Digital Marketing and the Rise of the Micro Influencer

It is almost a year since we made ourPredictions for Influencer Marketing in 2017。我们的第一个预测是，微影响者比名人更具影响力。现在很明显，我们的预测已经达到目标。2017年是微型影响者的兴起。

It is not all that long since brands thought that they would need to build a relationship with a celebrity to be successful. And, for many businesses that type of deal is well outside viable budget levels.

But brands are beginning to discover that influencer marketing is not the same as celebrity endorsement.

某人被认为是临界点n influencer must surely be that the person exudes influence, i.e., they can change their followers’ behavior. Celebrities may be famous, well-known, and have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people following them. However, do they have the ability to influence people in their tastes and encourage them to change their behaviors?

That is the essence of a micro- influencer. He or she is somebody who has gained sufficient respect to be able to change the tastes and behaviors of others.

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Digital Marketing and the Rise of the Micro Influencer:

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从社交媒体营销到影响者营销的运动金博宝188备用网址

五年前的近6倍rched Google each day for “social media marketing” compared to those who searched for “influencer marketing.” While the difference narrowed over the next few years, it was not until the beginning of 2017 that the positions reversed. There are now about 1.5 times as many daily searches for “influencer marketing” as there are for “social media marketing.”

This indicates how quickly influencer marketing has risen in popularity this year. In the “old days,” businesses carried out most of their social media marketing themselves. This could be discouraging at times, as most firms had only a small number of followers. There were a few superstars like Red Bull, but most brands lacked reach for their content.

一些人尝试了名人认可的“旧”营销技术，将其应用于他们的社交媒体促销中。

They found it worked well, but success came at a cost. Celebrities often charge considerable sums – as much as $500,000 a post for superstars. You need to have excellent social penetration to your target audience, allied with a high-value, product, to justify that kind of expenditure.

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早期影响者营金博宝188备用网址销策略

在其成长的日子里，有影响力的营销遭受了新的困扰金博宝188备用网址。它缺乏成功的定义和精确度量。

结果，品牌和营销人员更习惯了详细分析的仪表板，必须创造成功的衡量标准。有影响力的人最容易找到的数字之一是他或她的追随者。因此，品牌和营销人员搜索了具有最高数字追随者的影响者。

Brands competed with each other to align with the influencers with the highest followings. Influencers realized this, and in competitive niches were able to increase their charges accordingly.

有一段时间的品牌接受了这种情况。即使有影响力的人提高了价格，成本也大大低于为大牌名人认可所支付的费用。

However, brands have begun to query the value of some of their influencer investment. Just because somebody has thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of followers, does not mean that he or she influences anybody.

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Gamification and Cheating

The blind reliance on follower numbers began to dwindle as a result of social media participants trying to game the system. I am reluctant to refer to them as “influencers,” as the one thing that these people have in common with each other is that they do not influence anybody.

The cheats do not want to go through the hard work that genuine influencers endure, building a real, authentic following. They far prefer to take short-cuts to boost their follower numbers.

在某些情况下，模拟企业公然购买了关注者。在其他情况下，他们使用机器人来帮助他们建立参与统计数据。

It is not just the brands and marketers who suffer from this cheating. Genuine users of social media and blogs suffer as well. This at least had the effect of mobilizing the social networks to do something about the situation. Most of the social networks changed their terms of service, making gamification and cheating more difficult. Google’s changes to its search engine designed to weed out thin content and SEO gamification have also helped drive fraudsters further into the background.

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传统数字营销的问题

它显示了我可以使用“传统数字营销”一词的在线世界移动的速度。它指的是在影响者营销发作之前常见的数字广告类型。金博宝188备用网址

根据经济学家的说法internet advertising should exceed television advertising今年第一次。

While the search engine marketing and social media marketing components still perform well, traditional online display ads have suffered a significant decline in effectiveness in recent years. There are two main reasons for this:

1. 人们患有横幅盲目 - 我们已经对横幅广告的影响很大，即使他们直接在我们面前，我们也无法看到它们。
2. The use of Adblocker software has increased over the last couple of years. According to a report form PageFair,广告阻滞剂现在已安装在所有网络设备的30％上- 2016年底时为6.15亿个设备。如果您在设备上安装了广告块器，则将看不到显示广告。该软件将它们从屏幕上删除

上面提到的《经济学人》文章重点介绍了另一个数字营销问题。社交网络并不擅长控制广告的定位。例如，可口可乐和通用汽车等几个备受瞩目的品牌感到不安，发现他们的YouTube广告位于圣战者和新纳粹组织的仇恨言论旁边。

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Micro Influencers to the Rescue

With digital banner advertising on the decline, concern about the placement of formal social media adverts, and budget fears about the cost of celebrity influencers, what online marketing methods remain for brands?

