New Delhi, India, November 6, 2023 – When considering affiliate marketing as a brand or an advertiser, your first instinct is to approach the biggest influencers in your niche, with millions of followers. However, a logical approach would be quite the opposite.
You would be surprised to know that nano influencers and micro influencers are dubbed to be the ‘secret weapons of eCommerce’. There are many reasons behind this shift in strategy and we would be getting to it in the later part of this blog post.
Investing in nano and micro influencers is such a rage, especially among eCommerce brands, that over 56% of marketers who work with influencers admitted to have invested in micro-influencers, as they offer 60% more engagement than macro influencers all at a more budget-friendly cost.
But that’s not all. There are many layers behind the meteoric rise in popularity of micro/nano influencers among brands and advertisers. Let’s unravel them one by one.
What Are Nano and Micro Influencers?
As opposed to macro influencers who enjoy millions of followers on their accounts, micro and nano influencers have limited but genuine following. Nano influencers typically have >10000 followers while micro influencers may have up to 100,000 followers.
These influencers often create content around a niche subject and have followers interested in that particular niche itself. Many brands are going after the micro and nano influencers due to the genuine connections, relatability, and quality of audience they enjoy on their profiles.
Why Brands and Advertisers Should Invest in Micro and Nano Influencers
Influencer marketing has been there since 105 BCE (yeah, that’s right!), but the emergence of micro and nano influencers as the messiah of engagement and conversion has reshaped the rules of the industry for good. These influencers may not boast 7-digit influencers on their profiles, but they hold the key to authentic engagement and impact brand collaborations.
Let’s explore in-depth why investing in micro and nano influencers holds the key to successful affiliate campaigns for your brand.
- Authentic Connections: Micro and nano influencers have the most genuine and personal connections of people who trust their recommendations. This translates to higher credibility and even conversions.
- Cost Effective Partnerships: Micro and nano influencers are budget-friendly options. Brands can partner with multiple micro influencers at the cost of one macro influencer, allowing them to test multiple options and diversify their reach.
- Strong Foothold in Their Niche: Micro and nano influencers specialize in their niche which ensures that your brand only reaches your target customer.
- Relatable Content: Their authenticity and relatability appeals to their audience, making your brand more approachable, relatable, and trustworthy.
- Community Building: If you want to build a loyal community around your brand, partnering with nano and micro influencers can be one way to do that.
How to Manage Micro- and Nano-influencers to Build Profitable Relationships
The journey to successful partnerships with micro and nano influencers begin with nurturing a positive relationship with them. To foster this relationship of mutual growth, it’s important to cultivate trust, open communication, and a shared vision. Here’s how to do it:
- Set Clear Expectations: Build a foundation of trust by being transparent about your brand’s values, objectives, and expectations. In return, encourage influencers to share their insights and ideas openly. Keep the brand guidelines, creatives, and expectations clear and accessible. Several partner management tools like Trackier offer a transparent and user-friendly platform for partners and brands/advertisers to keep expectation, guidelines and communication handy.
- Transparency: Transparency isn’t only about the Scope of Work and brand guidelines. Your partners should also be able to track their performance, payments, and offers as and when required. Onboarding an attribution tracking platform that doubles up as a partner management tool, like Trackier, offers a comprehensive solution to maintain transparency between advertisers/brands and influencers.
- Reward & Appreciation: As we know, frauds run where money is, the affiliate marketing industry is no exception. Ensure you subscribe to a robust Anti-Fraud Tool or sign up for a partner management platform with an in-built anti-fraud system to reward only genuine achievements. This recognition fosters a sense of pride and commitment.
- Never Miss a Payment: Managing an affiliate program is not easy, so it’s comprehensible to miss out on payment schedules, here and there. While this might look like a genuine human error to you, it can affect your partnership greatly. Missed or delayed payments can erode their trust in your brand. That is why, ensure that the payments are transparent and always on time. Using the payment automation feature of your partner management tool, you can automate the payments and invoices to save time and your relationship with partners.
- Go Extra Mile For Top Performers: No phenomenal achievement should go unnoticed. Make sure that you go the extra mile and offer an additional incentive or offer to influencers who went great lengths to achieve the campaign goals. On your performance marketing software, you can segment your partners on the basis of performance and set up custom payouts for each segment. You can promote/demote partners based on their monthly or weekly performance using the real-time performance tracker.
Brands That Are Investing in Micro and Nano Influencers
You’ll be surprised to know that leading brands that make several digits in revenue, also go all out on micro and nano influencers. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Clinique, Charlotte Tilbury & The Inkey List
The leading American beauty brand puts in heavy chunks of $$ in macro influencers, but they also onboard micro and nano influencers to expand their reach. Let’s take this influencer for example.
Hannah, that goes by the name hannahlisa.makeup, has around 27K followers on her Instagram. She has been regularly promoting brands like Clinique, Charlotte Tilbury, The Inkey List and many more.
Even though her follower count is much lesser in number as opposed to macro influencers, she enjoys decent and genuine engagement on her posts from potential customers.
Marks & Spencer
The British multinational is one among the favorites of micro and nano influencers. The brand has been strategically putting money in smaller influencers to be more relatable and appeal to a niche audience.
One of its micro influencers, Jemma Cotterrell has around 20k followers on her profile but is able to engage genuine fashion lovers through detailed OOTD videos where she experiments with different outfits from multiple brands including Marks & Spencers, Scotch & Soda, Olivia Burton, etc.
Her posts enjoy a great number of comments from genuinely interested followers.
It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. That’s why diversifying your influencers portfolio with a mix of macro, micro and nano influencers can be a smart move to appeal to a larger audience. If you’re just starting out with micro and nano influencers, there are paid as well as free tools to get you started. You can look out for micro and nano influencers of your niche using tools like Upfluence, Semrush, Influence.co, etc.
Media Info:
Name: Alisha Suri
Organization: Cloud Stuff Technology Limited
Website: https://trackier.com/
Email: support@trackier.com
Phone: +91-9958636988
Address: B1/H3 Ground Floor Mathura Road Mohan Cooperative Ind. Area Badarpur, New Delhi, Delhi – 110044, India.
