Call it what you want, but influencer marketing is due a shake up. Brands are still engaging with influencers based on nothing more than a high follower count, and then wondering why they’re struggling to target the relevant audiences in a cost-effective way.

Brands are finding it hard to walk the tightrope between consumer product trust and brand exposure. As such, they’re not creating genuine conversations around the brand that at the end of the day are what boost both engagement and, ultimately, sales. 

The nano influencer is different. With an audience of between 1,000 and 10,000, nano influencers can and do, through niche appeal, virality, and plain old raw authenticity, reach audiences with a relevancy that larger influencers cannot.

What’s your niche?

Firstly, if data is what drives a brand, nano influencers are the perfect match. The litany of sub-niches and overlapping passion points that dominate a fractured social market can be targeted specifically through nano influencers who are chosen precisely because they speak to one of those niches. Tinned-fish? There are nano influencers for that. Alvin and the Chipmunks, pareidolia, NunTok - if you can dream it, TikTok and its algorithm are already there, connecting brands to influencers and vice versa. Through nano influencers, brands can reach audiences across each and every niche, unlocking the keys to mass engagement.

Brands wanting to work across every platform also benefit from this targeted approach. While traditional macro influencers may hold a more varied audience across platforms, brands that want to create content for specific platforms and audiences benefit from working with hand-picked nano influencers, maximising efficiency of impact. These brands understand the importance of working with the right influencers to create bespoke content for each and every audience and channel.

The localisation and niche-appeal of this content is also of great benefit for brands. With nano influencers, a brand can sometimes expect some level of an influencer's following to be localised within a geographic area. But what’s more beneficial is the nano influencer’s localisation within the niche itself, in a much more contained and focused digital space. These niche passion points are vital to the locating and targeting of customers.

Don’t feel your brand needs to be confined to just one small niche though. At SCREENSHOT, we advocate for partnering with hundreds of nano influencers with respected voices across a range of micro-communities. This is your gateway to building influence on a local level that can be scaled up to achieve huge global reach, with far higher levels of engagement than using just a handful of macro influencers. Or at the very least, a nano influencer marketing campaign can be a testing ground to build out a wider advertising proposition.

When it comes to managing your ever expanding band of nano influencers & ensuring the quality of the content lands in the sweet spot of communicating your brand’s messages but in a way that feels authentic to each creator’s audience, this is when agency partners come in.

Trust me, genuinely

Beyond the minutia of targeting, the localised, community feel of a page with under 10,000 followers is immensely more powerful for generating trust than a larger account with followers in the millions.  A nano influencer’s followers are more likely to be genuine friends or at least feel a more personal connection than  with larger influencers. Their audiences do not have the same fatigue with brand sponsored posts as many who see them daily on a well known influencer’s feed might.

Nano influencers treat sponsorship deals with care, and above all genuine excitement, especially as these sponsorship deals may well be the first that the influencer has been given. The trust between a nano influencer and their audience is key to brands looking to create a more authentic pool of online content. 

UGC often gets a bad rap from brands, who have a preconceived notion of what works and what doesn’t and are often worried about underdeveloped and under-produced pieces. But UGC builds trust. Its authenticity reaches audiences in a way that brand-generated content does not. The influencers can speak for themselves on behalf of the brand rather than simply sounding too much like the brand. Audiences notice this and so are more likely to genuinely engage with this kind of content. Social platforms also love UGC, promoting it over hi-fi content more often than not.  

Engage me in conversation  

That genuine trust means that campaigns that use nano influencers will naturally generate much greater engagement and conversation. For nano influencers, one-off brand deals generate a high level of genuine excitement and long-lasting respect and loyalty for that brand. Understandably, this isn’t so often the case with their macro counterparts regularly receiving offers from multiple brands in the same space. The close-to-the-audience feel of nano influencers within trends often drives more authentic conversation, and consistently this has led to higher engagement both on and off social platforms.  

The power of the nano influencer means that a brand’s marketing department has access to a consumer base that is precisely targeted, relevant to each campaign, and crucially, genuinely engaged.

Brands aren’t out of the woods when it comes to tough decisions on influencers. The Taylor Swifts’, Lionel Messis’, and Kim Kardashians’ of the world aren’t going anywhere. The reach of macro influencers and the diversity of their audience can benefit brands looking to spend big.

But it’s the micro and the nano influencers that will truly amplify your brand community. Think smaller, partner for the passion, and watch your brand fanbase grow.