Playing big by going small: The Nano and Micro Influencers
Nobody can deny that influencer marketing is still booming. Word of mouth has been one of the best ways of driving sales and connection towards a brand. Influencer marketing is an extension of this practice with the rise of social media. Influencers have been chosen over conventional ad buys and celebrities because they are seen more ‘authentic’ and ‘trustworthy.’ However, this perception has started to change because of the follower frauds, lack of connection and proximity in some mega influencers’ content. While these issues are getting bigger for the audience, also many marketers start to question what they’re getting for their money paid to these top-tier influencers.
In light of these, there has been a tendency towards micro-influencers for a while. Besides ‘the micro ones’ some marketing professionals swear by the success of nano-influencers to win the audiences’ trust and connection back.
Before we go deeper, let me introduce you the nano and micro influencers.
A nano-influencer has the smallest following of all tiers of influencers, in many sources this following defined in between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, while the following of the micro influencers are defined between 10,000 to 50,000. Nanos are the closest group of influencers to everyday Instagram users. The difference here is the nano-influencers have the power of affecting their circle of following, so they turn this power into money by promoting some product and services for the brands.
How bottom-tier influencers can help to tackle the problems of the audience with influencer marketing ?
It is no secret that influencer marketing is facing the threat of losing credibility and researches support this as well. A survey shows that more than half (52%) of millennials say they trust social media influencers less than they used to.
Maybe the most significant and recent example of this trust issue is the Fyre Festival. For the ones, who haven’t heard about it: Fyre was a music festival, which sold out the overly-priced tickets in 24 hours, thanks to the social media endorsements of celebrities and mega influencers. The organizers fell short of delivering anything they were promising, and this was discovered only after the guests had arrived. People bought the tickets, trusting to these influencers who had little or no information about the event.
With examples like this, there is a growing skepticism and questions about the mega influencers, such as ‘Are they really using the product they promote?’, ‘Does this product fit my needs which is presented by a lifestyle totally out of my reach?’ or ‘Do these highly edited photos represent well the real nature of the product?’
A survey shows that 62% of consumers feel that influencer content takes advantage of audiences by being too materialistic (55%) and misrepresenting the real life (54%). Another one indicates that trust has reverted to the friends and peers with 58 pct of users find ‘a person like themselves’ credible. Bottom tier influencers fit in this content perfectly with their authenticity, sincerity, and proximity. Especially nano influencers start to grow in their small community with deeper connections, and their contents resonate with their audience well.
Plus, in most of the cases, these influencers are the real consumers of the products they endorse and local experts of their circle on their niche. According to a survey, 94% of the audience find the micro influencers more credible and knowledgable. Also, 92% of them find these influencers better to explain how the products work.
Here I’d like to refer to academia. The influencer marketing benefits from the ‘match-up hypothesis’ while choosing an influencer to work with. The hypothesis suggests that endorsers are more effective when there is a fit between the endorser and the endorsed product. However, some researchers claim that the association between the endorser and the audience is also important. In this relationship, the extent of self-referencing significantly influenced consumers’ attitudes toward the ad and purchase intention. Other studies also show that when individuals highly relate an ad to themselves, they are more likely to recall the ad and evaluate it more positively. When we implement these findings to the nano and micro influencers, we can clearly see how much they are effective on their audiences because they are the top group of influencers benefiting this ‘self-referencing’ effect.
How bottom-tier influencers can help to tackle problems of the brands with influencer marketing?
When we look from the brands’ perspective, the biggest issue here is the follower and engagement fraud. Most of the top tier influencers are under the pressure of having and keeping a high reach and following, which is their forte. This is the result of the agencies have given a high bargaining power, based on an influencer’s audience size. Industry insiders say the difference between 90,000 to 100,000 followers can come up to thousands of pounds, which is a clear incentive for influencers to boost followers by inorganic ways.
According to a recent survey, Instagram might have as many as 95 million bots, posting as real accounts on its platform.
