Influencers have been affecting buyers since businesses began and not many understand the superpower an influencer wields – the power to make an audience trust your brand.
Influencer Marketing has made the top B2B brands rethink their strategy towards promotion.
But, how can small businesses micro influencers get the best out of marketing campaigns?
This is the question that moved me to create this ultimate guide on how to create the best micro influencer campaigns for a B2B brand.
Who are micro-influencers?
Micro influencers are individuals who interact with your audience on a constant basis. They engage with people to understand their likes, find what appeals to them and are probably a known face in your business vicinity.
Rather than promoting random products, micro influencers act as consultants when it comes to their audience.
Here is how you can identify a micro influencer:
- The individual has a following ranging from 1000 to 100,000 people.
- Micro influencers are more often niche experts.
- His/her social media engagement rate is high.
- They transfer customer value to your audience.
What can micro influencers do for your business?
While running a small business, launching an influencer marketing campaign can become a huge setback if there are budget limitations.
Micro-influencers can scale your business and help your brand communicate with the right audience within a limited budget.
The ones who inspire us also influence us. They urge us to take action. And Micro-Influencers fit the above bill.
Source: Sidney Pierucci
From buying a good product to improving your productivity to subscribing to software to get better at work, they have an impact on our buying decisions.
This is why I believe working with micro-influencers give the best result for SMBs.
How to find micro influencers?
Based on the different stages in content marketing and the strategies, you can partner with different micro-influencers.
I have detailed the methods of finding micro-influencers in the following stages of a content marketing campaign.
- Content creation
- Content idea generation
- Content promotion
Once the micro-influencer data is obtained, you can now reach out to each individual of your preference and involve them in your content marketing process.
The benefits of this tactic are:
- You get more readers to your articles.
- They can be a good prospect for your business
- You are working with influencers who wouldn’t charge you!
Since a clear picture has been painted on what to expect in a micro-influencer, let us move on to the best methods to find them.
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Content idea generation
In order to present engaging as well as interesting customer value to your audience, it is important to stay on top of the trends in your industry.
Finding compelling ideas to create an epic piece of content is made easy with Social Animal.
# Find your keywords
Keywords mean business in the world of SEO.
If you are someone who creates competitive articles for your set of keywords, writing long-form articles and making it rank would be a priority.
For a small business or a website with less Domain Authority, finding the best set of keywords, to begin with, can be a considerable task.
The best keywords are the ones that have a decent search volume (100+) and less competition.
Tools: Use a keyword research tool like SEM Rush or Ahrefs.
# Do a hashtag search on Google
Google is undoubtedly the most used search engine on the internet.
If a hashtag is added prior to your target keyword, Google returns results of top content related to your hashtag and most of the time the top social media posts in platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
This means that your piece of web content needs to stay on top of what is trending across social media channels.
# How to find micro influencers on Instagram
Use the Instagram search feature and enter your hashtag. Follow the below steps to know how to find Instagram influencers in your niche.
If you are clicking on the people filter, the results displayed will be a list of top influencer profiles for your small business on Instagram.
If you move on to the hashtag category, the result displayed will be a mix of the top as well as recent posts on Instagram.
This is the result of the keyword #portraitphoto consisting of the top and recent pictures uploaded using this hashtag.
You can sort your micro-influencer profiles from this list manually.
# Monitor online content
Writers have shed the limelight on a lot of brands with their content.
No one better than a writer can influence a lot of readers at once and this is why any small business should monitor the articles relevant to their audience and most preferably, their competitor’s content.
Tools: Social Animal’s dashboard, Google alerts, Brand24.
Here is how you can monitor your online content with Social Animal.
Enter your target keywords and domains to track, and you get the results loaded in your dashboard!
The below screenshot displays the recently shared articles related to Content Marketing.
Sign up now to monitor your keywords online!
# Look up your keywords on Twitter
Log in to your Twitter account and search for your target keyword. Please don’t forget to add a hashtag at the beginning.
The accounts displayed are the best profiles that can make your tweets reach more people.
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Content creation
Content creation can consume a lot of time and this might even ruin the timelines of other campaigns at times.
Writing a perfect article with best blogging topics which can gain more social media shares, and rank well for the target keywords is a tedious task.
# Content research
To begin with, your article requires content research and a data-driven way to get promoted. To save hours of research, log on to Social Animal and enter your keyword.
You can alter the search filters based on dates to get the most shared articles in recent times.
With the recent trending articles on your target keywords, you analyze each article to get a broader idea of what worked for them.
You can also apply a bunch of filters(like content type, deep search, etc) to find the best relevant results based on your audience.
# Find guest posting opportunities
Guest blogging can be the simplest way to attract a more appropriate audience. It gives immediate exposure to a new doorway of traffic to your website.
In the long run, it improves your branding and also helps you build good relationships with relevant influencers.
Websites with good traffic estimate for a long keyword means that the domain is a good place for you to write content.
Just have a look at the engagement these websites have got from the Top Domains bar of Social Animal’s insights section.
If you have a blog related to the keyword blockchain, a guest post content in one of the above five domains would mean a great deal.
This is a smart way of gaining a new audience to your blog.
You can gain the data of a total of 50 domains at one go by clicking on the export button on your right-hand side.
Tip: You can also place ads in the top domains for your target keyword.
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Content promotion
A lot of tactics can engage your existing audience through content promotion.
You can mail to your existing list, share your articles on your social media feeds, and possibly share in your online communities.
But have you ever wondered how to find microinfluencers who will possibly share your content?
Now, you can find those exact individuals on the best platform for content marketing promotion (Twitter) using Social Animal’s view sharers feature.
Choose the target keyword of your upcoming article and enter the query in the Articles section.
Since the view sharers feature is relatively new, it works on the latest articles only. Choose the week or month filter and hit apply!
Once you click on the view sharers button, the data consisting of the people who have shared top articles on Twitter will be ready to be exported.
You can tag, message or tweet to these profiles who will be willing to share or retweet similar content on their feeds.
# Use Micro Influencers filter in Social Animal
It is extremely easy to select the best micro influencers for your business using this powerful filter in the influencer section of Social Animal.
Choose the share content option after entering your target keyword.
For this example, I have chosen the keyword – content marketing
This mode displays the best Twitter profiles who have shared content related to content marketing.
Once the results are loaded for the shared content mode, choose the micro influencer filter from the list of filters from your left and hit Apply filter button.
Now you have got the best list of micro-influencers for the keyword content marketing. The power of this data is that these profiles are active and engage with their audience.
You can hit export to download the data.
Conclusion:
These are the best possible methods to find the best micro influencers to grow your business.
If you are on the lookout to find the best social media influencers for your business, sign up for a Social Animal free trial to save your time!
Here is one of our best pieces of content on how to find influencers on social media!
If you have other methods to find micro influencers, please do share!