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The Rise of Micro Influencers

Tom Logan

May 1, 2020

April 11, 2024

As influencer marketing has grown in popularity throughout the past couple of years, so have their rates (see our past blog post for more info). When a typical brand dives into influencer marketing for the first time, they may be tempted to go for the influencers with the biggest following. This may be a good choice for brands with a huge budget who are looking for exposure. However, for those hoping to generate great content at low costs-per-image this strategy isn't advisable.

This is where micro influencers come in.

Some brands may be discouraged by their smaller follower count, but when looking at the quality of the content along with their engagement rates micro-influencers prove to be very powerful.

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Bumble finds success with micro influencers

Bumble, a well known dating app with about 40 million registered users, actually stumbled upon micro influencers in their initial stages of growth. Whitney Wolfe, the creator of Bumble, explains that in the beginning they often asked their users how they found out about Bumble. A significant amount of people replied that they heard of Bumble through a woman, let's call her Anne Smith for privacy, and were intrigued enough to download the app and check it out.

When trying to figure out how Anne Smith learned about Bumble, one of Wolfe's employees came forward and told her that Anne was actually an old friend from high school and that she had posted a picture at a spin class wearing a Bumble t-shirt. After checking out Anne's account, with about 200 followers, Herd came up with a new marketing plan to recruit people similar to Anne Smith on Instagram to spread the word about Bumble.

We then worked with maybe 10,000 ‘Anne Smith’ hyper-micro-influencers...Our team was so authentic and mission-driven that their friends wanted to be a part of it, too.

— Whitney Wolfe

Bumble had great success with this micro influencer strategy and it resulted in a sharp increase in downloads.

The primary reason that this initiative worked is that people prefer to hear about a product or service from someone they trust vs. hearing it from a celebrity.

Working with micro influencers also allowed Bumble to target niche groups that they wouldn't have been able to reach with big celebrities.

RainbowOPTX Neemo Campaign on Cohley

Similar to the Bumble campaign, RainbowOPTX ran a campaign on Cohley where they generated a ton of amazing content with our community of micro influencers (we call Neemos). The Neemos are identified by our unique algorithm and independently verified for our team to ensure content quality.

Our Neemo program is unique in that the Neemos always work solely for product compensation, so brands are able to get the same high quality content for a fraction of the cost.

RainbowOPTX included 20 Neemos to promote their newest line of sunglasses with content generation being their primary objective. They were extremely successful and generated 184 photos in the campaign. The total asset value was $11,960 and the media value was $5,590.

To read more about the RainbowOPTX's campaign click here.

We understand how critical micro influencers are to influencer marketing. Our Neemos generate the same high-quality content that big influencers and their the trust their messaging carries is off the charts.

But don't take our word for it, try and guess which two photos are from our Neemos, and which two are from our influencers below!

Can you spot the quality difference?

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<img src="https://www.cohley.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/0E84F108-6D3D-46A6-A0EC-443A20B7DADC-4.jpeg" alt="@_lordxlana_ (2k followers)">

@_lordxlana_ (2k followers)

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<img src="https://www.cohley.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/image-asset-Sep-10-2020-07-07-47-02-PM-2.jpeg" alt="@globetrotting_gingertravel (216k followers)">

@globetrotting_gingertravel (216k followers)

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<img src="https://www.cohley.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/6B0A5189-3-3.jpg" alt="@stay_lame (3k followers)">

@stay_lame (3k followers)

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<img src="https://www.cohley.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/5D3B4556-B841-46D9-B355-DBE6544231AB-3.jpeg" alt="@glambymoni (72k followers)">

@glambymoni (72k followers)

Tom Logan

Founder & CEO