October 30, 2023
by Joe Sinkwitz / October 30, 2023
While aiming to promote your brand or product on social media, securing an influencer with a massive following isn't always necessary. Surprised?
In fact, leveraging micro-influencers can offer a more authentic and engaging approach to your marketing strategy. These influencers, with their niche and loyal audience, often yield higher engagement rates and foster stronger connections with your target market.
Moreover, tapping into specialized influencer marketing platforms can provide valuable insights and streamlined management of your influencer campaigns, amplifying your brand's visibility and impact.
Micro-influencers are individuals who have a follower count between 2,000-50,000 on a specific social media channel and who curate content around a particular niche topic or market
In this article, discover more about micro-influencers: who they are, why you should invest in them, where to find them, and how to leverage their potential in your campaigns.
Influencers can generally be lumped into three categories for targeting purposes. When you are seeking out individuals to assist with your campaigns, you have the added advantage of already having determined buyer personas given the targets are specific contacts within an organization.
This buyer persona determination makes influencer choice easier based on the following categorical breakouts.
The allure of the aspirational macro influencer is in the name; macro influencers are often celebrities with giant social followings and perceived aspirational status in the several million. What does this mean?
Consumers of the content from these social feeds do so with the goal of being like the celebrity in some small way. As it is probabilistically unlikely for a random member of the audience to achieve the same fame-like status as the celebrity, the influence is instead imparted more on what the celebrity does, says, and consumes.
Aspirational influencers are more useful for mass-consumption products than for enterprise-level account-based marketing plans for several reasons:
What separates authoritative influencers from aspirational influencers is perceived expertise. Authorities convey trust within their realm of expertise and are oft sought after for that expertise. While authoritative influencers can occasionally amass audience sizes compared to their aspirational counterparts, they tend to be smaller, constrained by the size of an industry or field of study. In rare cases, such as extremely small niches, authoritative influencers can be viewed as experts while holding a small enough audience to classify as micro influencers.
Your neighbor. Your co-worker. Your mom. All three could be classified as peer influencers as they are somehow connected to you in your everyday activities and social life. A peer influencer is generally one that an individual can relate to strongly due to overlapping social status, work history, or familial interaction. As their name implies, peers are generally smaller influencer audiences by nature but receive the highest scores for perceived trust and categorical relevance.
Note: Examining the three major categories, only aspirational influencers must be excluded when searching for micro-influencers.
Expert-level influencers are split among macro and micro status depending on the industry, making them useful to consider, especially for enterprise marketing strategies; however, only peer influencers are consistently overlapping in micro-influencer status.
With an understanding of what micro-influencers are, why use them? The simple answer is cost. From an ROI perspective, testing micro influencers comes with a low barrier to entry, which allows for easier A/B testing for messaging, social media, and categorical focus. Micro-influencers aid in word-of-mouth marketing, have fantastic social media engagement, and are especially useful in targeting those that might be using ad blockers.
Word-of-mouth marketing is the original marketing, predating everything printed, let alone everything digital. Of all forms of marketing, it is considered the most trusted as it is conveyed primarily through trusted sources, allowing greater mindshare to take root for products and services. You trust the recommendations from your peers and perceived experts as a proxy for your own experience, and as these are frequently micro influencers, they are worth investing in for the word-of-mouth benefit alone.
Another critical factor in relying on micro influencers is their engagement rates and efficacy. Engagement rates are a type of influencer analytics, typically a function of audience fit to an influencer’s content; the worst rates occur with aspirational influencers, where it is more difficult to achieve a high percentage of constant engagement over millions upon millions of followers. With micro influencers, engagement is more readily achieved since the topics often match what the audience is specifically looking for.
According to a research study by Tomoson, the quality of customers acquired through influencer channels was also perceived as better than non-segmented traffic.
This perceived quality may be thought of as a function of the higher engagement rates, as the relational affiliation between the audience and the content creator is higher, resulting in more intimate social reactions.
Not only is the perceived traffic from micro influencers better, but because the totality of influencers cannot easily be lumped into generalized ad units, their usage allows brand messaging to circumvent most modern ad blockers.
The reasoning behind this circumvention is that audiences opting in to consume content from the influencers, which allows for displaying what are effectively in-stream advertisements, wholly relevant to the audience’s desires, in an FTC-compliant manner.
Social network selection is an important consideration when determining which influencers to work with, whether B2C, B2B, or even the B2E use case you’re currently reading about. Each network has different pros and cons that you need to evaluate prior to determining the network focus for your ABM strategy.
As you can see from the above matrix, not all social networks are considered equal, especially regarding the need to provide a professional experience. From that perspective, networks like Instagram and Pinterest may be excluded from the enterprise ABM use case.
Beyond that, the use case specifics become more granular:
Using just the above sampling of social networks and excluding blogs for simplicity, you could select micro-influencers to likely meet the needed criteria on Twitter (now X), LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
X is the internet’s megaphone. Many social networks use some aspect of commenting, sharing, and liking. However, what makes X fairly unique in attracting attention is its methodology behind injecting likes, comments, and retweets into the content feed for mass consumption.
