Ready to take your 2016 marketing strategy to the next level? Micro-influencers are the swiss army knife in your marketing toolbox: their brand loyalty, trustworthiness and authority to engage their friends around topics relevant to your brand makes them the most effective human-to-human marketing strategy.
The best part? They already exist among your customer base, and that’s just the beginning of your micro-influencer army.
The Micro-Influencer X Factors
As ad fatigue grows and paid social becomes less effective every day, the best asset that marketers have is their existing customer base. Whether by email list, social media following, CRM, loyalty program or more, it’s crucial for you to tap into this database and discover who among your customers are driving your brand’s objectives forward.
In order to fully harness the power of your existing customer capital and understand how they’re impacting your brand, you first have to know how to discover them among your customer base. Not all customers are created equal, and those who fit the criteria of a micro-influencer not only talk the talk, but use their social capital to influence the decisions and actions of their friends.
It’s time look beyond the usual demographic and reach data and discover who’s actually driving brand value. Check out the four factors that define micro-influencers and the infographic below.
Reach: Micro-influencers’ effectiveness lies not in the reach or potential reach of their social network, but rather is rooted in their historical engaged reach among their friends. They’re your consumers on social media with 500-5,000 friends and 25%+ engagement on average around specific topics.
Relevance: Micro-influencers’ engaged reach quantifies the level of connection they have with your brand: in other words, whether they possess relevant influence around specific brand-related topics with their friends and on social networks. How these topics align with your brand interests (e.g. topics, keywords, industries, affinity) determines their relevance to your brand.
Resonance: While relevance encapsulates a micro-influencers level of connection to your brand, resonance is the level of connection a micro-influencer has with his or her social following. It’s the quality of micro-influencers’ dual relevance to your brand (authority) and among their friends (authenticity) that results in their ability to deliver value. This is quantified not only by the number of actions driven, but indicative of micro-influencers’ power to convert.
ROI: The micro-influencer’s ‘X’ factor – their proven ability to convert their friends on a brand’s objectives to deliver measurable return-on-investment. Quantified by conversions, cost-per-acquisition, app installs, e-commerce purchases or promo codes, among other strategic, bottom-line metrics.
The ability to discover and activate micro-influencers at scale becomes increasingly efficient with the right technology. Our patented technology empowers brands to discover their most influential customers across existing consumer experiences (e.g. mobile app, e-commerce site, social community). Brands can then activate their relevant micro-influencers to distribute content and drive conversions across all primary social networks. After activating millions of micro-influencers, we’ve proven that each one drives three friends to convert on a brand’s marketing objectives (e.g. app installs, e-commerce purchases, coupon redemptions or lead form completions).
To learn more about how you can discover and activate your own army of always-on micro-influencers, read our Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing e-book here, and get started by discovering micro-influencers among your Facebook fan base with Fan Grader.
