Influencers have the power to win the hearts – and pockets – of consumers. It is no surprise, then, that some of the biggest brands in the world are using influencer marketing to promote their products and services. While influencer marketing is effective, not all brands have the budget to afford a top-tier influencer. Fortunately, there are micro influencers on whom these brands can rely. These influencers offer better audience access and higher engagement than macro influencers (100K – 500K followers) at a fraction of the cost.

The social media platform where you can see amazing examples of micro influencer partnerships. This past year, brands like Hello Fresh and ASOS worked with micro influencers to run successful Instagram influencer marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll show you how to find micro influencers on Instagram. Also, we’ll demonstrate how you can use micro influencers to boost sales.

Micro influencers should be relevant to your niche

Influencer marketing can be used for achieving different goals, such as driving engagement, increasing brand awareness or boosting sales. To be able to achieve any of these goals, however, you must promote your content to a relevant audience.This means that you must work with micro influencers who are relevant to your niche and have a significant following that is interested in that niche.

Ideally, you should find an influencer who is considered an expert in a subject that is relevant to your niche. If you fail to do this, you won’t be able to reach your target audience and there will be no point in using influencers to promote your brand. Use social media monitoring tools to find influencers within your niche. These tools will allow you to listen to conversations and trends around your niche, and will help you identify the most influential voices around these topics.

Have specific goals for your campaign

As mentioned, micro influencer marketing can be used for a variety of goals. However, the tactics to achieve and measure these goals are different. So it’s important to have your goals as the starting point of your campaign. This will determine how you picking an influencer to developing the campaign creatives.

If your goal is to drive engagement, then, that should be the deciding factor in choosing micro-influencers. Find influencers with a high engagement rate and use content that inspires engagement. To promote engagement with your audiences, you can create a giveaway in partnership with the Instagram influencer of your choice. The influencer can give clear instructions of the rules, which can involve liking posts, tagging friends, or following your account.

If your goal is to create brand awareness because perhaps you’re working with a new product, then your focus should be on reach. The micro-influencers that you work with, in this case, should have impression rates. Your campaign strategy should support your goal of amplifying reach. For example, contests, where your micro-influencer partners ask their audiences to share posts tagging your brand, would help grow reach.

If your goal is to drive sales, then design your campaign with the main goal of facilitating the purchase process. Also, make it easy to track the impact that your micro-influencer partner had on your sales. You can do this by providing a promo code for each Instagram influencer. Also, if your budget allows, work with multiple micro-influencers within your niche. This will ensure higher reach within your target market and increase the chances of your customer base seeing your products multiple times.

Managing multiple influencers can be a real pain. However, if you use a tool like Keyhole you can monitor all of your influencers to gain instant access to performance insights and make sharing screenshots a thing of the past.

Showcase your product experience with micro influencers

When consumers see a compelling product content, they become interested in trying that product. In order to increase the impact on your audience through micro influencers on Instagram, showcase their experiences while using your products. After all, Instagram is all about inspiring experiences.

This can compel followers to buy the product or service to enjoy the same experience themselves. For example, you can have your Instagram influencer partner use it and share their reviews about it with the audience. Or perhaps, they can make a video of your product, share stories or simply post a picture with an inviting caption.

The goal here is to demonstrate how your product is enhancing an influencer’s experience. Since the influencer has its audience’s trust, it will create a compelling argument to try your products. In a similar fashion, the micro influencer should show their audience how your services enhance his/her experience.

Give influencers the freedom to be creative

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember when working with micro influencers on Instagram. The reason why micro influencers have managed to grow their audience is that their audience trusts them and they know what content attracts the audience.

They know their followers, so they know the type of content that will appeal to and engage their audience. Let them give honest reviews about your product and allow them to promote your brand in their own way. There is nothing more powerful in influencer marketing having an influencer that can promote your product authentically.

If you tightly control the content that an Instagram influencer shares about your product or services, there is a risk of the audience losing their trust in the influencer due to inauthenticity. If that happens, you won’t be able to successfully promote your brand. So instead of controlling the influencer’s creative process, get more control of the performance process. In essence, let influencers do their thing but have a clear measurement of their performance – what is working and what isn’t.

Using influencer tracking and analytics, you can have full transparency on your influencers’ performance metrics and help them get more engagement.