One method in which this can be used to your advantage when attempting to capture enterprise clients is by paying for the propagation of positive content associated with your product or service in a fashion most closely associated with public relations.
Taken a step further, since account-based marketing strategies inherently target specific people within a very specific company, the positive content being shared could be tailored to solve the exact need the ABM target has, with your company as the solution. Taken even further, X allows for tagging. This means decision-makers can even be asked to comment or weigh in on the content shared, psychologically investing them in your potential solution.
This technique can be used up and downstream to the intended ABM target due to X’s versatility. Chances are, micro-influencers already exist in the followers of the enterprise persona being targeted but also are probable as accounts being followed by the enterprise persona. By getting the content shared and positively commented upon by both the targeted enterprise client’s audience as well as their perceived peers, a compulsion to review the content is created.
Setting aside using an influencer network that may have already vetted X users and their willingness to engage in influencer activities, X is one of the easiest to discover potential micro-influencers.
There are two methods to consider:
LinkedIn is a wonderful social network choice for you in targeting enterprise-level ABM targets. Much has already been written on how to leverage the authority of LinkedIn influencers for B2B purposes. Since your KPI is already known as ultimately making the sale to the ABM target, you can approach LinkedIn with that goal in mind.
Using LinkedIn is somewhat different than X above, as the content feed is not particularly useful for reaching an intended target due to its noisiness and lack of professional relevancy. Instead, the best use of LinkedIn from an influencer perspective is via post and comment mentions of intended targets.
While LinkedIn comments are somewhat more egocentric than those of X, both in part due to how individuals are engaged in conversations on the network as well as how notifications of mentions are provided separate from normal LinkedIn activity notifications, there is a bit more risk in low-quality mentions of your ABM targets being viewed as undesirable.
To alleviate risks of overusing mentions of specific persona targets on an ABM strategy on individual-level posts, consider the following tweaks:
LinkedIn makes it easy to search for a name when hunting for specific ABM targets, allowing for searches by company, geography, title, and more via their Sales Navigator product. Gaining access to the targets’ professional peers is more difficult, given LinkedIn’s restrictions on displaying contact information and specific people connected to your target.
Instead, you’ll need to rely more on the displayed information elsewhere on your target customer profile to find appropriate micro-influencers, which should reside in Groups associated with education and corporate alumni associations, as well as interest-level groups and as current or previous employees in the companies associated with your target via Sales Navigator searches.
A trick would be to use a tool to guess probable email contacts for all these potential micro-influencers, making it easier to perform outreach rather than directly connecting or sending an InMail.
If you follow politics in nearly any country on the planet, you know that Facebook can be a dangerously effective tool in message propagation. What sets it apart from LinkedIn is the nature of which an enterprise message may exhibit virality. The downside to this is the bleeding line between the buyer persona’s personal life and professional life, which varies significantly among Facebook users.
One carryover from the previous methods employed for LinkedIn is using groups. It’s not always easy to determine which groups a Facebook user is in. However, the sheer number of possible groups that exist surrounding industry-specific and company-centric topics makes it easy to use possible groups as an initial point of a campaign to influence your ABM target.
Once the positive material is created and shared in the various groups, a second set of influencers that might be connected professionally to your target can share the posts from the groups and as a public post on their profiles. Done with frequency, this multiple-touch approach to content can help to get in front of the target.
As a final trick, if the influencer is listed in the Facebook Collabs marketplace, the shared material can be amplified for maximum propagation as a sponsored or promoted post. What is unique here is that with intelligent audience targeting, you can go so far as to create a large audience and then exclude down to only your intended ABM targets, frequently showing that post until such time a desired action is taken.
As mentioned above, several areas exist to find micro influencers on Facebook. Their collaborations marketplace is where Facebook would prefer you interact with influencers; however, you may find as much, if not more, success in recruiting micro-influencers directly via messaging specific group members for the share campaign.
Another way to find micro-influencers, which you may wish to do if your target uses their persona for professional connections, is by connecting with friends of friends. This can act as an additional vector to show in your target’s feed.
Everyone knows that YouTube is the current king of music videos and bootleg movies, but YouTube is also the top source for professional video content. What makes YouTube especially useful as a mechanism to attract ABM targets is its discoverability features. YouTube videos can rank well in organic search and are easily embedded within blog posts, making it the premier starting point for an ABM campaign.
With the ability to create extremely detailed and informative content, one of the best micro-influencer strategies involves the creation of ‘how to’ content using your product or service as the solution to a litany of problems, with each problem getting its own video.
By itself, this strategy can be useful in getting in front of your ABM targets, provided they are performing queries on YouTube related to the problems you’re creating videos for – the more aligned those videos are with the perceived problems the target is aware of, the more likely the YouTubers will assist in your pull marketing.
Don’t stop at simply creating the content via your influencers. As a secondary step, consider pushing out this video and transcribing textual content to the other networks mentioned above. YouTube videos pointing to you as the solution to be shared into relevant Facebook groups, into relevant LinkedIn groups, by up and downstream Xmicro-influencers, and into relevant blogs will only help you both catch the eye of your ABM targets and ultimately close your deals given the transference of perceived authority.
