For any brand, an online community is key to a strategy for forming stronger relationships with customers and ensuring longevity. Social media has made this easier — for example, brands like GymShark or Drunk Elephant built their customer bases entirely online through platforms like Instagram.
Creating community is part of the reason brands continue to invest in influencer marketing despite economic headwinds. Many companies increased their influencer marketing budgets in the last year, more often than not diverting the funds from other channels, a CreatorIQ study found earlier this year.
Micro influencers are in especially high demand — 74% of marketers said they planned to partner with this type of creator in 2023, according to a recent survey by the influencer-marketing agency Linqia.
Micro influencers, who have smaller, usually hyper-engaged audiences, partner with brands and leverage the communities they’ve built for marketing purposes. These creators have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers on a social-media platform like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, as influencer-marketing agency HypeAuditor defined them in a 2022 report.
“The right micro influencers have a unique ability to reach hyper-targeted audiences in a deeply authentic way, which can be more difficult to maintain when compared to macro creators,” said Annelise Campbell, founder of talent-management firm CFG.
Micro influencers often run lucrative full-time businesses on their own, but signing with a manager can supercharge that growth. For instance, Lissette Calveiro, founder of the management firm Influence with Impact, said nine of her clients make well over six figures a year now. Two of them, who have less than 150,000 followers, are on track to make more than half a million dollars by the end of 2023.
Some companies, like Calveiro’s, have made working with micro and emerging creators a priority.
Business Insider compiled a list of some of the most influential talent-management companies for…
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