EP068 Micro-Influencers - The Small But Mighty Key to Ecommerce Success
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[00:00:00] Darin Newbold: All right, good day and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darin and as always, Josh is here with me and we are going to explore the surprising power of little bitty, I'm sorry, micro influencers. They're not little bitty, they're micro influencers in driving e commerce sales. I was having some fun with Josh earlier and we did, did recall back in the 80s, the micro machines.

So no, these aren't micro machines, but micro influencers and how they Can really make a huge difference in the e commerce world and for your site.

[00:00:39] Joshua Warren: Yeah. and this all started with some research I was doing, putting together some influencer marketing guides that we're building out. And, you know, it's easy to assume, Hey, if you're going to do an influencer marketing campaign, go land the biggest influencers you can afford.

Like people with big audiences that will drive the best results. Turns out that's not true. It turns out that micro influencers are kind of the sweet spot for driving the best results for your, e commerce influencer marketing.

[00:01:05] Darin Newbold: And that's really, really cool. So, but help me understand, cause I know, yeah, not little bitty tiny, but the micro influencer, how are you, how are you defining that? What is that? What is that really?

[00:01:16] Joshua Warren: Well, and it's interesting. So in our show notes, I've defined microinfluencers as 5, 000 to 100, 000 follower followers. It actually varies a little bit though on platform. Some platforms, it's the cutoff is at 10, 000 to 100, 000 others. It's. 50 to 100, 000. But it's basically this tier of people that they're not the smallest, but they're still kind of small.

so kind of that 5 to 100, 000 range.

[00:01:41] Darin Newbold: it's becoming more of a trend, but What are the, kind of some of the stats that you're seeing on, on these micro influencers, and how that looks?

[00:01:51] Joshua Warren: you.

[00:01:51] Darin Newbold: love it when I read numbers So 

[00:01:53] Joshua Warren: always, we'll have links in the show notes out to all these resources.

but basically more and more brands are partnering with micro influencers. 57. 6 percent of brands that have an e commerce store are already using, influencer marketing of some variety. So if you're out there listening to this, you're working for an e commerce brand and you're not using influencer marketing yet, you are in that 40 ish percent that is kind of the last to adopt it.

Get on that. of the ones that are using influencer marketing now, 57 percent of them are finding a preference for these micro influencers. And that, that specifically came from a study that influencer marketing hub did on Instagram, but I'm seeing similar results on other social platforms as well.

[00:02:31] Darin Newbold: Okay. And then 

[00:02:33] Joshua Warren: how 

[00:02:34] Darin Newbold: for like large merchants and how are they really taken and adopting

[00:02:39] Joshua Warren: Yeah. So the largest merchants, they really went heavy at the, the large influencers and not the micro influencers. And so they have then seen the success that the others, the smaller businesses have had and they're shifting.

So we're seeing a 300 percent increase in micro influencer campaigns from the largest brands.

Well, 

[00:02:58] Darin Newbold: must be some key advantages of doing this. I'm guessing that cost is probably one of them because follow the money as always. But what are some other things that come up as, as advantages of using a micro influencer versus a major influencer?

Is that how that would be 

[00:03:15] Joshua Warren: That's one way to characterize it. Yeah. Yeah. so we talked goodness a month or two ago now about a study that came out about influencer marketing, here on the podcast and a lot of, and that was a really interesting research study, that I geeked out on, but a lot of y'all were kind of like, why this is a little too scientific for us.

but really, The results of that study show up here with the micro influencers. And what I mean by that is micro influencers, because they, they don't have, sometimes they don't even have thousands of people watching a live stream or interacting with a piece of content. It will be hundreds of people.

Well, when you're active live audiences, hundreds of people, it's so much easier to have a personal connection, actually. See a message come in from someone and say, Hey, Darin, I saw that question you had. You're right. You know, this is what I think. And that creates those interactions that lead to that stickiness that lead to that loyalty from the followers.

So you'll see much higher engagement rates, but then also a lot more authenticity and trust being developed by these micro influencers. And 88 percent of the consumers surveyed by Influencer Marketing Hub said that when they're kind of being influenced by one of these campaigns, it's the authenticity they feel, that is most important and that really drives the purchase.

