Your Micro-Influencer strategy delivers more than ROAS

Unravel Media February 17, 2023

We worked with several brands having different objectives for their influencer marketing. Some brands wanted to start influencer marketing to test out certain geos within India, some had first sales or CPA as goal while some wanted to boost their ongoing celebrity campaigns. Some even wanted to just get the content rights of the promising creators to use them as ad copies for their performance marketing campaigns. Since objectives are very different, the end goals are measured on different KPIs. Not only that, there are few outcomes that are not so easy to measure or assign weight to. E.g, we came across one such campaign for a gaming brand where we saw their Instagram followers increasing by double digits % in a month’s time post-campaign completion. Usually, these bumps up in social media following take time if done organically, and getting such bumps up helps gain network effort much faster. In the case of another brand, we saw referral rates going up more than usual. In our past experience, we have also noticed if a brand is running a promo code outside of influencer campaigns, the redemption of those picks up as you increase influencer activities. This is very much likely in case a customer is discovering the product for the first time being endorsed by an influencer they follow. Some of the customers would want to search for the product elsewhere and depending on your distribution, they may find a promo code elsewhere and use that during purchase.

The above hypothesis is applicable for all sorts of influencers i.e. Nano, Micro, Mega, however, you typically see notice bump up in these secondary metrics if you have a large number of micro/nano influencers promoting your brands. There are multiple reasons for the same:

• Micro-influencers have a higher engagement rate and users are more likely to perform some of the actions suggested by influencers.
• Micro-influencers usually have to work hard to gain incremental followers and engagement and hence proportionately have to work more on content ensuring better quality.
• The number of endorsements for micro-influencers is limited and hence would value any endorsement more.
• Their audience is growing at a better pace and hence would be keen on doing something for brands that resonate with their audience.
• From content iterations and messaging perspectives, brands can do more A/B tests as the cost is relatively small compared to the mega influencer.

While sales or ROAS is the ultimate objective, some of the above help in brand recall or establishing trust. Small companies which end up spending a lot of money to get video creatives done for ad-gen campaigns, find a pocket-friendly solution when they work with micro-influencers. In our past experiences, we have come across a few micro-influencers where collective performance even takes care of non-performing ones. Once you are able to find out high-performing ones with desired ROAS, this serves well for the next set of campaigns too. Brands can continue to work with performing ones until the performance goes below the expected ROAS level. By repeating this process, brands will have access to a lot of influencers who would help build recall, give their content rights, be brand evangelists and at the same time bring desired ROAS. As some of these micro-influencers grow, new audiences also end up making purchases after watching older videos/reels. Many of these are hard to attribute if you are not following the MMP/ Brand link and hence do not show up while checking for attributed sales from influencers.

In a nutshell, if you plan your micro-influencers campaign well and have the right mechanism in place to monitor and remarket your audience base, this can do wonders. We are happy to chat about it and help you build this channel in an effective manner.