USA TODAY International Edition
Micro-influencers can be small-biz marketing force
Traditional advertising not enough to grow sales
When entrepreneur Brian Lim was thinking through different ways to market his apparel company, he knew traditional advertising wouldn’t fly.
Lim’s Anaheim, Calif.-based iHeartRaves provides festival fashion apparel — creative and stylish clothing popular among Millennials attending concerts and entertainment venues. To reach his target audience, the founder and CEO wanted a more authentic approach. So he enlisted the services of so-called micro-influencers — people with followings online — to raise awareness about his company.
“I’m 30 years old. I grew up in the age of the Internet, and people just don’t listen to ads,” he says.
iHeartRaves scoured social media and cultivated relationships with popular digital personalities who were fans of the company’s clothing. Whenever the company launches a line, iHeartRaves ensures that those microinfluencers have products so they can blog or post about the clothing on launch day. The tactic has proven successful: A recent launch campaign earned the company $20,000 in revenue as a direct result of working with micro-influencers, Lim says.
An influencer can be a blogger, a YouTube video star or someone who posts regularly on social media.
❚ How big is micro? There is some disagreement about what should constitute a micro-influencer’s audience size. Some experts say micro-influencers should have anywhere between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. Shane Barker, a digital strategist and co-instructor of a course on Influencer Marketing for UCLA, says the sweet spot is between 25,000 and 250,000. Regardless of the cutoff, “with a micro-influencer, it’s going to be a smaller following, but they’re definitely going to be more engaged,” Barker says.
It’s that engagement that makes micro-influencers so effective. Since micro-influencers have fewer people to interact with, they are better able to develop stronger relationships with their audience. ❚ A small price to pay? Cost is one of the biggest benefits, says Kali Ventresca, who founded the Glen Cove, N.Y.based custom lingerie company Impish Lee with her sister Noelle in 2015. “We felt that using micro-influencers was the best way to get our product in front of the most people as quickly as possible, while staying within our budget,” Ventresca says.