How Ecommerce Stores Can Find Micro-Influencers

Hey guys, so if you own an E-commerce business you definitely want to listen to this episode. And if you don't, you still want to listen to it. So what we're going to talk about is How You Can Use Micro Influencers To Grow Your Business.

So, you might know big time influencers like Kylie Jenner, Cameron Dallas, and Lilly Sighn. To get a sponsored post from one of them it could cost you up to $1 million. Now, if you’re working with a smaller budget, you can still take advantage of the power of influencers.

What is a micro-influencer?

Micro-influencers are those people with 10 to 100 thousand followers that tend to appeal to a more targeted audience. These type of micro influencers are more cost-effective and have a better, closer relationship with their followers.

Here’s 4 ways on how to find micro-influencers:

1. Start with your own followers - The first step should be to check your own following. You might already have some micro-influencers in your network. Check for the people that are already liking, commenting, sharing your content.
   
   
2. Search for hashtags - Use Instagram and Twitter to search for your brand name and any other relevant hashtags to your brand.
   

3. Research the competition - Go over to your competitors profiles; check who’s following and engaging with them. There’s a good chance you’ll find some micro-influencers you can reach out to.
   
   
4. Use a tool - Doing these things might be a bit time consuming so using the right tools will speed up the process. Something like Influence.co and BuzzSumo can help you discover potential influencers using relevant keywords. In their platforms you can see follower count, engagement rate, and other stats.

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Hope y'all enjoyed this episode! We'll see you guys next week for another episode of The Marketing Natives!

Aaron [00:00:00] Hey guys so if you own an e-commerce business you definitely want to listen to this episode. And if you don't you still want to listen to it. So what we're going to talk about is how you can use micro influencers to grow your business. We're going to break down four different areas to use these influencers but more importantly break down what is a difference between a regular influencer micro influencer how to find them and how to use them to effectively grow your business.

Christian [00:00:40] So you might know some of the big time influencers talking about maybe Kylie Jenner cameron dallas Louis saying but to get a sponsor each spoke post from one of them could cost you up to a million dollars. 

Christian / Aaron [00:00:54] Actually that the status for Kylie Jenner. Which kind of makes sense. She's like How many followers should she have. I don't know. There's millions and millions to now. 

Christian [00:01:04] If you're working with a smaller budget you can still take advantage of influencers. All you have to do is just use some micro influencers. 

Aaron [00:01:14] Yeah. So just. She has one hundred and forty million so it probably would be worth it for you to if you did a sponsor plus or her. Who knows. But yeah I just looked at it one of her pictures had almost 9 million people like it which means that she probably was in front of seventy five million people. That's better than most TV shows. Which is crazy. So we don't have a million dollars to invest in one Instagram post maybe she would do a couple I would hope but I'm guessing that most of you guys don't either you don't want to spend that kind of budget on it but what you can't do is spend money on a micro influencer. These are people who are impactful in the area that they have followers in. So for example Christian could be a micro influencer in Puerto Rico. You know he could just only be posting about stuff from Puerto Rico the beaches or local things that are going on there and for whatever reason all of his followers follow stuff from Puerto Rico. And if somebody want to reach out to him like hey if a tourist company who does like scuba diving in Puerto Rico Christian would be a great person to reach out to and he could maybe only have a thousand followers. But what you want to look at is he has a thousand followers but maybe he gets one hundred and two hundred likes. So he has a really engaged audience. And you know that it could be good for your brand. So there's micro influencers of those people that have you know one hundred to a thousand. Even up to ten thousand ten thousand I think is starting to get into a not even a micro influencer maybe a little bit larger of an influencer. But look at those people who are out like a thousand two thousand people and they post about a specific topic. And those are probably going to be the people who reach out to you as another example. I actually have had probably three or four people reach out to me to give me like free running stuff or like some weird running gear. It's like this reflector stuff and it's like hey here's this free code to get it off amazon. I still never did it because I don't wear that stuff. But I've had it a couple of people like that different nutrition companies or whatever like hey use our products. Take a picture of it and you're gonna get you know this product for free or whatever else. And it's just because I post a lot of running pictures so I I don't have I have like maybe 18 or 19 and reflection and have 2000 followers so fall right into that micro influencer. So you maybe want to use don't even know it. 

Christian [00:03:26] Yeah. Usually these micro influencers are more cost effective. And like Aaron said they usually have a smaller group of people but they usually have tighter relationships with what those followers. 

Christian [00:03:39] So you know the thing about like Kylie Jenner any of these huge influencers don't get a lot of one to one with their followers. But you guys get awesome was you know smaller following. 

