How to Find Micro-Influencers on Instagram for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Alex Fedorenko
Alex Fedorenko
Managing Partner & Co-Founder at Insense

There’s no denying it: Influencer marketing is on the rise, giving companies the chance to market their products and services to broader and more qualified audiences. By partnering with industry influencers, many companies are seeing significantly higher sales since influencer marketing delivers each company’s message to the audience that’s most likely to be interested. However, partnering with macro-influencers — who are often celebrity influencers with millions upon millions of followers — is extremely expensive and actually offers much less return on your marketing spend.

For this reason, a growing number of brands and businesses are leveraging the high audience engagement of micro-influencers. What’s more, Insense offers a way to streamline the process of partnering with micro-influencers, making it easier to find, connect with, and collaborate with industry micro-influencers who have credibility with your target audience.

With that in mind, we’re going to tell you everything you need to know when it comes to how to find Instagram micro-influencers. We’ll also explain where to find micro-influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns.

What is a Micro-Influencer?

Compared to macro-influencers, micro-influencers are social media personalities who typically have social media followings of between 1,000 to 10,000 people. However, some micro-influencers teeter on the edge of being macro-influencers with up to 100,000 followers.

Although celebrity influencers tend to get the most attention from the general public, micro-influencers have the most value and offer brands the greatest return on their marketing spend as influencer marketing partners. Best of all, micro-influencers can be found on any platform, provided you’re searching by area of interest or niche such as baking or outdoor recreation.

According to a recent study observing engagement rates among Instagram influencers, as the amount of followers increases, an influencer’s audience engagement actually decreases. This actually makes a lot of sense because when an influencer has tons of followers — e.g. Kendall Jenner with over 131 million followers on Instagram — it’s simply not impossible for the influencer to have meaningful interactions with more than a fraction of those followers.

Since they have smaller audiences, micro-influencers can more easily engage with their followers. For this reason, the followers of micro-influencers feel as though they have actual relationships with the influencer (versus simply being a fan like most celebrity influencers’ followers). This makes micro-influencers’ followers more receptive to the branded content that the influencers post. For businesses looking for micro-influencers for influencer marketing campaigns, micro-influencers often deliver substantially higher click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales.

And not only do micro-influencers deliver better results, they are also significantly less expensive, and certainly more accommodating, than a Kardashian. These factors are why Insense focuses on micro-influencers who offer better value and a much greater return on investment for their brand partners.

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Why Micro-Influencers Are Crucial for Brands and Businesses

Although celebrity influencers tend to get the most attention from the general public, micro-influencers have the most value and offer brands the greatest return on their marketing spend as influencer marketing partners. Best of all, micro-influencers can be found on any platform, provided you’re searching by area of interest or niche such as baking or outdoor recreation.

According to a recent study observing engagement rates among Instagram influencers, as the amount of followers increases, an influencer’s audience engagement actually decreases. This actually makes a lot of sense because when an influencer has tons of followers — e.g. Kendall Jenner with over 131 million followers on Instagram — it’s simply not impossible for the influencer to have meaningful interactions with more than a fraction of those followers.

Since they have smaller audiences, micro-influencers can more easily engage with their followers. For this reason, the followers of micro-influencers feel as though they have actual relationships with the influencer (versus simply being a fan like most celebrity influencers’ followers). This makes micro-influencers’ followers more receptive to the branded content that the influencers post. For businesses looking for micro-influencers for influencer marketing campaigns, micro-influencers often deliver substantially higher click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales.

And not only do micro-influencers deliver better results, they are also significantly less expensive, and certainly more accommodating, than a Kardashian.

Benefits of Micro-Influencers Versus Celebrity Influencers

  • There is no shortage of micro-influencers to work with;
  • Micro-influencers tend to have more targeted audiences;
  • Partnering with micro-influencers is less expensive;
  • Micro-influencers aren’t as difficult to approach and contact;
  • Micro-influencers are seen as more authentic, trustworthy, and credible;
  • Micro-influencers have stronger relationships with their audiences;
  • Micro-influencers are more influential in their followers’ purchasing decisions.

