Microinfluenseri nisu trend za 2018. godinu

MICRO influencers: It’s a great buzzword. It looks mighty fine on a slide. It wakes up the client’s boss in a meeting.

But it’s tactically useless. Why?

Because when you factor in the resources needed to organize them, whether you’re a big brand or niche brand, whether you’re working with experts or ordinary people, by definition microinfluencers don’t have a lot of followers — and working with them is just not worth it. Or if I put my consultant hat on: “The ROI of such efforts is dubious at best.

That will be a lot of euros, thank you.”

If you’re a big brand, in order to reach enough people you need many microinfluencers. Anyone who has ever handled an influencer campaign knows what a logistical hell managing even a handful of influencers is. Once you go beyond a certain number, the time needed to coordinate everybody and approve everything escalates and you either lose control or don’t publish regularly enough.

Oh, and if you think that because they’re micro they don’t need a lot of attention, you’re sadly mistaken. More often than not, they need micromanagement.

Let’s say by contrast you’re a niche brand and you pick only the people relevant in your industry. You’ll soon find that those who were smart enough to become authorities in a certain field will not give away that credibility cheaper than the girl who amassed 10 times more followers by putting on makeup every day i.e. your regular run of the mill influencer.

Therefore, you’ll be forced to decide the same way when you’re deciding whether to cooperate with an influencer: you’ll weigh the size of their audience, assess their supposed influence and compare it to their asking price. Nothing micro about it.

You can automate all this through a web service where anyone can apply to be an influencer. They receive a unique link to attach to their posts and they are paid by the click. These services existed long before we coined the term “microinfluencer”. However, this doesn’t work if you’re just looking for general awareness or image building. Even when you’re looking for clicks, the resulting posts look robotic or there are too many of them for each influencer, which is why none of these platforms really took off in a big way.

We even once tried to find ordinary people and tried to entice them to post regularly. We found 50 local students with the largest Instagram profiles. We did the research, we contacted them and got approval and addresses. We organized postage. Then the trouble began: maybe half of them actually posted, a lot of them saw the others and realized they haven’t received their parcels, some of them took photos which downright shocked the client.

This is on top of all the problems already inherent in influencer marketing: Once another brand pulls the same trick with the same people, all illusion is broken; Consumers now understand that these are paid ads, not heartfelt recommendations; It’s even harder to prove positive ROI, and it starts looking a lot like we’re just giving away our products for Instagram likes — when our mission is the reverse — to create the perception that using our product will make you cool to your peers.

Every year digital marketers are looking for the next big thing, a new trend to package and sell to their clients. I first started hearing the term in late 2016 and it sounded like a good idea. But the practicalities are forbidding for most brands. There are brands who are positioned well enough so their early adopters are active on Instagram, and technically activating them would be a sort of microinfluencer campaign.

However, this by no means proves that microinfluencers can become an industry-wide practice.