Engagement is also another critical factor when we measure the effectiveness of a campaign. ‘Influencing Beauty’ report shows that 93% of the marketers in the beauty sector says having a relevant audience and engagement is more important than the number of followers. In the same report, Lauren Spearman, digital marketer at Benefit Cosmetics says “We have blacklisted influencers who may have hundreds of thousands of followers because they never reply to audience comments or are occasionally aggressive — it wouldn’t be worth our time.” CEO of Pai Skincare, Sarah Brown, adds to that “We’re trying to think about the quality of the engagement, rather than focus on numbers.”
While engagement gets more important for marketers, influencer fraud also gets more serious there. The Instagram posts tagged with either #sponsored or #ad have generated more than 50% of their engagement from fake profiles or bots.
In both contexts of reach and engagement, the micro and especially nano influencers win out over the mega ones. First of all, they have less pressure to boost their metrics because they don’t make a living by these paid posts. Secondly, as we mentioned before they are a part of a close peers group with their followers which brings a higher chance of their followers and engagement are organic. There is a strong bound, shared values and interests between the bottom-tier influencers and their followers, like a ‘consumer tribe.’ Consumer tribes are a group of people emotionally connected by similar consumption values and usage, use the social “linking value” of products.
Studies also show that as the reach goes up, the engagement goes down. For example, nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers enjoy an engagement rate of 7.2% on Instagram, and 1.4% on Twitter; while influencers with over 100,000 followers have 1.1% engagement on Instagram and 0.3% on Twitter.
While marketers think that what value they receive in return to their huge investments of these top tier influencers; reports say that brands that invest in small influencers at an early stage are likely to gain a better return on investment.
Examples showing the power of micro-influencers is anything but micro
One of the best practices of working with bottom-tier influencers has come from Adidas. The brand says they aimed to drive more authentic long-term connections with their ‘Tango Squads’ campaign. In this campaign, Adidas built out their own ‘squats’ of micro-influencers. The company partnered with some young footballers, who influences their local communities. Adidas gave them access to exclusive content and events to help them grow their own social media reach and to create posts about the brand. This campaign proved that the power of micro-influencers is anything but micro. The total cross-platform reach of the campaign was around 32 million views (32.7m), with 13 million unique viewers on YouTube alone. Adidas continues to expand this program.
Another successful grassroots influencer campaign is from the skincare retailer Glossier. On their website ‘Into The Gloss’ there is a section called ‘Top Shelf Series,’ where ordinary people like students, doctors and lawyers share their everyday skincare habits. Then the brand decided to collaborate with one of them: Cecilia Gorgon. With her 8,500 Instagram followers, Gorgon didn’t even describe herself as an influencer; in her words, she was just a university student. Gorgon was already promoting the brand voluntarily on her Instagram and reviewing products on the brand page. This made her gain a community of loyal followers, and Glossier benefited from this in their collaboration. Under the campaign, the company published the video interviews of her , and Gorgon created posts on her Instagram account. The content immediately resonated with her followers and the audience of the ITG (Into The Gloss) webpage. This kind of collaborations continued with other loyal customers of the brand and it created a strong community around the brand with high engagement rates. CEO Emily Weiss’ says that their social media engagements led to Glossier’s 600% growth between 2015 and 2016, and helped them achieved their current cult status.
In conclusion
Here, my suggestion is a multi-layered approach. Sure, mega and macro influencers are still highly useful to have reach and awareness. However, supporting these campaigns with the aligned content of nano and micro influencers is also crucial to build relationships, and credibility.
With the rise of the digital-native generation, who believe that their voice is important and want to spread the word in topics they think it matters, more and more customers carry a potential to be a low or mid-tier influencer. This brings countless possibilities and opportunities to the brands to choose the influencer they would collaborate with.
Besides these all, I want to emphasize this: all of us, brands, influencers, and consumers have a responsibility to make it sure that influencer marketing maintains the authenticity and integrity, which are the sole reasons of its existence.