Christian [00:03:51] Definitely has a better understanding of the audience what they want how they want to be essentially sold you know with with some of the the the things that you could be sponsoring. So I mean if we take it Aaron as an example and all of a sudden he starts doing those things and you know putting up products and saying like hey buy this thing and use my code Aaron ten people want to be a little standoffish just because maybe his audience is not you know I guess used to that or writing some sales. 

Christian [00:04:29] And yeah. But it's all about you know how you nurture your audience so Aaron has never done that. And you know it depends about you know the type of profiles and accounts that they have and how they interacted with the relationships they have with their followers. So something very important to take into consideration when you're finding these micro influencers so we're gonna share four ways on how to find my micro influencers within probably Instagram and Twitter. We're gonna be probably the easiest with the four strategies that we have here. 

Aaron [00:05:01] Yeah. And number one is to start with your own followers. Now this is assuming that you have somebody who's following you maybe you only have 10 or 100 people which a lot of people I think the average person on Instagram has like five hundred followers. So are actually lessening like two fifty to seventy five. So most people don't have that many but you least have maybe a couple hundred people that you have as followers so starting there and really trying to connect with those people and saying hey look I are at least two people that you're following rather like hey I see that I get a lot of people who are or I like a lot of this person's content and they only have. You know a thousand followers or two thousand followers and you reaching out to them and direct messaging them and you may have a lot better chance to give right into their inbox than if you trying to go after that bigger person. 

Christian [00:05:48] Yeah absolutely. 

Christian [00:05:49] And like starting with your own followers kind of reminds me of Pat Flynn's. He had a talk about super fans. He actually wrote a book about super fans. And it just I mean instead of just calling them micro influencers you could call them super fans. And I mean if you're that small and maybe you don't have necessarily like micro influencers or people who have really like you know bigger networks and things like that still using your actual fans and turning them into super fans by allowing them to you know sort of showcase your you know your product or your clothing or whatever it is that you're selling and it's just the I again as a way to turning those fans into super fans and to just get them to freely talk about your brand. So just a little mindset shift from micro influencers to superfans could also benefit you when you're starting very small and you starting with just looking at who that follows you you want to turn into a super fan or micro influencer. So another way that you can easily find micro influencers is by searching for hashtags. I'm guessing majority of the companies that have contacted Aaron is because of the hash tag that he's using. And you can do the same thing. So one you can either look for your brand as a hashtag. So for us we would search for a hashtag BitBranding and see who's posting about BitBranding. If there's nobody posting about BitBranding then the next thing would be just to look for relevant hashtags with your brand. So it could be social media marketing maybe Dallas marketing things that are closer to to us. And just can't think outside the box on what those hashtags that people might be using that are related to your brand and not just the hashtags but also people like for example like Aaron could be posting a picture of him running and sometimes he also tags the company that he's using. So if he's wearing Nike shoes he might tag Nike and they're obviously Nike probably will never see that picture because it's he they probably get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tags every day but use a smaller brand. You could definitely gauge that and see who's tagging you on what post that might be a faster easier way to to get those people or find those people. 

Aaron [00:08:09] Yeah. And within that like Christian saying it's kind of a little rebel like you said if I tagged Nike Nike may not respond. But it still shows up for most brands as the tagged photos. So you may not know where that's at but on your feet if you clicked on the tag photos you could see a bunch of other people who tagged Nike as well. And that may be a good place ad from the hashtags finding where people go and you get down in this rabbit hole of finding a group of people but just others who are using that that tagging feature on the photos to reach out to them. So I think that's kind of like in a similar realm of like using Instagram search to find those people but a really good way for you to find the right people and all the times. The good thing about micro influencers is that you don't have to necessarily. Some people have paid. Yes sure. But sometimes it's just free product or it's just like a Hey a shout out or something small. 

Aaron [00:09:00] So that's another good benefit about finding the people that way. They may not know that they're about to get business. Exactly. 

Christian [00:09:11] So we normally have an ad about halfway through which is it is kind of like a halfway through point but I actually want to take this step further and do a sort of a a calling to any micro influencers who are listening to our podcast. So this is a two part thing. It benefits us because we might find someone who is micro influencers who I don't know maybe we want to do some work with you. So if you're listening you're you think that you're Michael or maybe you have a big enough audience that we might say like hey we want to hire you. 

Christian [00:09:41] Contact us. That's cool. Now on top of that there's another way for you to find micro influencers. 

Christian [00:09:47] Just tell people that you're looking for a micro influencer. Tell people that you're looking for someone who has a big network and that you want to maybe give away some product or some service or something. 

