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Instagram's explosive growth to over 1.3 billion users has revolutionized branding and advertising, with 80% of marketers using Instagram in their social media marketing mix. The platform drives measurable ROI by boosting brand awareness, facilitating consumer...
May 20, 2025
Influencer marketing is a popular way for brands to boost reach and engagement. Good influencers can help brands bypass the tough work of establishing an audience and building rapport, as influencers come with their own established audiences that already (hopefully!) like them and will pay attention to what they have to say.
All of this is fairly well known. What’s less well known is that if you hire micro-influencers rather than big names, you can get similar (or even better) results.
For a long time, large (or “macro” influencers) have dominated the influencer marketing landscape. But brands are increasingly waking up to the potential of smaller “micro-influencers.” While macro-influencers may come with big pre-made audiences, micro-influencers are often more capable of targeting the kind of niche, hyper-engaged, and passionate audiences that can be converted into high-value customers.
Here, we’ll take a look at what micro-influencers are, how your brand could benefit if you hire micro-influencers, and the steps to take to find, hire, and work with your own micro-influencers.
There is some gray area between the definition of “micro” and “macro” influencers, but, in general, an influencer can be considered “micro” if they have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.
There’s a level below this — “nano-influencers,” with between one and 10K followers. If you want to get really specific and granular with your influencer marketing, nano-influencers could work well for you.
But, of course, it’s not all about follower count. A crucial aspect of what makes a good micro-influencer is the quality of their audience. To achieve influencer status, a micro-influencer will have a highly engaged audience with whom they’ve built a very strong rapport.
Macro-influencers come with the benefit of having large audiences. But that large audience isn’t always as engaged as smaller, closer audiences. As well as being more cost-effective for your business budget, micro-influencers often have niche, specific areas of interest that resonate deeply with their audiences.
Larger influencers have to broaden their scope out of necessity in order to have wider appeal. Depending on the nature of your product/service and campaign, you may find a micro-influencer and their audience more relevant than a larger influencer with a more dilute range.
Let’s quickly run through just a few of the benefits of working with micro-influencers:
If this sounds like what your brand is looking for, read on to find out how to find, hire, and work with a micro-influencer.
Finding the perfect micro-influencer can transform your brand’s reach and engagement, but knowing where to start is key. To make the process smoother and more strategic, we’ve outlined a step-by-step guide that will help you identify, evaluate, and connect with micro-influencers who truly align with your brand values and audience.
It’s worth noting that there are platforms you can use to make your search easier. Buzzsumo, for instance, allows you to look through influencer bios and content.
The first step to finding the right influencer is knowing exactly what you want to achieve with your influencer campaign. If your goals aren’t already clearly laid out in your marketing plan, now’s the time to do some strategizing.
So, ask yourself what benefit you expect to get from your micro-influencer. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Increase audience engagement? Boost conversions? Or something else?
Defining and setting clear goals and objectives will be a huge help in determining the kind of micro-influencer you’re looking for.
For example, if your goal is to increase audience engagement, look for an influencer who’s good at generating comments and likes and starting conversations with their audiences.
If your goal is to boost conversions, pick a micro-influencer with more of a product focus who can pull in audiences ready to spend.
Ideally, your goals should be aligned to specific KPIs. This helps you both to track your objective process and to find the right influencer for you through data-driven recruitment.
For example, you can tie a goal of raising brand awareness to reach metrics. You can then search for micro-influencers with high reach metrics and filter out those who are less likely to help with your goals.
The big benefit of micro-influencers is the highly specific, niche audiences they can pull in. So, to find the right influencer, it’s essential that you know the audience you’re looking for.
For example, if you’re a brand selling vitamin supplements, your target audiences would include:
So, you’d be unlikely to have much success by reaching out to a business influencer.
You need to find a micro-influencer whose audience is interested in your specific offering. So, before you start your search, dig deep into your ideal target audiences. Find out who they are, where they live, what platforms they hang out on, what their interests are, the kinds of influencers they follow, and more.
Now that you know who you want your micro-influencer to bring in and the goals you want them to help with, it’s time to start researching potential micro-influencers.
