In today’s fast-paced digital world, consumers are more savvy, demanding, and discerning than ever. To make a purchase decision, people like to search for information from those they trust or see as experts. That’s what makes influencer marketing so valuable.

According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals, even if they don’t know them. And as reported by AdWeek, 40% of people purchase a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on social media.

Collaborating with influencers can help raise brand awareness, strengthen the brand’s reputation, improve audience engagement, and increase conversions. Compared to other channels, 89% of marketers say that ROI (return on investment) from influencer marketing is comparable or better.

Keeping this in mind, it is not surprising that brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022 and 74% of marketers plan to activate influencer as much or more as they did before the coronavirus pandemic.

Instagram remains as the most important and impactful channel to run influencer campaigns, with more than 90% of brands including it as part of their marketing mix, according to CreatorIQ.

Other popular platforms, like Facebook, have lost favour over the past few years. Back in 2015, Facebook was included in 75% of all influencer campaigns. In 2018, it was used in less than half of the influencer campaigns, and its support dropped even further in 2019, to approximately 40%.

Micro or Macro-Influencers? 

When looking for influencers to partner with, marketers should have very clear and defined marketing objectives.

For example, if the campaign goal is to raise awareness, it makes sense to partner with a macro-influencer; usually celebrities or social media personalities who have more than 100,000 followers. Macro-influencers deliver killer visibility.

However, to gain more engagement, micro-influencers are the way to go. The success of a micro-influencer is built on community and connection, which includes taking time to answer direct messages, reply to comments, and like posts of other users in their community.

Don’t believe us? The ‘State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report’ analysed more than 100,000 influencer profiles across the leading influencer marketing platforms of Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, to see if there were variations in the engagement rate depending on an influencer’s number of followers.

The final conclusion was clear: influencers with a high number of followers have lower engagement than those with fewer followers.

This is particularly evident on Instagram, but not exclusively. Smaller TikTok influencers boast 9.38% engagement, yet the superstars only have 5.3%.

Zara #DearSouthAfrica campaign

To promote the launch of Zara’s South African online store, the clothing brand created the #DearSouthAfrica campaign, partnering with 60 micro-influencers.

According to Meltwater, the hashtag only surfaced on social media on September 16th, 2019; just 2 days before the site launch. But as soon as micro-influencers took to Twitter to share announcements, the hashtag exploded.

It successfully generated online conversations that reached over 6 million people worldwide one day before the online store launch, and close to 8 million on the actual day of the launch.

The outcome not only created high engagement rates and brand awareness for Zara, but their strategic use of micro-influencers reached a wider more diverse audience than if they had solely used macro-influencers.