The Power of Micro-Influencers & UGC Creators
Micro-Influencers?
UGC Creators?
What does it all mean?
As the landscape of social media marketing evolves, a shift toward authenticity and trust is emerging as an important trend. Brands that seek to cultivate this authenticity and trust should consider including two categories of collaborators in their strategy: micro-influencers and user-generated content (UGC) creators.
Micro-influencers are social media personalities with smaller but highly engaged audiences. UGC creators are users who create and share content based on their experiences, interest, or opinions. In this post, you’ll learn how businesses can leverage each type of collaborator for marketing success.
Micro-influencers, Macro Impact
The term micro-influencer usually refers to an account with a follower count in the thousands or tens of thousands. A micro-influencer typically focuses in on a niche that helps them build trust with their audience. While large-scale influencers might promote a broad range of products, a micro-influencer shares offers related to their niche (for example, a mommy blogger promoting an online parenting course or a travel blogger promoting travel insurance). Most influencers have an engagement rate between 1% and 3%, while micro-influencers often have stronger engagement (5% or higher).
When your company works with a micro-influencer, you’ll know up front that what you’re offering is aligned with the needs and interests of that creator’s audience. The micro-influencer’s higher level of engagement also means that your offer will be seen by a greater share of their audience. With a micro-influencer campaign, your product may actually get noticed by a greater number of potential customers than if you’d worked with an influencer with a larger audience. The ability to reach a huge audience may be enticing, but keep in mind that targeted outreach to a highly aligned—although smaller—audience is more likely to deliver loyal and highly engaged customers who will purchase from your brand for years to come.
Strategies for Leveraging Micro-Influencers
If you have a clear sense of your brand’s target market, you might find it easy to brainstorm a list of micro-influencers. These might be smaller influencers within your niche or they might be highly engaged customers who are already posting enthusiastically about your brand. (It doesn’t hurt if they have a flair for creating high-quality content!) Spending some time researching relevant hashtags and the audiences of competitors in your niche can help you fill out a list of potential partners. To help narrow down the list and identify which micro-influencers you plan to approach, articulate your brand’s core values and ensure that potential partners you select reflect those values.
Keep in mind that many micro-influencers do not have professional representation and may not be experienced with brand deals. You may need to propose collaboration models rather than working within established parameters; this requires more work up front but also presents an opportunity to define the partnership within your desired terms. Here are a few common collaboration models to consider when preparing to approach micro-influencers with a proposal:
Sponsored posts. This involves paying the creator in exchange for posting content (for example, an Instagram reel, story, or feed post) with mutually agreed-upon timing. You can provide guidance (such as a script to read in a voiceover) or allow the creator to come up with their own concept. You also have the option to require that the creator upload the content of the sponsored post for your prior review and input before posting.
Brand ambassadorships. This model typically involves an ongoing collaboration over a longer period of time. The model can take a variety of forms. Some brands cultivate a highly engaged group of ambassadors that become a focus group and test market for new releases. At the other end of the spectrum, some brands have a low bar for “ambassadors,” offering anyone who wants it a 10% discount and an affiliate code that generates commission. Micro-influencers may be skeptical of the latter model since it’s asking them to buy and promote a product at their own expense before the partnership produces any income for them. Even if you don’t have the capacity for a high-touch ambassador program, providing a product sample free of charge to your most desired micro-influencer partners (in exchange for their agreement to share about your product) can help build goodwill to get the partnership off the ground.
Product giveaways. Who doesn’t love a free gift? The prospect of winning an exciting prize can help build awareness and enthusiasm for your brand. Social City Consulting can help ensure that the structure of your giveaway—including the prize you offer and how you position it—are well aligned with the objective you choose, such as brand awareness, community engagement, or email list growth. Social City can also help ensure that your giveaway complies with the regulations that govern contests and sweepstakes for the social platforms you’re using and the geographies where you’re offering it.