YouTube works most similarly to X when it comes to being able to find accounts and content on a tagged basis for relevant micro-influencers. Unfortunately, determining the actual subscribers of a channel is more akin to LinkedIn’s protective nature of social contacts.
Many micro-influencing YouTubers do list their contact information for collaborations on the About tab of their profile, making outreach relatively easy. Expect to pay the most for your YouTube content compared to the other networks, as long-format video content is the most difficult to produce at a high level.
Now that you’ve successfully targeted your enterprise ABM contacts, it’s time to consider how you are going to best interact with them when they arrive at your website.
This is where using your website comes into play for an enterprise funnel strategy, all with the help of a little referrer magic on your specific landing pages.
Since you’re targeting enterprises and selling an enterprise-worthy product or service, you almost certainly have some sort of analytics setup to measure the success of your efforts on the web. Given Google Analytics is the most common platform used for basic analytical efforts, you can use the referral traffic approach with this in mind.
In a typical Google Analytics reporting view, you can quickly see all referral traffic by selecting Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals. In your view, you might see some amount of traffic coming in from Facebook.com, some from LinkedIn.com, X.com, and YouTube.com. It is within this section that you can conceptualize what is about to happen.
In order to psychologically establish common ground with your ABM prospective target, you’ll want to display imagery as closely associated with the previous page experience as possible. What this means is if the enterprise contact was interacting with a piece of micro influencer content on YouTube on how to solve a very specific problem, the best possible things you could show on your landing page for that enterprise is a combination of YouTube, the problem being faced that you’re solving, and then if possible, the enterprise itself.
You can skip the specific logic associated with informing the web visitor that you know the enterprise they are associated with based on the IP range used in the header request. Instead, let’s focus on swapping out imagery for common ground.
There are two major web hosts that power the majority of the Internet where you can apply this logic: Apache and Nginx. You will need to be very careful when modifying the logic for referrers, as it is very easy to break a website at this level.
Whether you’re using Apache, Nginx, or any other web server, you can relax knowing that it isn’t necessary to modify htaccess or set ngx_http_referrer_module logic to handle referrer logic. Instead, the referrer information and image swapping for your landing pages can be handled entirely with on-page JavaScript, allowing you to treat each landing page differently if you’re so inclined.
In this code example below, the referrer source is determined, and then if that source is coming from youtube.com, the imagery changes to reflect that. It’s a very simple and powerful method to establish common ground. If you have multiple sources to check for changing imagery, that can all be done in the If else statements.
//Only run once the document is ready
$(document).ready(function() {
// this sets the value to '' if referrer is somehow empty
var ref = document.referrer || '';
// since you'll be searching for this node multiple times, just store it in a variable:
var logoImg = $("#hero-logo");
if (ref.includes("youtube.com")) {
logoImg.attr("src", "//img/hero_image_yt.jpg");
} else {
logoImg.attr("src", "//img/hero_image.jpg");
}
})
When creating that level of image swapping at the referral level for the enterprise ABM you’re targeting, the common ground being established is helping the enterprise to lower their guard. The micro influencer content was designed as a hook to get the individual to your website and your dynamic landing page is being used to further influence the prospect to enter your sales funnel.
The method works best when the landing page is not setup as a hard sell strategy, but rather when it is designed as a soft funnel acquisition approach. In other words, the goal of the landing page is to gently suggest the ABM prospect register for a free demo or request a hassle-free phone consultation, as a couple examples.
Now do you see why micro influencers are so important for your enterprise marketing needs? By utilizing the flow of hyper-targeted micro influencers across multiple social networks, hopefully you can now see how vital these voices can be when targeting enterprise prospects on an ABM basis.
The micro influencers in the use case for enterprise ABM likely provided a stellar ROI due to the low-cost nature of the influencer, were effective due to their very specific targeting of the upstream and downstream audiences, captured the attention of the targets due to intelligent tagging and mentions, and (provided the posts themselves were effective) yielded the right traffic.
Once the ABM traffic from the micro-influencer hits the intended landing page, by using simple referrer logic to dynamically swap out imagery, a psychological connection is made to enhance perceived trust as a solution to a known problem, with a soft conversion being possible as a sales funnel entry.
By targeting micro-influencers based on ABM goals and tying those creatives to the correct imagery on your landing pages, lead capture will ensure the funnel starts to keep your sales team happy.
As a final note, consider using your ‘won’ account contacts with this campaign strategy as possible influencers in your future ABM target campaigns by cycling and having them share their successes to encountered problems via case studies as you attempt to take over an even greater share of the enterprise market.
Discover the growing significance of influencer marketing and its potential impact on your business in the coming years.
This article was originally published in 2020. It has been updated with new information.
Joe Sinkwitz has 20+ years involvement in digital marketing, focusing primarily in SEO (Principal of Digital Heretix) and of course influencer marketing (CEO of Intellifluence).
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