If you want big results from your influencer marketing, it might be time to think smaller.
A nano-influencer can make a great addition to your influencer team by creating highly impactful content and serving as a powerful voice that people trust.
Despite having smaller followings, nano-influencers often have highly engaged audiences and personal connections to them. This depth gives them a higher level of authenticity. Plus, they truly know their audience and what they like, which can help them present their brand partners in meaningful ways.
Here’s a closer look at nano-influencers and how brands can leverage them to drive big results.
Contents:
What Is a Nano-Influencer?
How Many Followers Do You Need to Be a Nano-Influencer?
Why Nano-Influencers Are Effective
How to Identify and Engage Nano-Influencers
Crafting Successful Nano-Influencer Campaigns
Building Long-Term Relationships with Nano-Influencers
Tracking and Analyzing Nano-Influencer Campaigns
Use Meltwater and Klear for Successful Nano-Influencer Campaigns
What Is a Nano-Influencer?
Nano-influencers are content creators who are leaders in niche communities. They have small audiences that are usually highly engaged with the nano-influencer’s content and often trust their recommendations or advice.
Many argue that the influence of a nano-influencer is as strong (or even stronger) than other types of influencers. This is likely because nano-influencers aren’t attracting followers from everywhere. Instead, they’ve built a core audience with a shared characteristic or interest. A higher percentage of their audience is likely to care about the content they create.
Which, of course, makes them more open to your message.
Nano-influencers are focused on a specific niche or topic, and their followers treat them as experts in that area. They have a high level of trust and respect for the influencer, which makes the influencer a powerful voice in shaping their audience’s perceptions and behaviors.
How Many Followers Do You Need to Be a Nano-Influencer?
Although the definition varies, nano-influencer follower count typically ranges from 1K to 10K followers. Out of all the types of influencers, nano-influencers have the smallest audiences.
Why Nano-Influencers Are Effective
There’s no arguing that genuine recommendations carry a lot of weight. The smaller followings allow nano-influencers to build personal connections with their audiences. These connections make brand promotions and recommendations feel more trustworthy.
Nano-influencers are everyday people, just like you. They just happen to have expertise around a given topic and an engaged audience who wants to hear more about that topic. Smaller influencers know what their people like, so can they create relevant, relatable content that gets engagement.
And speaking of engagement, nano-influencers tend to get higher engagement rates on their content compared to macro influencers or mega influencers (aka influencers with 100K or more followers). A small but dedicated following is more likely to interact with the influencer’s content, which leads to higher clicks, conversions, and engagement.
This higher engagement can make nano-influencers a more cost-effective option for businesses interested in influencer marketing.
How to Identify and Engage Nano-Influencers
If nano-influencer marketing sounds like the right strategy for your business, you’re in luck: About 91% of all global influencers fall into the nano category.
Nano-influencer examples include:
- ChefCathy Cuisine, with 1,770+ followers and lots of food-related content
- HelloChloeStyler, with 3,000+ followers interested in fashion-related content
- Marc.Wanderlust, with 7,000+ followers on his travel-focused IG account
These influencers embody the definition of having small yet engaged audiences and content on a specific niche or topic.
Your next objective: Find nano-influencers in your brand’s niche.
Here are some ways you can find and connect with relevant nano-influencers.
Do a social media hashtag search
Social media is the home of influencer marketing, so it makes sense to start your search here. You can search for relevant hashtags and see whose content pops up.
For example, if your brand is related to sustainable fashion, you might search for the hashtag #ecofashionshow. On Instagram, you can see how many posts a hashtag has before you click:
Next, click on the content to learn more about who posted it, their audience size, engagement rates, and other details.
This method works well because you’ll already have an idea of the content they post and how much engagement they receive.
Use social listening tools like Meltwater and Klear
Meltwater can help you speed up the process of finding nano-influencers in your niche.
Klear, Meltwater's influencer management solution, is designed to find, vet, and partner with influencers of all sizes and niches. You can use the the Klear influencer management platform to input your criteria, such as follower count, engagement rate, social media platform, and other details. The platform will curate a list of nano-influencers in your niche.
Meltwater’s social listening tools can also help you see who’s leading conversations related to your brand. With Meltwater, you can create a keyword search, then see who’s talking about those keywords on different social channels.
