Are you a Growth Marketer or a Startup founder? Are you eager to learn more about how to include Influencer Marketing in your growth marketing strategy?

This blog post shows the difference between macro and micro-influencer and how the latter may help your startup grow.

Popular Influencer Categories

Influencer marketing has become a popular and effective method for startups to drive engagement and sales. According to recent research (Mediakix, 2022), 80% reported positive ROI, and 71% said it helps their firms generate high-quality traffic and engagement rates.

Influencer marketing has become a popular and effective method for startups to drive engagement and sales. According to recent research (Mediakix, 2022), 80% of startups reported positive ROI, and 71% stated that it helps their firms generate high-quality traffic and engagement rates.

However, finding the right influencers can be a challenge, as 61% of marketers report difficulties in this area. When searching for influencers to collaborate with, factors such as the quality of their content, audience demographics, engagement rate, authenticity, and reach should be taken into consideration.

Typically, influencers are classified into two or four categories. Considering four categories, we can identify the following brackets:

• nano: they are a subcategory of micro-influencers with < 1,000 followers. They often have a niche audience and are considered experts in their specific niche or industry.
• micro: influencers with a moderate following on social media, > 1,000 and < 100,000 followers. They often have specific expertise in a niche market, a high engagement rate and the community trusts their recommendations.
• macro: influencers with a large following on social media usually have > 100,000 followers. They are often considered celebrities or well-known figures in their niche.
• mega: this is a subcategory of macro-influencers, and they are influencers who have a very vast reach and following, usually > 1,000,000 followers.

In the upcoming blog post, I will focus on analysing two primary categories of influencers: macro-influencers and micro-influencers. These categories encompass a wide range of influencers and offer valuable insights into different strategies and approaches for influencer marketing.

Choosing the Right Influencer Category to Accelerate Your Startup’s Growth

When implemented correctly, influencer marketing can bring significant benefits to any company and startup. Research conducted by Twitter (2016) found that consumers trust recommendations from influencers almost as much as they do their friends.

To be successful in Influencer Marketing and connect with your audience, it’s important to select influencers who align with your brand and can authentically promote your products and services to the target audience. This involves finding individuals who embody your brand’s values, are dependable, and connect with the audience you are trying to reach.

What do startup growth teams need to know to run effective influencer marketing campaigns?

9 criteria to choose the right influencers

1. Audience
In order to connect with potential customers, it’s essential to partner with influencers whose audience aligns with your brand. Utilize audience demographic tools on influencer marketing platforms to identify influencers who have followers within your desired location, age range, or gender. This allows you to effectively reach your target audience and promote your products or services.

2. Engagement Rate
The engagement rate is a metric that reflects how well an audience interacts and responds to the content posted by an influencer. You can measure these KPIs using Google Analytics 4 or through additional third-party tools.

3. Relevance
The main reason why an influencer will decide to work with you is because your brand image aligns with their community. When reviewing influencers’ social media profiles, envision your products or services being advertised on the same platform. Spending time to review videos to understand if they are a good fit for your brand and niche is a good practice.

4. Authenticity
Authentic influencers tend to have a loyal fanbase, as they gain audience trust and loyalty by building expertise in a particular niche, such as food and drink or fashion. They demonstrate their expertise by sharing personal stories, tips, and advice in their posts.

5. Values
It’s important to ensure that your brand values align with those of the influencer you’re considering working with. Review their social media bios to gather information about their preferences, brand ambassadorships, and causes they support. Additionally, look for posts or videos that are relevant to your industry.

6. Content Quality
When collaborating with influencers, you are allowing them to create sponsored content on behalf of your brand. It is essential to evaluate whether the quality of their content aligns with your brand image, as it will be representing your business. Carefully review their profiles for content that is clear, well-composed, creative, consistent, and optimized for the platform they are using, in this case, Instagram.

7. Frequency
Check the frequency of content posted by the influencers. To build a dedicated following, it’s important for influencers to regularly engage their audience by posting high-quality content on Instagram. Ideally, an active Instagram profile should post content every 1-3 days.

8. Reliability 
When choosing influencers to collaborate with, ensure that they are reliable. For example, if an influencer is slow to respond, it can delay the completion of collaborations.

9. Audience Quality
When selecting influencers, be aware that some may have artificially inflated followers or engagement numbers.

Micro or Macro Influencers?

As mentioned above, when choosing influencers to collaborate with, it’s important to evaluate various factors including the quality of the content they create, the demographics of their audience, their engagement rate, their authenticity, and the extent of their reach.

When deciding whether to collaborate with mega, macro or micro-influencers, it is also important to consider the company’s budget needs and restrictions.

