Go Small or Go Home: A Music Artist’s Guide to Micro-Influencers
It’s no secret that influencers have become the new go-to marketing channel for anyone looking to make a buck. From Instagram to YouTube, anyone whose words hold value is looked at like gold mines of attention. Instagram alone has managed to create over a billion dollar influencer marketing industry!
With insane amounts of followers, of course, comes an insane price tag, with some mega-influencers charging thousands of dollars for a single post or even mention. However, there is a community of influencers who, while small, are just as effective as these mega-influencers. They are called micro-influencers, and you should be familiarizing yourself with some and learning how to use them to expand your fan base.
What Are Micro-Influencers
Micro-Influencers are exactly what they sound like they are. They are people or brands who have small, deeply engaged audiences, usually within a specif niche. The number of followers used to define a micro-influencer varies from marketer to marketer, but they usually fall within the 1,000 to 50,000 follower range. While they don’t hold the same kind of social influence as a mega-influencer (think 1 million+ followers), their opinions are extremely valued by their audience.
Why Micro-Influencers
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Jacorey, why would I go for the small fry? I go big or go home 😤.” While it may be enticing to go for the big dogs, you’d be surprised to learn that focusing on micro-influencers could fare better for you in the long run. Researchers have noticed that once an account hits a certain amount of followers, their engagement starts to plateau. This typically happens around 100k followers, with engagement lessening as the account gets bigger. On average, micro-influencers get 60% higher engagement rate than larger influencers. This is largely due to the way that the influencers are seen by their audience. Smaller influencers are typically more trusted by their audience, being viewed as a friend by their loyal followers.
They also tend to be a lot cheaper to work with. As stated earlier, mega-influencers often demand a hefty price tag in order to be placed in front of their large audiences. I recently talked to an influencer who told me he charges $1,000 for a story post on his Instagram, and $8,000 for a 24-hour page post to his 4 million follower base. While worth it if you have it, that’s an insane amount of money for most of us. Micro-influencers give you the chance to target engaged fans for a fraction of the cost!
How to Find Micro-Influencers
The beauty of micro-influencers is that they exist across different spectrums on every single platform. Finding them is simply a matter of knowing how to navigate the platform, and putting a little elbow grease into your search. A lot of it boils down to knowing your audience, giving yourself a direction of where to start looking. With YouTube, typically what I like to do is search the names of certain artists, and look at what channels are posting their music or talking about them in some way. For example, I typed in Ski Mask the Slump God and found these guys:
With Instagram, you’ll want to use hashtags to find influencer pages, which work pretty much like blogs. Look at what pages are posting your influences and reach out to them about posting your music. As far as actual people, they’ll be a little trickier to find. What I’ve found works best is to look through the comments of much larger pages, as they’re usually hanging out in there commenting and what not. You can also go to other influencer pages that you already know of and click the down-facing arrow underneath their follower counts. This brings up a list of pages that are similar to that one.
Twitter works kind of the same way as Instagram, with hashtags and keywords being the primary way to find these guys. As far as other platforms, you’ll just have to get familiar with how influencers are tagged in them and use a combination of the keyword tactic and due diligence searching to find them.
Evaluating Your Influencers
Once you’ve found a set of influencers you think you’d like to work with, what you’ll want to do next is make sure that they’re worth it. The last thing you want to do is waste your money on someone who won’t give you a good ROI. You’ll want to look at things like their potential reach. How many followers do they have, and are those followers the kind of people you want to reach? What is their engagement like? Are their followers actively commenting, liking, and sharing their content? With some, you may also want to ask for a track record of their past results. Ask for screenshots of their analytics from past clients that they’ve worked with. Remember that the goal is to find one with a quality fan base. A micro-influencer with 5k followers who gets 200 comments and 600 likes is much more effective than one with 20k follower who only gets 50 comments and 130 likes.
How to Use Micro-Influencers
This is the fun part: figuring out how exactly you can use the influencer and their platform to drive people to your song. It really comes down to the influencer’s niche, what you want to push, and how creative you want to get. You could always take the general promotion route (i.e. posting your song or video to their audience) or you could figure out a way to work into what their audience is used to. Working with a food YouTuber? Get them to cook their next dish while your song plays in the background. Put together a clip of insane workouts with your song playing underneath and have it posted to a bunch of fitness Instagram accounts. Maybe have a Twitcher host a listening session of your song during their next live-stream, or get an Instagram comedian to create a viral skit centered around your video. The possibilities are literally endless!
Final Thoughts
Consider using micro-influencers in your next marketing campaign or general strategies. They can be an effective way to spread your music and build your fan base organically. You don’t always have to look for music influencers either! Consider looking into other niches and figuring out how you can tweak your content to gain fans from them. It’s definitely going to be some work, but with a little research and creativity, micro-influencers can prove to give you a big return in a small way.
