5 steps to grow your startup through micro-influencers for free — Growth hacks with Marc #1
Hi growth lovers!
Seeing the success of blogposts like 14 Tik Tok Growth Hacks or How I got 500 MAU with the shittiest APP you’ve ever seen, I will keep sharing some growth hacks I am experimenting with.
We will start with something very little amount of companies do well. Micro-influencers.
What are micro-influencers?
Micro-influencers with a small audience that have large amount of influence because:
1. They are working in a very niche market.
2. They are still starting and they will grow in the future.
3. They don’t focus in their growth but in very good quality content — either because they don’t know how to or because they are not interested.
Why should you work with them?
1. Big companies don’t have the time to work with them, so that leaves them with very few proposals to work for. This makes them do a very good job and allow to do non-paid activities to focus on their growth.
2. Most of them will grow in the future, and they will remember who trusted in them.
3. You can go very niche and attack a very specific market related to your customer segment.
My story — 113k subscribers and 7 million views thanks to this strategy
I like to share things I have experimented with at work or through my side projects.
In this case, I did it in my youtube channel decidetufuturo.org to have more content and followers.
Thanks to this I reached 113k subscribers and 7 million views by May 20th 2019.
5 Steps to create your micro-influencers campaign for free
1. Decide which kind of customers you will go for
It is impossible to go for all the micro-influencers that exist.
That’s why I would recommend focusing in a specific group.
In my case, i defined it as people that had already created a video about studying a degree.
To find them, I did multiple searches in youtube:
- Study finance
- Study medicine
- Study psycology
- Study art
- Study history
- Study …
Then I entered to each profile from the Top 10 results and took their email.
There are some ways to do that in a scalable way, but due to my little budget for this project I did it all manually.
2. Create an excel sheet of interesting micro-influencers to talk to
5 Columns
- Name of the channel
- What kind of content do they do?
- Name
- Have i sent them a proposal?
4 tabs
- Youtube
- Blog
- Podcasts
- You could add more if there are other channels you would like to attack
3. Find something valuable for the micro-influencers in exchange of mentioning you in instagram / youtube
Ideas:
- A referral code to earn money in your app
- Physical products
- Access to a special event where they will be able to meet similar influencers
- A mention in a blogpost / youtube channel in your news site “10 best youtubers about X”, “10 best instagrammers about X”
- Show the influencer in your app / website in a premium spot for X months. E.g: If that person is a cook and you have a nutrition app, you can show an article about that person as “Tips from experts”
- Create a blogpost / youtube view in my blog / youtube channel and I will mention you
- A space in your blog for collaborators
- A course if you are specialist in something they could benefit from. E.g: SEO.
4. Create an email template to send everyone and personalize it a bit
My example for decide tu futuro:
Hi ____,
I am Marc, from the Decide tu futuro channel, and I am contacting you because I saw your video and I really liked it.
I would like to offer you a collaboration. My channel has more than 30k subscribers in 6 months.
If you are interested contact me and I send you more info.
Cheers,
Marc
5. Follow up 4 times even if the person doesn’t answer
Lots of times, micro-influencers have other things to do apart from their side project. Therefore, you can follow up multiple times even if they don’t answer.
I got lots of collaborations after sending follow up emails.
Who am I?
你好! I am Marc Molins and I am a Product Manager at Maker Studio — the innovation laboratory — at Skyscanner and former PM at Rocket Internet.
I am passionate about understanding people’s needs and thinking about creative ways to 100x products.
In my free time I like to learn languages, play beach volleyball and work on new projects with friends.
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