[00:04:31] Darin Newbold: Well, that goes back to kind of the age old adage of people buy from people. And they buy from people that they trust. So if micro influencers are the way to build that trust, it's goes without saying in a way it's going to drive and really influence those sales and stuff.

What are some other things that are advantages that you're

[00:04:51] Joshua Warren: Well, you mentioned the money, so they can be more cost effective. typically micro influencers, smaller reach, they are going to charge a lower amount. also though, and I think of an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry's trying to get rid of a van and, Kramer convinces him to put in this, wanted ad of, hey, interesting trades considered.

And a lot of micro influencers are open to those interesting trades. So you can actually exchange products or services with them instead of paying them, outright. And, you know, your, your mileage will vary, depends on the influencer, depends on the product, but, there are a lot more, whereas the largest influencers, they're getting so many inquiries from brands.

They pretty much will say, here's our rates, here's our contract, take it or leave it. And you don't have that flexibility.

[00:05:39] Darin Newbold: Interesting. Well, and maybe you need to find a van. let's hope not. go ahead, Josh. You had, there's a couple others here that you wanted to

[00:05:47] Joshua Warren: couple more. so going back to that authenticity, but then also just going back to, if you look at this like any other marketing of, you want to find, The right people that are interested in your products.

Those are the people you want to market to kind of marketing 101. Well, if you go to like the biggest influencers, you go out there to like a Mr. Beast, his target audience is kind of everybody, or at least everybody under a certain age. versus you could actually find someone, if you're a beauty brand, you could find someone out there and I shouldn't have picked beauty as the example,

[00:06:18] Darin Newbold: Yeah.

[00:06:19] Joshua Warren: let's just say you go out and you find an influencer that, Not only is talking about beauty, but maybe you sell lipstick and there may be an influencer out there that her main content is all about how to apply lipstick.

And so you can go very deep on a very specific profile that way. and also opens up some opportunities for interesting experiments to see basically how to reach your ideal customers by working with some of these influencers that have really specialized around smaller niches, to see kind of where that interest lies.

[00:06:49] Darin Newbold: Okay. So as we kind of move on here and looking at another section, what are, what then are the potential ROI and even some success stories that maybe you found as you're doing all this 

[00:07:02] Joshua Warren: Yeah, so Hype Auditor put out a report showing that for Instagram influencer marketing campaigns, the average ROI is you get back $4.21 for every dollar spent. So, Not a

bad investment. Yeah. kind of a scary stat around ROI is almost 80 of brands are tracking the direct sales that come from their influencer marketing campaign. So I say that's kind of scary because that means that 20 of y'all are out there just Throwing money and seeing what happens. So, definitely need to be doing that tracking, so that you can get that ROI information. And there's two success stories I'll link to in the show notes. One is a brand called Glossier. and they actually launched a campaign where they basically turned their existing loyal customers into their own micro influencers and then partnered with them.

and that not only boosted traffic to their web, website, boosted sales, also created so much user generated content that they were then able to use on the site. So if you are kind of struggling to get good video content on your site, micro influencers can actually be a really good way to generate some of that.

[00:08:08] Darin Newbold: That's really interesting. you had mentioned, the other one, Daniel Wellington's, microinfluencer strategy.

[00:08:15] Joshua Warren: So Daniel Wellington, partnered with, they really went wide on a number of different micro influencers, in both fashion and lifestyle to launch some of their new product lines.

and again, this was kind of an opportunity for them to test and see, okay, which types of micro influencers are going to work best so that they then knew, okay, going forward, let's really focus our efforts into these specific niches.

Well, 

[00:08:40] Darin Newbold: all in all you have a lot of creative content that That leads to rapid, rapid growth and, and that's the key.

I really like this idea on the, on the glossiers. I'm going to have to, I didn't get a chance to read that beforehand. So I want to read.

[00:08:55] Joshua Warren: actually forgot to put that one on the show notes until two minutes to air. So it was a surprise.

