When Instagram and Facebook started becoming popular, they offered brands and businesses an exciting opportunity to market their products and services, giving birth to influencer marketing. Now, the global influencer marketing market value is around $21.1BN. 

But even though influencer marketing offers high ROI and brilliant engagement for businesses, until recently, they were not accessible for smaller brands. Creators also had to spend a lot of resources and build a following before they were able to monetize their brands. 

This led to the popularity of micro-influencers or creators with smaller and often local followings. Let’s have a look at where brands can find micro-influencers and why they should work with smaller creators. 

Why should brands work with micro-influencers?

Most brands prefer to work with influencers within their industry and with a large following closely resembling their target audience. It works because if an influencer has around a million followers, a single piece of content can create huge engagement and awareness about the brand. 

These influencers are well aware of their capabilities and charge accordingly for their services. Mega influencers can charge upwards of $10,000 per post while celebrities may charge more than a million dollars. 

While these influencers have a huge reach, they rarely have a personal connection with their audience. Influencers with more than a million followers rarely send personal replies to every comment on their posts. 

That’s where micro-influencers win. Micro-influencers have a much smaller following, but they often have a much more personal connection with their audience. They share more intimate details of their lives with their audience and are constantly working to engage with them. Micro-influencers also tend to focus on niche subjects, and their followers are more likely to trust them. 

Since they have a much smaller audience, it's also often cheaper to work with them; you can get a micro-influencer to collaborate with you for as little as $100 to $500 per post. 

Pros of working with micro-influencers

Lower cost per post: Micro-influencers charge a lot less for a single post compared to larger influencers. Brands can collaborate with them for as low as $100 dollars per post, which makes them more accessible for smaller companies. For larger brands, marketing teams can make quick decisions when working with micro-influencers. 

‍Better engagement with the audience: Micro-influencers engage very closely with their audience, and their followers reciprocate. Their followers feel a much closer connection with these influencers than they may accounts that have a larger following. 

‍The audience is more likely to trust the influencer: Micro-influencers often focus on very niche topics. For instance, they may focus on very specific aspects of fashion, like make-up, dresses, or photography, or niche sections in technology, for instance design, teaching, and others. From an audience perspective, it makes them highly trustworthy in that specific field, and their followers are more likely to take action based on their recommendation. 

Cons of working with micro-influencers

‍It’s not easy to find micro-influencers: Because of their smaller following, it's not very easy to find micro-influencers. While working with them, it's important to choose influencers that are closely aligned with your brand and have a following that resembles your target audience. However, performing an in-depth micro-influencer profile analysis takes too many resources. 

‍Lower reach compared to larger influencers: The lower number of followers means your campaign will reach only a limited audience. 

What are the top micro-influencer platforms? Where can you find micro-influencers?

The biggest challenge with micro-influencers is that, unlike mega-influencers, they are much more difficult to find. It’s tough to find creators that align with your brand and products and have good engagement from your target audience. A simple search on Instagram or Facebook won’t help you find micro-influencers or their social media engagement data. It’s not easy to understand an influencer’s audience by analyzing their profile.  

This is where brands can use micro-influencer platforms. These platforms have huge databases of influencers all over the world across different platforms, specializing in different sectors or industries. With these platforms, marketers can access data about the influencers’ engagement, previous campaigns, and more. 

1. InsightIQ

InsightIQ offers a database of more than 20M creators and constantly tracks more than 80M pieces of content for engagement data. The platform constantly updates its database and claims to add more than 15,000 influencers daily. 

InsightIQ has data from influencers on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more. The platform also ensures that marketers get accurate data on the creators they want to work with. InsightIQ can tell marketers what percent of followers are authentic for a creator and how many are suspicious or mass followers. 

Features

InsightIQ offers high-quality metrics into an influencer's performance:

The platform can tell the capability of an influencer to influence purchases among their audience by analyzing previous campaigns and engagement metrics. 

The platform can help you find creator lookalikes:

Even with a large database and filters, it can be tough to find micro-influencers that fit your brand. With its lookalike search feature, InsightIQ can help marketers find one influencer that fits their campaign and automatically look for other similar influencers. 

2. Upfluence

Upfluence is a popular influencer management solution with tools for every stage of the campaign. The platform can help brands find micro-influencers, plan campaigns, and evaluate the metrics. Besides influencer marketing, Upfluence also supports managing affiliate marketing campaigns, creator management, user-generated content, and brand ambassadors. 

Upfluence is known for its data-driven approach to influencer marketing and for helping marketers get more done in a short time with its powerful workflow management and automation tools. Upfluence has also integrated ChatGPT into its platform to help marketers draft emails and communicate better with creators. 

‍Features

Influencer search: 

Upfluence promises to help you find influencers who already like your brand and are following you. The platform also offers brand engagement metrics for all the influencers on their platform and helps to find creators most likely to bring you good results. 

