Marketing campaigns have played integral roles in commerce from time immemorial. For Shopify eCommerce, however, and with the growth of the internet over the years, there are a lot of additional, unconventional strategies to implement. One of these is the implementation of micro-influencer marketing campaigns.
What are these, how are they beneficial to you, and how best do you optimize your micro-influencer marketing campaigns for Shopify to give you better results? We are here to give you all you need to know. Let’s dive in.
Who Is A Micro-Influencer?
A micro-influencer is an individual having an online presence, preferably on social media, amassing followership between 1,000 to 100,000 followers. These individuals, of course, dedicate the use of their online platform to the paid promotion of various products and services.
For more context, micro-influencers on Instagram have an average following of 15,000. With a number of these individuals being experts in particular niches, such as tech, lifestyle, fashion or food, to mention a few, micro-influencers prove to be very important to a lot of eCommerce businesses.
Why Micro-Influencers Are Great Marketing Choices
Micro-influencer marketing campaigns are great picks for your Shopify store and products, and this is so for a barrage of reasons. To start with, unlike macro-influencers or full-blown celebrities, micro-influencers prove to be more accessible, more relatable in their content with an ordinary audience and, best of all, cost less to hire. These individuals may not have an audience reach that stretches as far as these macro-influencers and celebrities but statistics show just why micro-influencers are better.
- Micro-Influencers have an 85% higher engagement ratio
- 61% of consumers relate more with micro-influencers content
- 82% of consumers prefer to follow recommendations of micro-influencers
- A study by the Digital Marketing Institute shows that 60% of consumers consider purchasing an influencer-promoted product and 40% went on to purchase a product after seeing an influencer promote it on social media
All these favourable statistics are mostly owed to the fact that, coupled with highly-engaging content, micro-influencers prove to be more responsive or directly engage with the audience.
Best Practices For Micro-Influencer Marketing For Shopify
The benefits of micro-influencer marketing for Shopify are not in doubt. So how do you make the best of this form of a marketing campaign for your online store, products, and services? Sharing the best practices that will maximize your Return-On-Investment on Micro-Influencer marketing for Shopify.
Keep Your Audience And Values Aligned
The first thing you want to consider is if the general audience of an influencer you wish to work with shares the same characteristics as your target audience. You don’t want to waste time on an audience that is not, in the ordinary, interested in your particular niche.
What do you do to identify an audience’s demography and behavioural profile?
- Check the influencer’s posts and ensure that they show similarity with the type of content you wish to put out.
- Ensure the influencer makes use of the same social media or online platform you wish to use. If your brand has recognition on a particular platform, like Facebook, choosing an influencer that also makes use of that platform could make exposure easier. Nonetheless, getting introduced to a new audience on another platform requires that you choose an influencer that is an expert there.
Values are also important. Where your values do not align, there may be clashes when posts are to be put out or are eventually put out. Here you want to check the language and tone this individual uses, as well as his or her reputation and the type of products this individual promotes.
Hiring an influencer that promotes R-rated products may not be the best if you wish to market family-friendly products.
In all this, you want to pick an influencer that operates in the same niche as you, serves your exact target audience, and shares the same values as you, to avoid clashes.
Promote social media authenticity
61% of consumers prefer an influencer who creates authentic content. A lot of popular influencers enjoy high engagements due to their authenticity. How do they show it? By making use of the product or service, showing the audience exactly how it works or how effective it is.
Rather than creating content that consumers see through as “cliche” marketing, the best-choice micro-influencer shows this audience the exact use of your product or services. Of course, you know these types of influencers by checking out their previous paid micro-influencer marketing campaigns for Shopify stores and seeing just how their content is curated. Authentic personal stories also do the trick.
Work With Multiple Influencers
Micro-influencers, or any type of influencer at all, have unique ways they interact with their audience. A large, engaging following isn’t a result limited to one engagement strategy. Influencers present specific perspectives of products to their audience and you want to use this to your advantage.
Hire multiple micro-influencers (who share your target audience and values) and show a larger, more dynamic audience a wider perspective of your product or services.
Use Influencer Marketing Software
Now, all the talk about studying previous posts of influencers to figure out how they align with your target audience and values may seem like extra hard work. Why don’t you implement software that filters out your choices based on your specific needs?
A micro-influencer marketing app for Shopify presents you with multiple choices to choose from as long as you give it the right input and data to work with. Your results are filtered based on your preferred niche, age, geographics, follower volume, keywords, hashtags, and even engagement rates.
Some of the best tools in the market include Hubspot, Upfluence, Influenster, Heartbeat, and Traackr. All these give you unlimited campaigns, multiple contact channels, and possess high review scores.
Communicate Goals Clearly
For instance, you have a micro-influencer to work with, you don’t want any result that falls out of your main goals. To ensure this, you unequivocally relate your goals with your influencer(s). You discuss your main objectives and optimize your micro-influencer marketing strategy for Shopify based on each influencer’s expertise within the niche and with the audience.
You present them with any key messages you wish to put out, background information on your brand to develop their content, deliverables (including delivery dates), required campaign elements, and how success is to be measured.
In addition to all these tips, you also want to give your micro-influencer a certain level of creative freedom. Not too much freedom, but enough to implement personal strategies in promoting products. You also note that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires disclosure to be given to the audience that promotion is paid. This could be in the form of #ad or #sponsored hashtags.
Get Involved In Micro-Influencer Marketing Today
You want the best for your eCommerce business and have recognized the benefits of micro-influencer marketing. With a lot of guidelines to follow, you may be thinking “are there enough influencers that fit all these?” Indeed, influencers are not selling out and there are a lot of new influencers on the internet that get your products, services, or store the exposure it needs.
eCommerce is a tight market to break out of and implementing every strategy to this effect is crucial. Now you know how micro-influencer marketing in Shopify works, why waste time? Get involved now.
