they need, and building a mutually beneficial relationship. You never know; your 10,000-subscriber micro-influencer could blow up to the 100,000s in months.

Choose who you want to work with, like a sports scout would choose a new player. Ask yourself further questions like.

  • Could they be potential, long-term ambassadors for our product?
  • Do you believe their channel will grow?
  • Can you see a place for your product to grow into part of the content's character?

Most products that have this longevity in popular content likely fall into it by accident as it is a relatively new medium or promotion.

However, suppose you understand how things work and how product positioning can be bolstered with the use of content creators. In that case, you can be intentional about how users utilize this new marketing channel.

To Wrap Up

So, how can you find and use micro-influencers to market your products?

Start by finding social media influencers in your niche who have a following of between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. Once you’ve found them, ask them if they would be interested in promoting your products in return for free or a form of product or affiliate deal.

A lot of micro-influencers are working from home and don’t consider themselves a business, so they won’t definitely be charging B2B prices if (often) anything.

If they agree to a collaboration, create a content plan that outlines what types of posts they will make (photos, videos, etc.), when they will post them, and what hashtags they should use.

Finally, track your campaign results using your preferred analytics tools so you can see whether or not things are working.

Have you tried using micro-influencers to market your products? What were the results? Let us know in the comments below.

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