Yahoo Finance 'Micro', 'nano' and 'mega' influencers: Why you need to know what these mean
The New Investors video series brought to you by Yahoo Finance reveals the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs and business people in Australia today. This is the seventh episode of the season.
The modern equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel would be to convince Kylie Jenner to post your product on Instagram.
That's 135 million follower fish who see their idol using your product and likely will fork out a few dollars to try it. Even if just one per cent of that audience was interested, that's 1.3 million new customers for a fledgling startup.
One Melbourne man actually achieved this, paying "around $250,000" for the privilege.
Mega social media influencer
Shaun Wilson, the co-founder of self-tan and suncare maker Bondi Sands, told Yahoo Finance's New Investors show that marketing through influencers is not as simple as just paying a celebrity to advertise your company.
They need to genuinely like the product.
"It's not just the paid relationship for us... Kylie's actually loved tanning and she knew about our product and we had a connection and she loved it.
"So yes, there was obviously a paid transaction with that post. But more importantly, for us, that she loved our brand and she uses our products and I think that's the key with influencer marketing."
Micro and nano social media influencers
And it's not just about convincing a massive tier-one celebrity like Jenner to spruik your product. There are social media influencers with smaller overall reach but have specific demographics of followers that are of interest to certain businesses.
"We have a massive influencer strategy globally – we've got four people in our team who work on it," Wilson told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Sarah O'Carroll.
"There's micros, there's nanos, there's megas, there's segmentation, there's profiling..."
Wilson said nano influencers have 5,000 or fewer followers, while micros have between 5,000 and 50,000. Mega influencers are those like Jenner who have anything from 50,000 to millions of followers.
Another Australian entrepreneur, Gretta Van Riel, has been both an influencer herself and a businesswoman who's built five businesses through intragram influencers.
"Collaboration, is to work together with social media influencers, 'other accounts in your niche for shoutouts', or another brand to host a giveaway," she told New Investors.
“By collaborating with another brand in your niche to host a giveaway you’re able to mutually benefit each other by growing each other’s social following."
Influencer marketing
The woman behind the Skinny Me Tea phenomenon these days is heading up a platform called Hey Influencers, which performs “match-making” of brands to social media influencers who'll reach the most appropriate target audience.
Influencer marketing is the most effective way to build up demand for a product before the actual launch, according to Van Riel.
"I think in the past the great e-commerce myth has been ‘build it and they will come’… Create a product, put it online, create some beautiful imagery, press live on the store and just wait for the sales to start flooding in," she said.
"[But] it doesn’t happen. Not in that way. If you are building an audience before you launch a product, you’re mitigating that risk of launching to crickets."
And as for the quarter-of-a-million dollars spent on Jenner. Was it worth it for Bondi Sands?
"Absolutely. For us, it's about generating awareness and mass awareness at that time," Wilson said.
"It was really a selling story for us in the US. How do we get noticed by the big retailers? ... It was mass awareness, people understand who we are. Kylie's a great voice and we thought it was a very good post and we got a great return from it."
The New Investors video series brought to you by Yahoo Finance reveals the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs and business people in Australia today. This is the seventh episode of the season.