大型品牌仍与名人合作。他们可能会花一笔钱，但他们可以传播一个信息。

Smaller businesses have learned that influencer marketing can give them better results. That is why despite the ramifications and other problems encountered in its early days, influencer marketing is thriving in 2017 and looks to expand further in 2018.

影响者营销快速扩张的主要原因是微影响者的金博宝188备用网址崛起。

The key to micro-influencer success is in their name. They may be comparatively “micro” in reach, but they genuinely “influence” people’s decision-making.

Depending on just how niche a market is, a brand may gain the best results working with a micro- influencer with a reach as low as 8,000 – 10,000. If their engagement is high enough, this will make up for lack of followers.

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The Larger the Influencer, the Lower the Engagement

Influencer marketing is a clear example of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Paying for an influencer with 100,000 followers is unlikely to bring you twice the success that somebody with 50,000 followers could achieve.

Markerly surveyed more than 800,000 Instagram users to help understand thecorrelation between Likes and Followers on Instagram。Their key finding was that as an influencer’s number of followers rises, the rate of engagement (likes and comments) with their followers decreases.

Celebrities typically have the most followers, followed by mega influencers, and then micro influencers. With engagement, though, the results are reversed: micro influencers engage more than mega influencers, who in turn engage more than celebrities.

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The Benefits for a Brand When Working with a Micro Influencer

虽然触手可及的数字是一个不错的数字，但它并没有告诉您太多有关成功的信息。品牌从微型影响者工作中获得的一些最佳好处是无形的。

Based on their survey results, Markerly believes that influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 followers offer the best combination of reach and engagement.

Micro influencers have established authentic relationships and trust with their audiences. If a micro-influencer agrees to work with your brand (and it does need to be that way around), they are likely to provide a positive commentary on your product to their followers. Assuming you have targeted the correct micro-influencers for your product, their followers should match your target market.

No micro influencer will agree to work with a product they do not believe in – that would send a terrible message to their followers and destroy their credibility. If you succeed in building a relationship with a micro influencer, you know that he is likely to promote your product with gusto. Not only will he endorse your product to his followers, but he will tell them why they should buy it.

This means that you do need to give a micro-influencer some leeway in producing content that relates to your product. The brands that are least satisfied with influencer marketing are the brands that try to stamp authority on the relationship; the brands that insist on approving every piece of content before the influencer can release it. How can an influencer have a genuine conversation with his fans if you try to micro-manage how the campaign goes?

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Stand Back and Let a Micro Influencer tell Stories About Your Brand

如果一个品牌要通过与微型影响者合作获得最大的好处，它必须退缩并让影响者编织他的魔力。影响者有任何影响的唯一原因是因为他建立了真正的关系。如果您试图指导诉讼程序，观众可以通过事物正确看到，那么影响者将失去他的一些信誉，而您的品牌将失去任何潜在的好处。

Micro influencers are born storytellers. They tell tales to their followers on a daily basis. They conceptualize stories relating to their specialist niche that help their fans sort out their problems. Brands have learned that one of the best forms of marketing is to let the influencers tell the brands’ stories.

Iceland (a British supermarket chain) is an example of a brand that chose to change direction tomicro-influencer marketing。他们曾经与彼得·安德烈（Peter Andre），迈克尔·布布尔（Michael Buble）和史黛西·所罗门（Stacy Solomon）等名人合作。但是，他们决定将重点转移到与微型影响者的合作，例如YouTube上的妈妈。冰岛对他们的改进结果感到非常满意，以至于他们还决定建立一项关注爸爸的运动。

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A Micro Influencer’s First Loyalty is to His Followers

However, That is Not Bad News for a Brand

There are two typical reasons for a micro influencers’ success:

1. 他们对某些特定主题了解很多，或者至少准备分享他们所知道的知识并帮助他人与他们学习
2. 他们得到粉丝的尊重。他们的追随者阅读他们的帖子或观看视频，因为他们想听听他们尊重的人的更多信息

Any decent influencer will always put his fans’ interest first.

This usually means though, that will be happy to recommend products to their followers if they believe the products will solve their followers’ problems.