Complete influencer management: 

Upfluence helps brands manage their entire influencer marketing campaign. It can help you find influencers, connect with them, build campaigns, track their performance, pay and offer gifts to influencers, and more. 

3. Klear

Klear is a powerful influencer marketing platform that focuses on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Klear can help marketers find micro-influencers by filtering them out by region, platform, industry, and even hashtags. 

The platform can also help brands and marketers streamline their communications with their influencers. The platform has in-app messaging and can help you reach influencers directly. Klear can also help marketers onboard influencers, and manage briefs and even the content before publishing. The platform can also help marketers manage influencer contracts, and once the campaign is over, brands can make payments directly through the platform. 

Features

Brand safety management:

Brands can easily analyze influencer profiles to see if their content fits with the company’s ethics and philosophies and if collaborating with a certain creator will negatively affect their brand. 

Complete influencer management: 

Klear doesn’t stop at finding influencers. It has the tools to help you onboard creators, manage communications, briefs, and contracts, and even complete the payments on time. 

4. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ is an influencer marketing platform known for its AI-powered creator search features. The platform can help you find creators through natural language search and is capable of matching you with influencers based on the people you’ve worked with before. 

CreatorIQ can also help marketers vet creators before working with them by checking their accounts for fit and relevance and if the creator has produced or put out content that doesn’t fit with the brand’s philosophies. 

The platform also offers a complete influencer marketing campaign toolset. It can help you manage creators, execute campaigns, analyze results, and pay the influencers you’re working with. 

‍Features: 

AI-powered creator search: 

CreatorIQ’s AI-powered creator search can help marketers quickly find influencers who are best suited for their brand. 

Build community 

CreatorIQ can help you find influencers and creators talking about your brand and help you create a community of people who like your business. It can help foster the creation of UGC and build long-term partnerships.

5. Aspire

Aspire is both an influencer marketing platform and an agency that can run your entire campaign for you. The platform offers high ROI on campaigns with fewer resources with its workflows and automation capabilities. Aspire’s influencer search solution promises to help you find influencers in different industries with varying numbers of followers and engagement. 

Aspire claims to be the only influencer marketing platform with a creator search engine and a creator marketplace. If you don’t find influencers that fit your needs or if you need a larger number of creators for your campaign, you can have creators applying to work with you through the creator marketplace. 

Features

Creator search, creator marketplace, and influencer marketing team all in one: 

Aspire offers multiple options for brands and marketing teams to run their influencer marketing campaigns. Marketing teams can just look for creators, use the software to run their campaigns, or hand over the entire campaign to Aspire, who will run it for you and get you the results you need.  

6. Modash

Modash is a popular influencer marketing tool with a powerful creator discovery solution. The platform offers data-rich profiles of influencers all over the world and can help you find your perfect fit through multiple filters. One of the most notable features of Modash is that you can find influencers by looking at their audience instead of just their content or brand. Your brand can then easily find influencers whose following resembles your target audience. 

Features: 

In-depth data about creators: 

Modash offers a deep dive into creators, their audience, and the performance of their content. Their data-driven approach helps you find the best fit with less effort. 

Finding influencer emails: 

With Modash, influencer marketing teams can quickly find emails of influencers they want to work with. Modash lets you find emails of a single influencer or export emails in bulk so you can use them with your CRM or emailing tools. 

7. Heepsy

Unlike other solutions that offer many tools for influencer management, Heepsy is dedicated purely to finding and managing influencers. The platform offers data to influencers, helps you reach out to them, and analyzes campaign data. Marketers can also look into influencer audiences and ensure it's the demographic they’re looking for. 

Heepsy also has a chat feature, can help you manage influencer payments, and has a project management tool to manage your collaborations. 

Features

Influencer search: 

Powerful influencer search solution that can help you narrow down creators for your brand with detailed influencer statistics and audience insights.  

8. Traackr

Traackr is all about data. The solution offers detailed insights into influencers and their engagements and can help you run data-driven campaigns. Traackr is one of the very few influencer marketing platforms that places a lot of emphasis on collaboration and teamwork within the campaign team. They have tools to manage team roles, ensure compliance, integrations with other solutions, and even SSO. 

Traackr also has a lot of tools to monitor campaigns, track content, and effectively manage budgets. Besides this, they also have a team that can manage your entire influencer marketing campaign and collaborate with creators to create awareness about your brand. 

Features

Campaign tracking: 

Traackr has a detailed set of tools to monitor campaigns, measure ROI, understand the competition, and track content. 

Collaboration:

Traackr has dedicated tools for helping your team collaborate easily. It offers integrations with your existing tools and can assign different roles to your team.  

Micro-influencers can create winning campaigns. You just need to find the right ones

That’s where InsightIQ comes up. InsightIQ is a revolutionary new micro-influencer platform that gives detailed insights into influencers and their brand. The solution can help you quickly find influencers that fit with your brand and launch your campaign with little delay. Check it out now.