When working with micro-influencers, you’ll want to make sure to collect metrics that allow you to measure the campaigns’ success. Evaluating what worked well and what didn’t work so well will allow you to make adjustments for future marketing efforts. Depending on which platform you’re using and the built-in options it offers, you may be able to get direct access to metrics such as post impressions and video views, or you can build it into your contracts to require partners to share this data with you. Personalized affiliate codes and customized URLs are two tools you can use to directly track sales and conversion rates for a given partner. You may also want to consider tactics for tracking less tangible outcomes such as awareness and reputation. For example, activating many micro-influencers at once during a well-defined timeframe can help differentiate the website visits and sales attributable to these influencers from your background site traffic and sales; a similar strategy can be employed to evaluate micro-influencers’ impact on brand mentions or product reviews.
User-Generated Content Builds Trust and Credibility
User-generated content refers to any content created by people rather than brands. UGC can take many forms: photos, videos, reviews, testimonials, and more.
Today’s consumers are more media-savvy and aware of the influence of marketing; this can mean they distrust the “slick” and highly produced content of traditional marketing and advertising. In contrast, UGC feels less polished and more organic. By offering the unfiltered perspective of a real person who has used a product or service, it builds customer trust and thus enhances the credibility of your brand.
Consumer research surveys indicate that the majority of people do not believe or trust advertisements. Meanwhile, recommendations from friends and family consistently rank as a highly trusted source of information to guide purchasing decisions. When done right, UGC can capitalize on this trust to boost conversion rates while reducing the cost of advertising and marketing.
Harnessing the Power of User-Generated Content
Your brand’s social accounts may already be receiving UGC through tags and mentions. When you start by using this existing content wisely, then expand your strategy to actively solicit and shape UGC, you can increase the content’s impact—and at the same time, deepen brand loyalty and engagement as the content creators feel they’re making a meaningful contribution to your brand. At its best, UGC comes full-circle to help you refine your product and service offerings as you actively listen to customers’ feedback.
A simple, straightforward first step in beginning to assemble UGC is to build social proof collection into your customer journey. For example, you might send an automated email inviting reviews and feedback one week after a customer receives their product. If you’re just getting started with UGC and looking to build momentum, you might offer a giveaway entry as an incentive to generate a critical mass of reviews, product photos, or survey responses.
Featuring UGC—for example, resharing posts that mention your brand on Instagram or reading a selected review each week on your podcast—can help encourage others to share. Hosting contests and creating branded hashtags can also help to build the buzz about your brand. For example, the blender brand Vitamix ran a contest asking users to post their best smoothie recipes, and then boosted engagement further by selecting finalists and asking their followers to choose a winner.
If you are engaging with micro-influencers as discussed in the first part of this post, you’ll want to be sure to integrate the content they produce into your UGC strategy. (With this or any UGC, it’s important to make sure you honor the relevant copyright laws and secure explicit permission to share and reuse the content for any future uses you envision. Social City can help you put the mechanisms in place to honor creators’ rights while also making sure you’re able to use the content they create in the ways you want to.)
When displaying or sharing UGC, you’ll need to decide where your strategy falls on the spectrum between ease (for example, pulling an automated feed onto your website showing the most recent Instagram posts with your branded hashtag) and curation (hand-selecting each featured item). While a curated approach requires more effort, it also allows you to weed out content that isn’t in line with your brand values and aesthetics. Choosing a featured review to highlight may be more useful than pulling in reviews (which may or may not be well-written or even favorable to your product) with an automated system. While some people might think of UGC as “low-effort” marketing content, the truth is that applying a strategic and thoughtful approach can help leverage the best attributes of this type of content to get more mileage for your brand.
If you're ready to take your brand's digital journey to the next level and start getting noticed, Social City is here to help. With expertise in navigating the nuances of social media marketing, including micro-influencer collaborations and UGC strategies, Social City can guide you through the process of creating meaningful, impactful digital campaigns. Connect with Social City if you're looking to build a genuine connection with your audience, enhance your brand's online presence, and achieve lasting marketing success in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