The strategizing you did in the previous two steps will help with this. If you’ve done it right, you’ll already know which platforms your target audiences use, so you’ll know to seek micro-influencers who are active on those platforms.
Similarly, you’ll know to look for influencers whose personas, subject areas, and content align with your product and campaign goals.
There are plenty of ways to find and research influencers. Relevant social media platforms are a good place to start — you can search for social media influencers using hashtags, locations, keywords, and so on.
You could also use influencer marketing platforms that make it very easy to find the kind of micro-influencer you’re looking for. For example, if you’re employing a diversity sourcing strategy, a good platform will allow you to search for influencers by gender, language, and so on.
Once you’ve found some potential influencers, narrow your selection down by evaluating them and marking down the pros and cons in your applicant tracking system.
Pay particular attention to how well their style aligns with your goals and how well they’re likely to connect with your audience.
Here are some things to check out when evaluating potential micro-influencers:
Look for marks of counterfeit in engagement that could indicate fake followers, including brief and arbitrary commenting, repetitive comments, and profiles that lack detail.
If you can get a sample of follower details, verify phone numbers and social accounts to determine how authentic an influencer’s following actually is.
Some platforms like BuzzSumo will help you with this; they’ll display content metrics to allow you to determine which influencers create the most impactful content.
Once you’ve found the right micro-influencer for your brand, it’s time to reach out and build a working relationship with them. Working with any influencer (or any freelancer, for that matter) is a case of give and take, and you’ll have to negotiate closely with your chosen influencer to get a deal that works for both their business and yours.
When reaching out, you can save everyone a lot of time by being totally clear and upfront about what you want from the collaboration. Brief your micro-influencer with:
Influencers aren’t employees or even brand ambassadors. They’re business people running their own brands. As such, you can’t expect to exert the same level of control over a micro-influencer as you can over your own marketing team.
While it’s perfectly reasonable to make creative requests, ask to approve content, and collaborate closely, many micro-influencers will dislike being micromanaged and will expect to have a degree of creative control.
It benefits you to take a step back and let your influencer put their own skills and creative ideas to good use. If you start controlling every word they say, their unique voice gets lost. The partnership will feel forced, and followers will quickly notice that their favorite influencer is just echoing a brand script.
Presumably, you hired your micro-influencer because you like their content and style. Let them use that content and style to your advantage.
Both you and your micro-influencer should be monitoring campaign performance on an ongoing basis. Your micro-influencer is likely to have their own analysis tools and may provide you with reports from those tools (If this is something you require, make this clear when you set your expectations).
You should also be able to gather campaign metrics from the platform used and your own marketing tools.
Ongoing monitoring lets you fine-tune your campaigns in real time, making sure you’re always hitting the mark and getting the best possible results. You’ll need to negotiate with your influencer to find optimizations that work for all concerned, but if you have a good collaborative relationship, it won’t be hard to make changes that work for everyone.
Marketing collaboration tools like Planable can make this process smoother by keeping communication clear and organized.
At the end of each campaign, crunch the numbers in full and compare them to previous campaigns, previous quarters, and so on. This will help you quantify the impact your influencer had on your goals and give you insights that will help build even better micro-influencer campaigns in the future.
Micro-influencers probably can’t bring in hundreds of thousands of new customers. But the customers they do bring in are likely to be more engaged, more enthusiastic, and more likely to convert. Micro-influencers provide authenticity and genuine audience rapport that macro-influencers often can’t.
So, hiring micro-influencers can be a very lucrative move, but it’s important to find a micro-influencer that resonates with your brand pillars, goals, and target audiences. A strategic approach is the way forward here.
Once you’ve fully understood what you want to gain from this collaboration, who you want to target, and the kinds of voices and values that really resonate with your brand, you’ll be well-equipped to reach out to a good micro-influencer.
Global Marketing Director @ Oleeo. Over 20 years of marketing experience in scale-up and strategic growth environments, and several years of experience in the HCM tech industry. A strong advocate of using technology to automate manual processes and workflows in HCM, freeing up employees to focus on more strategic and value-added work. Outside of work, Tommy enjoys short distance running and watching grassroots and Premier League football.
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