According to Jules Lund, founder of influencer marketing marketplace TRIBE, brands should think less about the reach that celebrity influencers offer and more about the engagement that micro-influencers can bring.
Speaking at the Marketing Week Live exhibition earlier this year, he highlighted a TRIBE analysis of Instagram posts which showed that, following a change to the platform’s algorithm, “micro-influencers that have under 100,000 followers attract far higher engagement than those with over 100,000 followers”.
And for those with under 25,000 followers, engagement had increased 50%. (For more details, read WARC’s report: Buy or nurture? Two approaches to using micro-influencers.)
“It is far more powerful than ever to fill your campaigns with an army of micro-influencers versus one or two or three top-tier influencers with over 100,000 followers, because the smaller the tribe the more potent the influencer,” he stated.
TRIBE’s marketplace allows advertisers to post a brief and micro-influencers to pitch their ideas along with a fee. If the advertiser likes the pitch it can buy it; and if it does particularly well it can go on and buy the content rights for use in a wider, mainstream campaign.
There are some obvious benefits of this approach, including the speed of response and the volume of content a brand can generate for use across various platforms.
Another was demonstrated by Omo, the Unilever-owned detergent. Lund explained how it asked for pieces of content mimicking six of the brand’s mood board images, got a hundred back and was able to pick the top-performing ones to put money behind.
“Influencer marketing was the perfect multivariate test,” said Lund. “They were able to see the one that goes ‘wow’, that's over-indexed, it’s resonated.
“So what they do is they take that image and then they apply motion and they put some graphics on it, so you’ve got this emotional connection.”
Sourced from WARC