Christian [00:09:57] So if you have a big network and you're listening to this podcast I mean we do a little bit everything so social media marketing website design graphics lead generation anything like that. Contact us let us know why you should work with us and we'll get back to you. 

Christian [00:10:19] Looking told this little you go to our Instagram just demos say like hey I was listening to your podcast and I think I think I might be a good fit for your micro influencer needs. Cool. 

Christian [00:10:36] Speaking of which of you there was some lady I forget her name but she messaged me on Lincoln's and she was listening to our podcast. 

Christian / Aaron [00:10:45] Cool. She misses you. No no. You have to show me after this. Yeah that's gonna kill us. She was like I was listening to your podcast I think was great. Just connecting here and Linked In. Oh that's cool. Pretty awesome. Yeah. When was that today. I saw it today. I think maybe a few days ago a month ago. Yeah. 

Aaron [00:11:05] So if you want to be friends with Christian or connected Christian and linked then just you know he's not ignoring you may just be away. Yeah. All right. Number three here is to research the competition. So literally if we were going to do something we would go after other website design or social media marketing companies and see who is following and engaging with them. You may go into the comments that way. It doesn't makes a lot of sense to go with somebody who's the same size as you. Unless you already have a decent following because you're not going to find that many comments. The ones that you really want to find are the ones who have 50 or 60 comments on every picture and you can go into those because that's a really good spot for you to find people when they only have three or four comments. Sure you're gonna show up and they're definitely gonna notice you but it's gonna be a lot harder for you to pick. You're gonna have to go to a lot of different profiles than if you go to somebody who has a lot of comments or a lot of engagement already. 

Christian [00:11:57] Yeah. So this researcher competition thing like I feel like at the very beginning we used to do that we used to bombard gave her and Chuck's followers now bombard but maybe follow them or try to interact with his followers to try to get them to like our pages and things like that. But beyond that beyond just researching the competition for micro influencers actually showed Aaron not too long ago a ad agency New York who recently closed down and they shared all their Google Drive folders and all this stuff. 

Christian [00:12:29] Very interestingly they had a folder that was labeled a competition and they created this spreadsheet of literally everyone in their area and their space and they had like all their information. I guess just to kind of keep an eye on them and keep track. Yeah. It doesn't. So I mean I feel like we do that to some extent but it's not something that we have written down. We just top of our ahead we probably know you know five or 10 companies that are around the area that do what we do. And you know from time to time we kind of check their websites like their socials see what they're doing different. But it was interesting that they had a dedicated folder and dedicated spreadsheet to their competition. That's cool. Yeah it was very interesting. All right. So moving on to number four is to use a tool. So there are things like influence dot co or maybe bus sumo where you can obviously there's a paid way of doing this but also a lot easier way of getting in touch with micro influencers. These tools will essentially label it for you and spell it out and say This person has this amount of followers they have this amount of engagement. 

Christian [00:13:42] So it gives you a lot of stats and things that you can make decisions pretty quickly. So it saves you a lot of time. So if you don't have time to necessarily do any of the above three ways then using a tool will definitely cut time in half or even more. And you might be able to find the right person faster. 

Aaron [00:14:01] Yeah and one company that you didn't mention that we actually started using way back when like two now three or four years ago before that really I mean influence has been around but not really like as much as this but we've used the ninja outreach before today's collect email addresses but they've really become known as at least they've built themselves as finding influencers and it's a really simple easy tool to use. Once you get the hang of it but they've revamped everything I haven't clocked in or logged into that thing for a long time. But we have lifetime access which is super nice but it's again I think for most people is like 40 or 50 bucks and well worth it especially if you're going after quite a few different influencers but that's another software that you should check out too. Cool. 

Christian [00:14:46] All right so there you have it. How e-commerce stores can find micro influencers. Just to recap. Number one start with your own followers. Number two search for has hashtags. Number three. Research the competition. Number four. Just use a tool. 

Aaron [00:14:59] Nice. All right. We hope you guys got a lot out of this episode. It's super exciting for us because I think this is something that really it's not cutting edge because it's been around for a while but it is something that a lot of businesses are not using yet. But they don't understand how powerful it is going to be and continue to be for your influence. So it is your first time. Make sure you hit the subscribe button because our content is constantly updating and we are always trying to be on time with what's coming out or what's coming on the horizon. So new episodes come out every Monday and you want to make sure that you get notifications so you do not miss those. Most episodes are 15 to 20 minutes so you know that you can just listen to it on your way to work get the content and you need to stay ahead of your competition and move on. And if you've been listening for a while again please leave us an honest rating and review over on iTunes. We will get your username whatever you use we'll use that as a shout out and put that on the podcast too so that we can continue to spread the love to you. Thank you.