A Simple Guide to Influencers and Advocates

Everyone has heard of a social media “influencer”. But most people don’t really understand what that is beyond “they connect people to your brand”. These people are typically paid in some way: money, free products or free services. Everyone thinks they need an influencer to hype up their brand in order to succeed on social media but the reality is, you may not ever need one. Let me elaborate a bit more by explaining the different types of influencers.

Mega Influencer: Think celebrity endorsement. This is who you usually think of when you think “influential” on social media. These are people who could make or break a brand with their endorsement because their following is so large and easily swayed/motivated. These are people like Kylie Jenner who charges $1.2 million for a single post. While small businesses can’t afford that type of marketing budget, big companies who want to attract stylish, contemporary younger women like Puma, Fashion Nova and Quay can easily swing it.

Macro Influencer: Just below the mega status is a macro influencer. Typically these individuals have roughly 100k followers. Their following is great but just not as vast as the mega influencer. Because of that, they tend to charge less for promotions. These individuals are well known experts in their field but not celebrities. With little research, you can typically find industry macro influencers for things like food, music, design, art and beauty. These individuals, depending on their audience engagement, can charge anywhere between $0.05 to $1 a follower. Which means you can spend anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 on a single or a series of posts just to access their followers.

Micro Influencers: The bargain influencers are micro influencers. They are likely who you’d like to work with most if you’re a new brand or businesses. These influencers tend to have MORE engaged audiences and typically have a hyper niche interest audience such as PC gamers, cruelty-free makeup lovers, sports team fanatics or even vegan foodies. This usually means they have a more trusting audience and higher conversion rates. This could lead to better return on investment for marketing. These types of influencers have roughly 10,000 followers. Some influencers may accept free products or services if it’s something worth their wild. However, typically they charge anywhere between $0.01 to $0.50 a follower which can be between a couple hundred to a couple thousand for a single or series of posts on their feed.

Now that we understand influencers a little better, let’s talk about my favorite users/followers - advocates.

Advocates: These are people who mirror influencers by hyping up your brand but for FREE. These are people who tend to like your services, products or business so much that they behave like influencers without being paid or even asked to. They share your content, write great reviews, tell their friends/followers about you and promote you positively. 

True advocates are hard to come by but creating advocates is pretty simple. Here are some tips on how to create brand advocates: 

•  Engage with your customers and invite them to say good things through surveys and asking them to “share our post”. You’d be surprised how often people will share something if they’re simply asked to.

• Run contests or fun promotions with requirements to tag their friends or share a post. This gets your content in front their followers.

• Remember to tag your customers in content that you share such as consultations or using products/services. You promote them, they promote you. This works really well with photographers, stylists and other intimate service professionals.

• Share customer testimonies or tagged content. This is the “rewarding good behavior” method and they typically will continue to tag you in content with the hopes of you featuring them. This is very easy to do as restaurants or an experience based business.

Make sure to keep your advocates happy. The best advocates move down the marketing funnel and turn into brand allies. Allies are even better than advocates! More on that at a later time. That’s it for this week.