Influencer marketing has proven to be a valuable method for marketing a brand or product, with some of the key outcomes being: improving brand advocacy, increasing awareness, reaching new audiences, and improving sales conversion.

The most widely used social media platforms for influencer brand collaborations is Instagram, followed by blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest. According to Statista in 2016, there were 9.7 million sponsored influencer posts on Instagram, and this is expected to grow to over 30 million in 2019. In another survey from 2017, almost 96% of bloggers around the world promoted their blog posts through social media.

The question remains, do influencers with larger audiences always deliver better results? Although influencer marketing is so widely used, many marketers still struggle with identifying the right influencer, which can make or break a campaign.

 Micro Influencer?

There are many factors to consider when it comes to working with an influencer. Here we will show you the key differences between macro and micro influencers, and how to identify which scenarios to work with each of them.

1. Macro-Influencers

• Macro-influencers are characterized as having a large number of followers (at least over 100,000). While celebrities previously dominated in reaching such large audiences, social media has given rise to new online personalities with similar reach and clout. Thus influencer marketing grew as a more commonly adopted strategy by brands.

2. Micro-Influencers

There has been increasing interest in working with micro-influencers. Commonly categorized by their smaller number of followers (usually ranging from 1000 to around 100,000) on Instagram, micro-influencers were also initially defined as having higher audience engagement rates as compared to macro-influencers.

In this case, a smaller number of followers actually means that micro-influencers are still able to develop personal relationships with followers, and these followers show genuine interest in their content, which leads to more genuine support for sponsored posts.

Key benefits of collaborating with micro-influencers are:

• 1. Less investment, which makes it accessible to most brands or businesses
• 2. Possibility of working with several influencers at the same time
• 3. Reaching a new niche audience
• 4. High conversion rate
• 5. Ability to generate an increase in sales
• 
  However, one of its main drawbacks is the lower visibility and reach compared to macro-influencers. Brands also have less control over a micro-influencer’s content in terms of consistency and legitimacy. There is also a high possibility of inaccurate target audience and engagement, which makes measuring return on investment (ROI) difficult.
  

Source: blog.digimind.com