[00:09:00] Darin Newbold: make sure and get that on there. Well, what are some, some tips for maximizing micro influencer partnerships?

[00:09:07] Joshua Warren: so don't go out there and just find a bunch of random micro influencers, choose the right ones based on the, not only their levels of engagement, but look at the people they're engaging with. How well do those people fit with your brand and how well does their message fit with your brand? I'm going back to talking about a category I have no business talking about, but beauty influencers, let's say that you are a, I don't know, you're a food brand that has nothing to do with beauty and you go out there and you're like, Hey, here's some cheap micro influencers in the beauty category that aren't getting a lot of attention.

Let's partner with them to push this random food product that has nothing to do with anything they ever talked about before. Not going to do well. So yes, right out. So make sure that you are really looking not just at the engagement numbers and the stats and the cost, but also how well your message fits in with the message that this influencer has already been sending out there.

Also, these are typically smaller, less experienced influencers. The brand has a lot of power here. Just be aware of that power. really look to collaborate with these influencers. I've seen some bigger brands that almost abuse that power and kind of say, well, Hey, if you want to promote our super awesome products, then you have to do this, this, and this, and kind of try to ring every dime they can out of the influencer. but that shows up like one way or another, that's going to show up when the influencers producing their content. So really, try to build that long term collaborative relationship. And I would say the biggest thing is give them creative freedom. do not make them read a script. the quickest way to have your influencer marketing campaign fail is to give them a script that they must stick to.

these people know their audiences. They need to be able to react on the fly as they're engaging with people. Definitely give them guidelines. Give them clear guidelines. Let them know, hey, Don't go there. Don't go here, but you can talk about this, and give them some creative freedom and room to play in because again, that not only does that show up like you can tell when someone is kind of being forced to stick to a script versus ad libbing, but then also sometimes it's those ad libs that will produce something that you'll say, Hey, that's actually The new direction we're going to take in our marketing, like they are brainstorming for you, 

[00:11:26] Darin Newbold: especially in those moments when, when there's that, that key question that's asked that maybe somebody hadn't thought of, or a moment that all of a sudden can really change that direction for that brand, or even at least some of the marketing pitch around.

That brand and in that moment, one of the last things I think you may have talked about or brought up, but definitely want to track some results. As always, we need to have some unique codes, key metrics, all of those things.

[00:11:50] Joshua Warren: Yeah. And there's different tools out there you can use. It can be as simple as give each influencer their own coupon code. It can get more complex into, UTM parameters on URLs. plat, there's different platforms out there that you can use to actually funnel all the traffic through that'll generate reports for you.

You know, the scale of your business and your campaign. So pick the right level of tracking, but definitely don't be that 20 percent that isn't tracking. The sales that are driven by your influence or marketing.

[00:12:18] Darin Newbold: Well, very good. what are you seeing, Josh, as the future of this influencer marketing campaigns and how they're, how they're, how brands are really using it and, and grabbing onto it? Thank you.

[00:12:31] Joshua Warren: Yeah, so, definitely a shift. We haven't talked about them in this episode, but there are even smaller influencers called nano 

[00:12:38] Darin Newbold: Ooh, maybe that could be me.

[00:12:39] Joshua Warren: There you go. is there a size under nano? But anyway, so there's a definitely I see a continued shift shift down into the micro and nano influencers.

I mean, we're even seeing linkedin now. They never really used the word influencer before. They've rolled out some new features literally just in the past 24 hours that Identifies specific people as influencers on LinkedIn gives you a ways to track those things and these aren't people with 100,000 followers.

I started playing with it and in lots of cases. These are nano influencers of 1000 followers 2000 followers. And so I do think that because it allows such a level of specialization and personalization and that personal touch, you're going to see more of a shift towards the smaller influencers driving more success.

also, you know, Thank goodness, as an industry, we have learned that that overt promotion and that overt, I am reading a script to sell you this product doesn't work. And so I'm seeing more and more of a shift that will continue into the future towards authentic storytelling and really creating stories and not just one piece of content.

and that's, that's a lot of fun when that's done well and that delivers some great results.

