4 Types of Influencers in 2024 and How to Choose the Best Influencers

As influencer marketing keeps growing, more businesses are deciding to create their first campaigns. According to Business Insider, by 2024 the influencer marketing industry is expected to become a $15 billion industry.

With that in mind, there is an opportunity for brands to launch a sponsored collaboration with an influencer. This will increase your brand awareness, visibility, traffic and sales.

However, in order to have a successful campaign, there are different steps to take into account. In this article, you will find the types of influencers that exist and how to make sure you choose the right collaborator.

4 Types of Influencers: from Nano Influencers to Celebrities

As part of the discovery of influencers, you will see that each content creator posts unique content and has their own audience.

This is what makes this industry so different from traditional marketing. The main differentiating factor when talking about influencers, is the category they are thought to be in, considering their number of followers:

1. Nano Influencers

Those influencers that range from 1K to 5K followers. They are new to this business and they are growing an audience that is interested in their content.

These types of influencers work if you have a local business, or if your product is for a very specific audience.

If the nano influencer has the same audience as your product, your brand will be shown to the right people. These types of influencers don’t create posts that are too retouched or “perfect” as other types of influencers, but they have credibility.

Furthermore, if you have a low budget campaign, these influencers have cost per post fees that are not expensive. In fact, many times you might just send your product and there will not need to be any monetary compensation.

The cons of collaborating with them is that they don’t have high engagement rates or reach, due to the low number of followers that they have. Also, this is not their main job, so they probably don’t have as much time or resources to create an attractive post as micro influencers do.

2. Micro Influencers

Micro influencers are always a great resource because they have from 5K to 50K followers.  They have a very committed audience and they are experts on their field.

There are Beauty, Travel, Fitness or Lifestyle micro influencers that will be able to show your products or services to their audience and increase the traffic to your website or to your profile.

These types of content creators have high engagement rates because their audience trusts the type of content and brands that they sponsor. Since they have fewer followers than top influencers, they are able to communicate with them and are very active about responding to comments on social media.

If you are a brand or business that is starting in this industry, they are the type of influencers that might be a good option for your campaign.

The budget for them is usually lower than top influencers and sometimes you just need to send them products so they can try them and create a review.

The brand exposure when working with micro influencers is very successful. They have an audience that is committed to watching and checking the posts of the influencer and they trust their opinions, which turns into sales for the sponsored product.

Make sure your audience is active on social media channels, such as Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter and then select micro-influencers who are the best fit for your product.

Another important tip to take into account is analyzing their engagement with several influencers of the same range of followers. This way you will be able to know the real impact that they have with their audience. This analysis should be done on the latest posts of the influencer, so the metric is as up to date as possible.

As you can see in the following graph, this micro influencer has a high engagement compared to other micro influencers, so they are a suitable option.

This metric and many more can be found through an influencer marketing platform, which can help you find and analyze influencers in seconds.

3.Mid-tier Influencers

Those influencers have between 50K to 500K followers. They have high social media status and they are continuously collaborating with industry top brands.

For example, in Beauty, top influencers work with Sephora, L’Oréal, etc. Sometimes, these influencers were micro-influencers in the past and their connection with their audience made them top influencers.

Their voices are powerful in terms of advertising and they can grow a brand’s value with just a few posts. As mid-tier influencers, they are very natural when it comes to sharing a message and their followers trust them.

Performing a collaboration together might require a higher budget than collaborating with micro influencers, but it can leverage the impact of your campaign.

Furthermore, if you work with several mid-tier influencers, depending on the channel you are interested in, you will be able to get more loyal customers than with other strategies.

4. Mega Influencers

From 500K followers up. These are considered celebrities in their field. They are usually very busy working on different collaborations and the cost per post is much higher than any other type of influencer.

It is important to sign a contract with them, since there might be some legal aspects that need to be covered.

When working with these influencers, brands should be aware that they might be working on several projects at the same time and that can delay the time of your campaign launch.

As these influencers have a large follower base, the message is shared with millions of people all over the world. If your brand is located in several countries, you can definitely collaborate with them.

Sometimes, people don’t believe in their collaborations because they are very frequent and don’t look natural.

The brand and sales impact for these types of collaborations is usually very rapid, but analyzing their audience to convert them into loyal customers might be a challenge since they are very different.

How to Choose the Best Influencer for a Campaign

Once you know the types of influencers there are, it is time to choose the best fit for your goals. There are different aspects that should be considered when choosing them, as mentioned before, an increase of sales does not only happen with mega influencers.

To choose an influencer you should consider:

• Campaign goals: What do you want to reach with the campaign? Select a couple of goals that you want to obtain after the campaign. Once the team knows these goals, select metrics that will determine the success of your campaign. Stick to the most important goals and have a time frame for when you want to reach them.

• Channel: Where do you want the collaboration to be? Instagram is the most powerful channel for influencer marketing, but it depends on your product or service. Some products might have a higher chance to be visible if you choose a specific channel. Also, analyze your audience to understand what types of channels they are usually using. As a brand, you might think Twitter might be a good social media channel, but if your audience doesn’t use it, it won’t make sense to invest time and money there.

• Audience of your product: Who is your buyer persona? Analyze who is your most frequent customer and find influencers that have a similar audience. Make sure the influencer is an expert or has collaborated with brands of the same field, that way you know that their audience is aligned with yours. This is not something that you can see by checking their Instagram profiles, so you need to ask for this information or use influencer analytics software that has this information available.

Conclusion

This year seems to be a good year to do influencer marketing. New social media channels are popping up and brands and businesses want to increase their visibility with content creators.

Each type of influencer has its own characteristics, micro-influencers being the ones who have a higher engagement compared to mid-tier influencers, nano influencers, and even mega influencers.

Other times, more popular influencers like mega influencers are able to leverage the visibility of a brand very rapidly and reach a niche audience. In order to choose the best influencer for your campaign, each business needs to analyze their goals, audience, and channels.