How To Become a Micro-Influencer

Want to become a micro-influencer?

Gone are the days when brands collaborated only with influencers who had millions of followers. The new era of influencer marketing heralds the rise of content created by relatable everyday people — someone likable, personable, and above all, relatable.

And that could be you!

You can make money, receive freebies, and collaborate with top-tier brands – even if you have a small yet highly-engaged follower base.

But being a micro-influencer is no easy feat!

And yes, we’re not talking about increasing your follower count to a couple thousand.

The real deal is to build an engaged social media following so that when you recommend something, your audience checks it out and, let’s be honest, takes the desired action.

If you’re wondering how to become a micro-influencer, we’re here to help.

In this blog, we will discuss who a micro-influencer is, why brands prefer to partner with them, and how to become a micro-influencer!

Excited to know more? Read on!

Who is a Micro-Influencer?

According to Builtin, “A micro-influencer has a social media presence larger than a normal person’s but smaller than a celebrity’s, landing between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. (Some say anything less than 10,000 followers makes someone a nano-influencer.).”

Micro-influencers have a limited yet engaged follower base. Unlike celebrities or mega-influencers, they don’t have hundreds of brands wanting to collaborate with them. That’s the reason – every brand they collaborate with, they’re able to give their dedicated time and put in the much-needed efforts to build.

But at the end of the day, your effectiveness as a micro-influencer lies in your influence over your audience and how the content you create affects their buying decisions.

Research indicates that 82% of consumers are more inclined to follow a recommendation from a micro-influencer than mega or celebrity influencers.

That’s the reason more and more brands are showing their interests in partnering with micro-influencers.

How Does it Benefit Brands to Partner with Micro-Influencers?

Think about it. Wouldn’t influencers with more than 1,000,000 followers cause a tidal wave of website visits and brand purchases worth unimaginable revenue? Not exactly.

A bigger audience doesn’t necessarily come with greater engagement. Celebrities have multiple audience segments, and marketing to people not interested in your niche of products gives you little-to-no ROI.

This is why collaborating with micro-influencers is the better bet.

Here are three reasons why brands prefer to partner with micro-influencers:

• Higher engagement rates: The most crucial deciding factor in a brand partnership is how a creator interacts with their audience and vice-versa. With a smaller audience size comes greater one-on-one interactions, which in turn, foster long-term relationships between a creator and their audience. Micro-influencers have a 6% engagement rate on average, higher than most macro-influencers out there—therefore, making it worth the ROI for brands to partner with them.
• More trust: We cannot stress this enough, but trust is everything when you are trying to convince strangers on the internet to purchase something based on your recommendation. The standard market buyer may not find a celebrity living in a mansion with 17 swimming pools credible, but they will trust their next-door neighbor. This is the purpose that micro-influencers serve—being relatable. Research indicates that posts from micro-influencers convert over 20% of their followers—7% more than the industry average of macro-influencers. So why wouldn’t brands want to work with them?
• Less expensive collaborations: As a micro-influencer, your primary focus is to build strong brand relationships and a steady income stream. This doesn’t mean you will not be well-compensated—micro-influencers charge $100-$500 on average for their promotional posts. But it isn’t nearly as much as bigshot creators. However, the plus side is that you can bag as many brand collaborations as you like. It is a clear win for brands as they get massive ROI on a relatively lower budget and can expand their reach in a platform-like manner through micro-influencers to their high-engaged target audience segments. You can always grow your audience and become a social media superstar—and this is a great place to start!

Now that you know that brands prefer to collaborate with micro-influencers (and why!), let’s outline the steps for how to become a micro-influencer.

How to Become a Micro-Influencer

If you have to lie in the micro-influencer’s bed of roses, you have to brave some thorns (like building a decent following on any platform). But once you acquire a thousand followers, you can approach brands to partner with them.

The best part about becoming a micro-influencer is that brands will be focused on something other than your audience size—they will appraise your capabilities based on your engagement rates and the authenticity of your presentation. If they like you for your reel personality, you can expect the freebies (and the moolah!) to start coming in!

1. Choose a niche

Would you jump off a cliff without first learning about cliff-diving, judging the height of the cliff you’re about to jump off, or how to swim in deep waters? No, absolutely not!

So why would you dive into becoming a micro-influencer without choosing a niche? You wouldn’t, right? Choosing a niche is the hardest challenge you will encounter. You must choose something you are passionate about to hope for true success.

This step is all about research. You need to find something you are interested in so that you can create content that incentivizes people to follow you.

You need to niche down.

Once you have a niche, you have to identify problems for the typical customers of your industry. Suppose your followers with oily skin struggle with acne problems. Then you could promote skincare products that soak up excess oil while still keeping skin supple and protected—this will increase the probability of your followers suffering from a common pain point, buying your recommendations.