In 2016, popular shoe brand Sperry launched a highly successful micro-influencer campaign, partnering with over 100 micro-influencers. These influencers created custom content to promote Sperry’s products and shared that content with their followers on Instagram using hashtags created specifically for the campaign, like #OdysseysAwait.

The ratio of impressions to followers was impressive considering many of the most successful posts came from influencers with less than 5,000 followers. However, many of these micro-influencers had their content featured on Sperry’s own Instagram account, and they benefited from this exposure with significant growth of their own individual audiences.

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What Micro-Influencers and Creators Have to Offer Brands

Compared to celebrity influencers who hire creators in their stead, micro-influencers are skilled content creators who think outside of the box. Since many companies’ marketing content has a homogenous quality to it, partnering with micro-influencers is valuable because micro-influencers bring fresh ideas and novel approaches to the table.

These partnerships often result in products, services, and brands being promoted their product in ways they wouldn’t normally think to. Since micro-influencers also tend to know their followers well, these creators can also help market and promote the company’s product in a way that resonates with their followers.

How to Find Micro-Influencers on Instagram for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

The process of finding out influencers on Instagram — or any other social media platform — can be a laborious and financially risky task. Without the proper procedures in place, companies are forced to take influencers at their word with little way to verify whether or not they can deliver the results they claim. In short, there’s been no way to mitigate the risk of working with influencers.

How Brands Find Micro-influencers on Instagram

  1. Companies will seek out micro-influencers that are relevant to their product or company
  2. Companies will also turn to their current fan or consumer base to examine their interests and who they follow on Instagram to find micro-influencers
  3. Companies use hashtags on Instagram to find micro-influencers relevant to their product or company
  4. Companies also calculate the engagement rate of micro-influencers on Instagram to see if their followers are an effective consumer base to target
  5. Companies vet micro-influencers and look for ones with quality, genuine content on Instagram since it’s important to be sure you’re partnering with someone you want your product and company associated with

Why Insense is a platform Where to Find Micro-Influencers easily

Eliminating most of the challenges related to finding micro-influencers to partner, Insense is a creative platform where you’ll find over 15,000 micro-influencers with a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and styles. With Insense, businesses, brands, and advertisers can easily find talented creators and micro-influencers who fit the goals and objectives of their influencer marketing campaigns.

To alleviate the risks associated with influencer marketing, Insense has a team that pre-screens and verifies each influencer before he or she is invited to be a content creator on the platform. Because of the high diversity of creators on the platform, brands and businesses can avoid the usual struggles associated with trying to find Instagram influencers the hard way.

Finding a micro-influencer for influencer marketing collaborations on Insense starts with a creative brief. Created by the company or brand, the brief introduces the company and its brand, the needs and goals of the marketing campaign, and the type of influencer(s) needed. Once submitted, the team at Insense will review the brief and match the company with creators and micro-influencers who are the best fit.

Additionally, creators who wish to partner with a company can respond with a quote for the content and services requested on the brief. From there, the company can begin communicating with potential creative partners right on Insense using the built-in messaging system. Once selected, the creator or influencer can immediately start creating custom branded content.

As you can see, Insense is a powerful tool that streamlines influencer marketing by giving companies a one-stop shop where they can find qualified micro-influencers and pursue creative collaborations with influencers from start to finish.

Insense.pro is Your Premier Creative Content Platform and the best way to find Micro-Influencers

One of the things that makes Insense such a useful tool is that it’s an all-in-one creative platform for companies to get custom branded content, from videos to organic posts and photos, created by skilled, experienced influencers.

There’s incredible diversity and experience among the influencers who are available on Insense. This means companies are able to seek out influencers who match their needs and preferences rather than wasting time and money on exhaustive searches for influencers on social media.

With Insense, you can elevate your influencer marketing campaigns by streamlining the entire process, from finding micro-influencers to payment to results-tracking. Additionally, Insense integrates directly with Facebook Ads Manager and Snapchat Ads, meaning that brands, companies, and businesses can run influencers’ content as targeted, paid ads using the influencers’ own social media handles. Best of all, this deep integration includes access to full reporting and analytics.

For these and so many other great features, start enhancing your influencer marketing campaigns on Insense so that partnering with micro-influencers will be easier and more effective than ever before.

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Alex Fedorenko

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