[00:13:50] Darin Newbold: great results. Absolutely. Well, and there's integration with the other marketing channels as well. Email ads and events. And then I still love this idea of the potential brands cultivate their own influence or communities because even some of the, well, there's been some experiences that I've seen where I think this can really, can really work, especially when it's somebody has a much smaller business and maybe it's, it is someone that is a friend of that small business, but has created a passion for that product and can, can really be that, be that help.

[00:14:25] Joshua Warren: Yeah,

and you know, on the marketing channel integration, there, I forget which brand it was. It was beauty brand. Somebody did an end cap in store that said, TikTok made me buy it. And I just think we're going to see more and more of that of basically your in store promotions, your influencer marketing campaign, your email campaign, all of it tying together.

And it's my favorite time of the episode. It's the AI minute. ding, ding, ding. I mentioned AI, made it 15 minutes in, but I am seeing there's more and more platforms out there for managing marketing and managing influencer marketing. There's also more and more AI being used to deliver. Very hyper targeted personalized things.

We were talking about some B2B AI automation earlier even, on the B2B side. But there's also the same stuff happening on B2C. I think this is going to allow you, some of these platforms that are leveraging AI really well, you're going to be able to scale to thousands of micro influencers that you're working with.

Build out. Kind of multi channel omni channel influencer marketing campaigns around each influencer. and that's going to be,

as a marketer,

that is really cool. As a consumer and as I talk to other consumers about it, it gets a little scary because of the level of hyper targeting you can do as well. but I do think that's kind of part of the future of influencer marketing is seeing the use of technology and AI to Make it feel like almost a one on one interaction, but at a massive scale,

[00:15:56] Darin Newbold: Wow. Very, very exciting things happening. Well, as we kind of bring this podcast to together into a close, kind of what are some influencer, marketing resources that, that we may have and, and kind of the big ideas we want to want everyone to walk away from, from this podcast.

[00:16:16] Joshua Warren: Yeah, so definitely follow me Joshua Warren on LinkedIn They'll be a link in the show notes and follow creativity as well.

And that's not just because I want more followers I'm putting out content every day around e commerce and a lot of it lately has been around influence for marketing We are actually building out just saw the, the final version just needs a little bit of design polish of an influencer marketing ROI calculator that lets you program in, as complex of an influencer mix as you would like.

So you can say, Hey, I'm going to work with. Five micro influencers, 10 nano influencers, one larger scale influencer. Here's the amounts that they're quoting me. And then it will even prefill the expected response rates, depending on the size of influencer, give you the total cost and the ROI that you can expect from that campaign.

So that will be available on my LinkedIn here in the next couple of weeks. So definitely. Follow me and, keep an eye out for that. And yeah, I would say, the main, main idea of this episode is if you aren't doing influencer marketing yet, get started and you can get started with micro influencers at a lot lower cost than you expect.

if you are, leveraging influencer marketing, make sure you're tracking everything, please, please. and then also just consider experimenting with that mix of different size influencers.

[00:17:38] Darin Newbold: One quick question, and I should have brought this up earlier, but Where would a brand find 

[00:17:43] Joshua Warren: the micro influence? You know, there are some services out there, and this was actually, I had a great conversation on LinkedIn yesterday with someone about this, and it was a brand that basically said Google. Their best results have been just good old fashioned Google organic search and actually just searching around and finding the influencers that way, but there are agencies that specialize just in influencers, and representing influencers almost like, any other agent would, and there are services and websites that, you know, influencer directories, but apparently the best way that quite a few brands have found is

[00:18:18] Darin Newbold: Just 

[00:18:19] Joshua Warren: old fashioned Google. All right.

right. Well, 

[00:18:21] Darin Newbold: you've heard it here. So, so with that, we definitely want to encourage you to, definitely subscribe and, to what, to Josh's posts as well as, creativities. And as always, we definitely encourage you to tell us about your stories around influencer marketing and what you've been doing or what questions you have.

And with that, we'll close it out. Thanks again for joining us here at commerce today. And we look forward to connecting with you.

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