Choosing Between Micro And Macro Influencer Marketing On Instagram

There are two forms of Influencer marketing you can choose from for your Instagram marketing efforts. These are micro and macro influencer marketing. To make the best choice among the two, here are a few things that you should know. Influencer marketing is the most popular form of marketing on Instagram. This form of marketing is embraced by most of the businesses because:
• It drives highest level of engagement
• It provides widest reach of content
• It ensures higher ROI.
According to research it is found that:
• 80% of marketers find influencer marketing to be the most effective approach and
• 71% of marketers admit that influencer marketing has helped them a great deal in driving high quality of organic traffic to their website.
In short, influencer marketing ensures high traffic, conversion, sales and business revenue, exactly in that order.

These should be good enough reasons to convince you to focus on influencer marketing in 2020. The influencers will help you to leverage the power of Instagram marketing, whether you use a micro, macro or a celebrity influencer.

However, if you plan to integrate influencer marketing to your efforts, here are a few important things that you should keep in mind:
• You must craft an effective influencer marketing strategy
• You must find the right type of influencers for your campaign
• You must consider the quality of followers they have more than the number of followers
• You must review the content to judge the quality
• You must check the level of engagement
• You must look at the demographics of the audience
• You must check their authenticity and reach.

This will ensure that you end up choosing and partnering with the right type of influencer for your Instagram marketing campaigns.

About the micro influencers
Micro influencers are the ones to go for, especially if you are a small business and have a limited budget. They have a following less than 10,000 and have a very good eye for photography.

The advantages of working with micro influencers are:
• They are more authentic as they will have ought or used the product, they promote
• This authenticity attracts more engagement from the followers
• They create a better awareness and brand recall
• They are cheaper than macro-influencers and therefore more cost-effective for businesses with limited budget and
• Their campaigns are easy and low-cost to execute.
On the flipside, the downsides of using micro-influencers for Instagram marketing are:
• They have limited reach and visibility due to their low number of followers
• You will have less control of the output of the micro influencers and
• Their return on investment is usually very hard to prove.

Therefore, using micro-influencers can be great to put your brand and product in front of a considerable number of people only when the reach, visibility, and engagement can be easily quantified and reported on. If that is not possible, you should stick to reliable and reputable marketing agencies such as Blastup.com or others and expect desired results.

About macro-influencers
On the other hand, you may also work with macro-influencers, if you have the budget, that is. They have a large number of followers, often exceeding 100,000. The macro-influencers have replaced the celebrity influencers that dominated this field previously. Since the macro-influencers have a large number of audiences, you are assured of:
• A wider reach
• A better brand awareness
• A higher prospect of traffic, conversion and sales and
• A better online personality and impact.

In spite of the significant investment, it is good to work with macro-influencers due to their high level of professionalism. This will ensure autonomy of your brand as well as more control over your Instagram marketing campaign.

The major advantages of working with macro-influencers include:
• Time saved and
• Low risk of boosted engagement and fake followers.
Apart from the cost factor, there is one more issue working with the macro-influencer. This is the lack of credibility of customers towards their voices. According to a report of Collective Bias it is found that only 3% of consumers are influenced by these influencers when it comes to buying a product.

Micro influencers vs macro influencers
When you have to make a choice between micro and macro influencer, there are a few basic parameters and factors to take into consideration.
• Your final choice should depend on what you want to accomplish through your influencer marketing strategy. It can be a wider reach, a higher engagement or simply a hype about your product.
• It will also depend on the budget of celebrity endorsement of course. Sometimes, it may cost you millions of dollars to use a celebrity for marketing your product or brand.

Most important, in the recent times, there is a significant shift seen among the business owners in using micro-influencers instead of macro-influencers because of several good reasons such as:
• Authentic content
• Affordability and
• More credible recommendations.

This back-to-basics approach followed by the business owners has resulted in the rise in demand for micro-influencers according to global influencer marketing research report of 2019 by Emarketer.com. This has also resulted in the rise in use of the new Influencer Relationship Management tools and software. This tool helps the businesses to manage, track and analyze a large number of people involved in such influencer marketing campaigns.

The verdict
Nothing can be said for certain that you should go for either micro or macro influencer marketing. It depends on several factors whether you should go for micro or macro. If a micro influencer strategy meets your business goals and objectives, then you should surely go for it to save money and get the desired result.

Both micro and macro influencers have their significant merits and demerits for which you should consider the following points to make an informed and educated decision:
• Consider your business goal
• Consider your budget
• Determine your audience
• Match it with the audience of the influencer and
• Find out how important and credible they are for your brand.

You will be better off if you work with both influencer types with higher brand awareness, leads, conversions, sales, subscriptions and ROI, if budget permits.

By Kristen Smith. Kristen Smith has been working on the importance of social media in marketing with thousands of real Instagram followers for her postings.