When considering whether to collaborate with a mega, macro, or micro-influencer, it’s important to take into account the budget constraints of your business.  Macro-influencers tend to be more expensive than micro-influencers, making them less suitable for early-stage startups or companies with limited funds. Macro-influencers are usually approached by well-established brands aiming to reach a broad audience. Additionally, endorsements from macro-influencers may not be perceived as authentic by the audience, particularly among younger generations who are more discerning consumers and prefer to engage with brands that are genuine, understand their values and are represented by micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers

While the potential reach of micro-influencers is limited compared to macro-influencers, there are a number of reasons why brands should prefer them over larger accounts. Four key factors to consider include:

• Authenticity: as mentioned above, Gen Z and Millennials love brands which are authentic and transparent in their communication online. Micro-influencers are better able to convey these values compared to celebrities or popular influencers.
• Conditions: negotiations between brands and influencers are typically more affordable for brands. Startups that negotiate with influencers may be able to provide them with free products, which can save on their marketing expenses. However, for this strategy to be effective, the influencer and their audience must have a positive sentiment towards the product or service being offered.
• Middle or Bottom-Of-Funnel: micro-influencers should be implemented in your marketing strategy to drive brand engagement and/or direct response. This is not the case in using micro-influencers to drive brand awareness.
• Engagement Rate: the Engagement Rate is probably the most important key metric if you’re looking for growing the revenue of your startup. As you can see in the chart below, smaller accounts scored a higher engagement rate. Also, TikTok marked a higher EG% rate compared with Instagram and Twitter.

Source: Influencer Marketing Hub, Click Here

With a deeper understanding of how macro and micro-influencer marketing operates, you can now explore two techniques for using micro-influencers to help grow your startup.

1. TikTok Influencer Marketing Strategy

We all know that TikTok is spreading so fast and far. One of the reasons why not all brands are taking advantage of TikTok is that it operates differently from other social media platforms. Before setting up an account and creating daily content, a brand should be aware of its communication style. 69% of TikTok users are between 16 and 24 years old, which suggests that content should be more fun and spontaneous. (However, TikTok is also becoming popular among adults.)

If your startup targets a segmented audience between 18-26 years old and you think you have the right company culture to fit the social media, definitely you should explore influencer marketing on TikTok. If so, follow the following steps to get started:

1. Make Your Research:
   1. Hashtag: do your research manually making use of the free #hashtag tool in the app. Conduct research using keywords related to your industry to find the best profile in your niche.
   2. Don’t forget to use Google Search. For example, look for “Best TikTok influencers for B2B SaaS“. Free SEO tools can help you too.
   3. Tools: Hypetrace is a Freemium TikTok & Instagram influencer search engine providing data by location and engagement rate. Otherwise, you can also try Influence Grid to help match brands with influencers.
2. Analysis: Find your top influencers by Engagement Rate, Follower number, Quality & Frequency of Content. Also, make sure they are active on other social media: what about YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook? You may be able to sign cross-channel deals.
3. Reach out to influencers: now you probably came up with a list of “top 5” influencers to work with.
   1. Check out their expected earnings using this free tool. TikTok Influencer Earning Calculator Tool.
   2. Reach out to them via email or direct message. Be specific. Explain what your strategy is. Send free samples for them to test your product.
   3. Send a contract including the number of featured videos, type of content, earnings, and contract duration.

2. Twitch Influencer Marketing Strategy

According to statistics, 55% of Twitch users are between the ages of 18 and 34. In December 2022, the most popular category on Twitch was “Just Chatting,” it recorded 260.6 million hours of viewership, an increase of 4% from the previous month. Additionally, the peak number of viewers grew from 800,000 to just over 1 million.”. This demonstrates that there are various opportunities on Twitch for brands across different niches. If you are interested in exploring opportunities with Twitch, here are some steps you can follow:

1. Discover tags: Familiarize yourself with Twitch Tags by Checking them out, here.
2. Evaluate metrics: Explore and evaluate channels that align with your startup’s needs. Utilize the free TwitchTracker tool to measure performance and identify the most active channels.
3. Some Ideas: Come up with a proposal:
   1. Requesting to display your brand logo in the channel in-stream before or during the live
   2.  Having the influencer wear a jersey with your logo
   3. Offering a coupon to the community during the live stream.

As Twitch is relatively new, there is still potential to develop creative and strategic plans for incorporating Twitch into your marketing strategy. Currently, Twitch Ads are not as widely used as other platforms. The future of live-streaming media is promising, and brands should take advantage of it.

Conclusions

Recent years have seen changes in how brands and agencies approach influencer marketing, due to factors such as the ongoing pandemic, the decrease in popularity of Facebook, and the rise of the Metaverse. Despite these changes, in January 2023 influencer marketing remains a powerful channel and has become an integral part of both people’s lives and brands’ marketing strategies.