Using social media influencers to reach and engage with small businesses

Businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to strategically position themselves in the market to gain visibility and customers. Today, alongside traditional forms of marketing, businesses are increasingly turning to social media influencers — individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche — to reach their target markets. This strategy is sometimes called influencer marketing.

Research indicates that social media influencers have become an integral part of marketing campaigns as they can be effective endorsers of a brand’s products or services. The global influencer marketing market size has more than doubled since 2019 and was valued at $16.4 billion in 2022.

At Strive Community, we’re interested in reaching and engaging with small businesses more effectively. Influencer marketing has caught our eye, as some of our program partners are collaborating with social media influencers to expand their reach and engage with small businesses. In this post, we share what we’ve learned about influencer marketing from our programs and beyond.

Know your goals

Begin with a strategy that clearly defines the goals you want to achieve through social media influencers. Hootsuite, a social media management tool, emphasizes the importance of determining your goals from the start. Do you want to drive sales, reach new customers, or increase brand awareness? As part of their influencer marketing guide, Hootsuite recommends compiling a list of influencers, studying their posts, and personally reaching out to them. Businesses can also consider working with an influencer marketing agency that has established relationships with a variety of influencers.

Regardless of how you go about your strategy, have a plan in place to measure return on investment. Aspire, an influencer marketing platform, provides three ways to measure and monitor results:

• For brand awareness, track impressions on posts, follower growth, and organic website traffic on your own channels.
• For brand engagement, monitor likes, comments, retweets, post saves, clicks, and add-to-carts.
• For sales, use trackable links or personalized promo codes for each influencer.

Find the right influencer

Finding the right influencer depends on your offerings and your target audience. For example, the right influencer for Strive Community partner MESH is one who is already talking about starting or running your own business, or who is already teaching a skill that can be monetized in the informal sector. It’s important that he or she shares the same values and is already meaningfully engaging with an audience of young people who are looking to generate income.

This alignment is referred to as the “influencer–product–consumer congruence.” For instance, researchers found that when followers perceive a fit between an influencer’s values and their own, and when the influencer promotes a product consistent with their usual style of content, followers develop more favorable attitudes towards the product, leading to purchase intentions and recommendations. The researchers advise businesses to conduct market research to identify which influencers their audience already follows, segment them, and pick the right one. According to TapInfluence, the best influencers are those whose content and audiences are so aligned with a brand that their posts leave readers with a sense of authenticity, transparency, and consistency with previous content.

Large followings aren’t always better

MESH has learned that working with influencers with a large following doesn’t always translate to desired outcomes, such as signing up new members or increasing activity on MESH’s platform. Using an influencer with a huge following because of his popular content on sports, for example, may not attract the kind of MESHers that will stay and use the platform. Such influencers, MESH found, are able to get many views — putting content in front of many people — but not meaningful engagement with that content.

Similarly, another Strive Community partner worked with an influencer with more than five million followers, but they only managed to reach and engage very few small businesses.

Hootsuite refers to influencers with than one million followers as macro- or mega-influencers. TapInfluence recommends that businesses resist the temptation to focus solely on an influencer’s follower count. Nano- or micro-influencers (those with less than 100,000 followers) can have a more dedicated following, can generate higher engagement, and are often more affordable. This was the case for MESH. One influencer, with just under 20,000 followers, self-shot a video promoting a gig opportunity from the MESH app, which led to 4,500 new young people visiting the platform.

Similarly, researchers advise businesses to use a mix of influencer types to make the most of the unique contributions of each. For example, they suggest using mega-influencers alongside micro- and macro-influencers to capitalize on the accessibility and authenticity that comes naturally to smaller-scale influencers.

Beware of the risks

Businesses should also be mindful of the risks that arise when using influencers:

• Involving multiple people in content creation for a brand. Without clear guidelines, involving influencers can lead to diluted brand meanings or divergence from the business’s goals.
• Brand reputation. Influencers often carry a celebrity status that has the potential to denigrate the brand reputation should the influencer engage in morally offensive behavior. Businesses must therefore remain cognizant of the often sensitive and fickle nature of highly visible partnerships.
• Look out for fake followers. Some influencers buy fake followers (follows from bots) to make their audiences appear bigger than they are. Upfluence recommends that businesses look out for very low or very high engagement rates, spammy or irrelevant comments on posts, and followers-to-following ratio to spot fake follower counts.
• Disclosing sponsored content. Businesses must also understand the rules for disclosing sponsored content in the countries in which they operate. In the UK, guidelines issued by the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Advertising Standards Authority require influencers to prominently disclose if a post is an ad. Businesses are responsible for ensuring adequate disclosure is present on any posts made by influencers on their behalf.

The worldwide popularity of influencer marketing is rapidly growing. In 2023, the market size is estimated at $21.1 billion. Already, many businesses are finding it a more effective way to reach out to their audience compared to other methods. Our work with Strive Community shows that influencers can indeed be successful in reaching small businesses — those with smaller, more active audiences can engage small businesses more effectively.

We’ll share more insights as we continue to learn from our programs and partners. Do you have insights to share on using influencer marketing to engage small businesses? If so, we’d love to learn more.