Influencer Marketing in 2020
Your customers are your most valuable salespeople. Personal recommendations have been a vital component of marketing for centuries, and that hasn’t changed. Today, 92% of people rely on friends and family for product suggestions.
Word-of-mouth marketing is effective for one simple reason: Consumers trust their peers. When your customers recommend your products to their friends and families, they will immediately view your brand as trustworthy. And brand trust is a top buying consideration in today’s market.
Influencers & word-of-mouth recommendations
Influencers are the digital age’s take on word-of-mouth marketing. A recommendation from an influencer can feel like a suggestion from a friend — even if it is part of a paid collaboration. This is because influencers interact with their audiences almost daily, and they even share intimate details about their lives online. This vulnerability builds a level of trust with their audiences that is hard to replicate. Consumers are often so wrapped up in influencers’ personal lives, expertise, and advice that they don’t even realize that the posts they see are paid promotions.
Partnering with influencers is a powerful way to build word-of-mouth recommendations. But in order for this strategy to be effective, you have to find influencers that match your brand’s image, align with your values, and fit within your target audience. Partnering with the right influencers can further your brand’s experience and build trust with potential customers, but the wrong influencer can degrade your reputation.
Smaller social media personalities are the key to modern-day word-of-mouth marketing. Influencer marketing used to rely on the social media stars with the largest followings, but today, there is more focus on micro- and macro-influencers, who have small but loyal followings. In the world of influencers, it’s the people with the most intimate followings that build the most trust.
Let’s dive into the different types of influencers, and how you can choose the right one for your brand:
Macro-influencers
When people think of influencers, they typically think of macro-influencers. These are people with more than 100,000 followers on any given platform, including Instagram, YouTube, and even Facebook. Macro-influencers have incredible reach, but their engagement tends to be quite low because their audiences spread so wide. Instagram posts from macro-influencers average a 2.05% engagement rate.
Macro-influencers are often considered celebrities in their own right. And in some cases, they are famous from projects like reality tv shows. Getting a macro-influencer to market for you is somewhere between word-of-mouth marketing and a celebrity endorsement. Macro-influencers are more relatable than celebrities, but their followers recognize that they get paid significant amounts to promote products. Macro-influencers don’t feel like your best friend, but they don’t feel like Britney Spears either. This dichotomy is beneficial for bigger brands, but it doesn’t build the most trust with consumers.
Macro-influencers are a good fit for brands with a(n):
- Wide target audience
- Established reputation
- National or international presence
- Large marketing budget — sponsored posts from macro-influencers can cost $5,000-$10,000+
Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers are social media personalities with 10,000–50,000 followers. These influencers tend to post more niche content than macro-influencers. Micro-influencers may post about fitness or skincare or cooking, but they don’t usually post about all three.
Because they produce more specific content, micro-influencers have more engaged audiences than macro-influencers. This leads to slightly higher engagement rates — between 2.15% and 2.43%, depending on follower count. And micro-influencers are seen as more genuine than macro-influencers: An endorsement from a micro-influencer feels much more like a recommendation from your best friend. This authentic connection makes micro-influencers a great way to build trust with potential customers.
Micro-influencers are a good fit for brands with a:
- Niche offering
- Regional to national presence
- Growing audience
- Small to midsize marketing budget — posts from micro-influencers can cost between $100 and $500
Nano-influencers
Nano-influencers have 1,000–10,000 social media followers, and they post even more specific content than micro-influencers. A nano-influencer may share content about yoga instead of overall fitness, vegan skincare, or paleo cooking. Because their audience is hyper-interested in the topics they cover, nano-influencers earn a 5.6% engagement rate on Instagram.
A recommendation from a nano-influencer truly feels like a suggestion from your best friend. In fact, 37.41% of Instagram users have between 1,000 and 10,000 social media followers, so your best friend really could be a nano-influencer. And as we know, consumers take recommendations from trusted friends very seriously.
Nano-influencers are a good fit for brands with a:
- Very niche offering
- Hyper-specific target audience
- Small marketing budget or a desire to test the influencer space — some nano-influencers will accept free product as compensation, others will charge fees up to $100
Less is more
As brand trust becomes more and more important, so do smaller influencers. In 2016, CreatorIQ found that there were three micro- or nano-influencer campaigns for every one macro-influencer campaign. By 2018, that ratio was nine to one.
When you are just getting started with influencer marketing, it’s best to start small, with nano- or micro-influencers, and work your way up to the bigger social media stars. And in many cases, with their lower price points and higher conversion rates, smaller-scale influencers are actually more valuable to your business then macro-influencers are. If your objective is to build trust with your target audience and earn more word-of-mouth recommendations, then nano- and micro-influencers are the best partners to have.
