FB RentalsMicro-Influencer Case Study: How We Reached 87,811 People Without Paying Influencers A Cent
Many people think you need huge budgets and influencers with millions of followers to make an impact, but this simply isn't the case. We recently worked on a campaign for Australian organic tattoo-care brand R3vitalize and partnered up with 7 micro-influencers with the goal of generating brand exposure at minimal cost.
The Brief
Brand: R3vitalize
Product: H3al Tattoo Aftercare
Goal: Leverage influencers to build product and brand awareness
Strategy: Get relevant Instagram micro-influencers to post for free in exchange for a product sample.
Key Platform: Instagram
The Results
Instagram Collaborations: 7
Average Follower Count: 11,720
Instagram Posts: 7
Engagements: 3,393
Reach: 87,811
Amount Paid To Influencers: $0.00
Total Cost Of Products: $105.00
Effective CPM: $1.19
What did we learn?
1. Micro-influencers are very willing to post for free if they actually like the product.
2. Engagement rates were far higher than with similar macro-influencer campaigns.
3. Spending a lot of time identifying the ideal customer helped in identifying the ideal influencers.
4. The content posted by the influencers was highly engaging when reposted on the brand's page.
5. The more natural, the better. Hard-selling copy isn't as effective.
The most valuable take-away from our campaign was the founding of highly valuable relationships with some of the micro-influencers. There were a couple of influencers who far outperformed the others and we plan to build long-term relationships with them.
So apart from generating some valuable engagement, we also learnt what types of micro-influencers work best for the brand. This gives us valuable insight into our future paid ad targeting strategy and influencer outreach methodology.
The Posts:
Here are the best and worst performing posts accompanied by some insights into why we think they worked or didn't work as well as expected.
Lucas' post generated an engagement rate of 9.57% which is far higher than the average. We believe the reason for this is the natural style of his post and the tight, relevant relationship that he has with his audience. Instead of posting in sales-speak, he used a casual tone that felt natural and in-line with the colloquial speech one would expect from a big guy with lots of tattoos.
His post gelled well with the rest of his feed and didn't come across as too market-y which caused his followers to engage with it on a human level instead of immediately regarding it as a sponsored advert.
This post yielded very poor results, far below the average and the reasons for this are pretty obvious. The product is the complete focus of the post which immediately flags it as a marketing post in the eyes of his followers. He also uses marketing speak to promote the benefits of the product, instead of casually mentioning it as a regular part of his daily routine like Lucas did.
The biggest lesson we learnt from this post is to offer micro-influencers a little more direction regarding their post. It's important that their post doesn't feel too directed, but it's also important that they don't just copy and paste a list of benefits. Going forward we will definitely instruct influencers not to post photos where the product is placed centre-stage.
This is a repost by the official R3vitalize Instagram page. The original post by @eros-entertainer reached 7,401 people and engaged 544 of them. When we add these two posts together we get a combined reach of 13,172 and a combined engagement of 1,041 people. This teaches us some very interesting things.
Firstly and most importantly, it means that micro-influencer content can and should be repurposed and used in as many places as possible. Why stop at reposting it on the official page? The next step would be to run this post as a Facebook Ad alongside a testimonial by the influencer.
The second thing it teaches us is the importance of market research and ideal customer analysis. We spent a lot of time researching the market and developing an Ideal Customer Avatar which we used to determine which influencers to approach. This clearly worked as the engagement rate between this influencer's audience and the official page's audience was very similar.
Conclusion:
Micro-influencer marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to drive engagement and develop creative content that can and should be repurposed for future campaigns. Natural works best and market and customer analysis is key.
Here at The Brand Army we take pride in delivering results that exceed expectations and we'd love to help you reach your goals using the power of influencer marketing. Let us know if you'd like to jump on a free consultation call by filling in the contact form at the bottom of this page.