Gone are the days of brands turning to celebrity influencers to promote their products. The coronavirus only accelerated that trend.
A quick search on Google Trends shows a carrying trend of increased online searches for influencer marketing, a trend that has been additionally amplified by the coronavirus as brands turned to social media to promote their products. Specifically, brands have turned to authentic and relatable micro influencers who have between 5,000 – 50,000 followers, versus those with 100,000+ followers. But why?
Consider this: when was the last time you purchased something off the recommendation of a celebrity? People are starting to see through the smokescreen of the ‘perfect life’ portrayed by the Mega influencers, especially as daily stories began to appear with influencers getting into hot water by not following COVID-related safety protocols. The lack of authenticity and relatability are only some of the factors driving the move from Mega to Micro influencers.
A Changing Trend: Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers are the future of influence marketing. They are able to authentically demonstrate a product by showing their audience how they use it in their everyday life, how its aligned with their personal values and other content posted on their page, using their own voice on their own social media channels. Their audience feels more involved in the life of a micro-influencer, respectively, will more carefully listen to what they advise to buy or try.
In addition, the communication of micro-influencers with their audiences is more personalized. Brands select them in order to achieve marketing goals through quality and higher conversion rates, as the number of potential quality leads is higher than with a mega influencer, who is spoiled by different brands and their brand support isn’t authentic. Partnership with microinfluencers allows you to connect with the potential consumer through the established trust between a micro-influencer and their audience.
Taking into account all the mentioned above, brand partnerships with micro-influencers is one of the most effective ways to promote products and services. It shows high efficiency for the reason that the micro-influencers have a smaller target audience with higher trust for their recommendations, resulting in a higher conversion rate for the brand.
Karma Case Study: Alternative Kitchen Influencers
In the absence of retail sampling events, Alternative Kitchen decided to try a new marketing approach for their brand and engaged Karma to source bilingual (English/French) food bloggers/micro-influencers to create vegetarian recipes and promote meatless Alternative Kitchen products.
Over the course of two weeks, select micro-influencers in the Montreal and Quebec areas created special recipes to share with their followers. This campaign targeted a very specific audience: millennials, 18-34 age demographic, who prefer a plant-based diet, are vegetarians or vegans, those looking for meatless alternatives to include in their diet.
Through our database of 27,000 profiled brand ambassadors across North America, Karma sourced well-known micro-influencers, who have extensive experienced and organic audience, to create food-related content using Alternative Kitchen products.
Micro-influencers posted in their personal authentic style with no “sales-y” script and created unique recipes to share with the followers!
Results: over 10,500 unique impressions through influencer posts and stories, 2,700+ likes on campaign posts, increased Alternative Kitchen website traffic by 11.5%…and the numbers are growing daily!