2. Create content focused on your target audience.

As a micro-influencer, you cannot share content about anything and everything. You will need to create super-targeted content for your niche audience carefully.

For example, if you are creating content in the skincare niche, you shouldn’t be creating graphic makeup looks. Your relevancy as a content creator lies in the organic engagements you can drum up by sharing your authentic self. If you keep losing focus, your credibility will drop faster than a rollercoaster downhill.

You need to produce personable content, promoting products from brands that align with your values. In this case, it would be caring for your skin against harmful chemicals. You need to collaborate with the right brand. The faster you establish niche authority, the more brands will invest in you.

3. Optimize your profile.

Some key facts you should include while optimizing your profile include:

• Your real name
• Your interests
• Where you are from
• Contact information for fans and brands
• Link to your online profiles on other social media handles
• Highlights comprising testimonials and collaborative brand stories

These details further boost your credibility and make you approachable to both your followers and the brands. As an active creator, you should consistently update them since it helps the algorithm direct your content to more of your target audience.

4. Engage with your followers and post consistently

Regular interactions build an engaged audience base, which is your biggest strength as a micro-influencer.

Brands want to see that you are frequently present in the digital space as part of conversations on the topics they want to discuss. You should post on your blog a couple of times a week on social media and keep active in your followers’ conversations.

The last point is critical. Being an influencer is a “give first take later” game. You need to share the love and interact with your audience on the content you create—this will increase engagement and result in your dream brands choosing to collaborate with you.

Thoughtful replies to a few comments can go a long way in fostering personal connections. It may eat at your time a little, but it is a part of the job.

The more your followers hang on to your words, the easier it will be to convince them to purchase from brands you partner with (and love!). This leads back to authenticity, in that you should solely collaborate with brands with the same values as you and your fellowship.

5. Find brands you want to collaborate with and engage with them

Now that you are comfortable with creating and publishing content consistently, you need to search for the brands in your niche that you would like to collaborate with.

As a skincare influencer, it would be brands selling paraben-free, sulfur-free, and everything organic skincare products.

You should choose 3-4 brands in your niche that allow you creative freedom instead of asking for random posts. For starters, it may be advisable to look for brands that have newly launched into the market.

You may start commenting on their posts—brands love that! Anything to support their products and initiatives, or even mini reviews about one of their products you tried on. Be quirky, relatable, and even polite, and watch them slide into your DMs!

6. Create targeted content for your dream brands for free and tag them

The way to paid brand partnerships lies through free promotions! Yes, that’s true!

You can make free collaboration posts to land your first paid partnership and tag the brands you use. (Don’t do this excessively, though, since it will kill your authenticity.) When potential campaign managers go through your feed, they can see how you work and what kind of material they can expect from you.

You can receive brownie points if you create a media kit that you can send to brand managers. Besides Instagram, you can get bonus points for blogs, a YouTube channel, and an email list. These boost your trustworthiness, allowing you to charge much more money.

Another way to get into your dream brand’s sights is to send them a concrete offer, stating clearly how you love the brand and how you would like to do a promotional post—detailing the number of posts you will do and even offering to pay for shipping. It automatically creates goodwill and increases your chances of collaborating with your dream brand.

7. Follow other influencers in your niche

Influencers live in a small world. Search for other influencers creating content in your niche, or broaden your search to include relevant adjacent niches. It is all about building personal connections and supporting them with engagement.

The more you cheer for them, the chances are, they will reciprocate and support you! There are rotten oranges in every basket, but this is a great way to grow your audience, find inspiration for creating content, and learn what works or doesn’t.

Start Your Micro-Influencer Career on an Influencer Marketing Platform like Stack Influence

Micro-influencers are the emerging trendsetters of the modern age. More and more businesses are realizing the value of niche, highly-engaged audience bases. Micro-influencers can use this to their advantage and land a lot of dream brand partnerships.

Ryan Prior from customerfacing.io says, “In order to be a micro-influencer, all you need is an authentic audience. Even a small one. The best advice I could give you is to pick a niche, create the best content you can, and stay consistent. Over time you’ll build your audience, and have something valuable to offer brands whose customers are in your niche.”

Using this and the pointers above, you can begin your journey as a micro-influencer—but here’s the bonus! You can supercharge your journey by signing on to influencer marketing platforms. Brands often use these platforms to scout for influencer talent and monitor their growth on relevant social media channels.

Many influencer marketing platforms are available for you, like Heepsy and AspireIQ, but none are channel-specific. This is why you should try out Stack Influence, and Stack Influence is the leading marketing platform for Amazon influencers.

Click here to learn more about us.