See how often influencers are using those terms, whether their content is positive or negative about a topic, and how their audience is responding.
These insights can help you make smarter influencer partnerships and ensure their content aligns with your brand values and goals.
Find bloggers in your niche
Bloggers often rely on social media to share their articles and gain new readers. They usually have links to their social media accounts on their blogs.
Do a Google search for bloggers in your niche, then check out the blogger’s social media following to see if they meet the nano-influencer criteria.
You can also use Klear to find relevant bloggers, vet their content, and make your introduction — all from the same platform.
Tip: Check out our blog that gives you a deep-dive on crafting and launching a successful blogger outreach campaign!
Crafting Successful Nano-Influencer Campaigns
Nano-influencer campaigns work a little differently than collaborations with celebrities or other big-name influencers. They’re more personal, and the purpose of the campaigns is usually more targeted.
Use these tips to work with nano-influencers and create a big impact.
Define your campaign objectives
Nano-influencers can help you grow your brand awareness, drive immediate sales, or create leads for further nurturing. So, what specifically do you want to achieve with your influencer partners?
Take a step back and figure out your influencer campaign objectives. You’ll need to share these objectives with the influencer so they can do what they do best and help you reach those goals.
Develop a content strategy
Influencers have built loyal followings for a reason: They’re good at what they do and know a lot about their respective niches. Their audience trusts them for a reason, too, so you’ll want to give them some creative freedom when developing content.
That said, you don’t have to be completely in the dark regarding content. After all, it’s your brand you’re trying to build — you don’t want misalignment in content to potentially damage your brand.
This is where working with nano-influencers can make a big difference. Remember, these are normal everyday people who happen to have a following. They’re usually easy to work with and willing to have back-and-forth conversations about what you like, don’t like, or ultimately want from the partnership.
You can get a feel for their flavor by looking at past content and brand collabs. You might even pull a few examples to show them what you really like and want to see more of in your partnership.
Just be sure to let them do their best work. They know what their people want to see and can help you get the best results when they’re left to their own creativity.
Measure the impact of your nano-influencer collaboration
As with any type of campaign, you want to see how much of an impact your nano-influencers make. You can gain a basic idea by looking at their post engagements, likes, shares, and comments.
Or take it a step further to see if customers visited your website or used a special coupon or discount code the influencer offered, for example.
If you’re using Klear to manage influencer marketing, you can track these metrics within the platform. Meltwater social listening tools also measure engagement rates along with consumer sentiment, share of voice, and other areas to illustrate how influential your influencers are.
Tip: Our Influencer Campaign Tracking and Monitoring Guide has everything you need to know about measuring the impact of your influencer initiatives.
Building Long-Term Relationships with Nano-Influencers
Nano-influencers are arguably more valuable to a brand when you have an ongoing partnership. A one-off mention won’t always cement loyalty among their fans. But if they keep talking about your brand or product, their audience is likely to tune in even more.
To nurture your connections beyond a single campaign, you can:
- Provide ongoing support and resources
- Offer cash rewards for successful conversions
- Repurpose their content in UGC campaigns
- Send personalized follow-up messages to keep conversations going
Working with nano-influencers on an ongoing basis allows you to build rapport and genuine understanding between the brand and the influencer. It’s a collaboration that goes beyond transactions, which can lead to content that feels more natural and resonates with the right people.
Tracking and Analyzing Nano-Influencer Campaigns
To get the best view of how your nano-influencer campaigns perform, you need data. As part of your campaign planning, you’ll want to choose the right data and metrics to track that give you the most complete picture of your success.
These may include:
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Clicks
- Brand reach
- Brand awareness
- Share of voice
- Consumer sentiment
- Website traffic
- Conversions/sales
- Brand mentions
- Follower growth
These aren’t the only metrics you can measure, and not all of them will be relevant to your campaign goals. Think about your campaign and what you want to achieve, then choose the metrics that will best illustrate your success.
With Meltwater and Klear, you can collect these and other metrics automatically and compile them into a neat and tidy report.
Use Meltwater and Klear for Successful Nano-Influencer Campaigns
Meltwater and Klear provide valuable resources for brands running influencer campaigns. From finding nano-influencers to vetting them, hiring them, and measuring their impact, you can manage the end-to-end process from a single platform.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.