FMCG Micro-Influencer Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Business

On the surface, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) may not appear an obvious choice for influencer marketing. Most manufacturers and retailers of products like milk, bread, fast foods, and personal care products seem to spend a fortune on television advertising and other forms of traditional media. Yet, FMCG is one of the fastest growing market segments using influencer marketing, with an increase in partnerships with micro-influencers in particular. The sector increased its influencer marketing spending by more than 62% in 2021, according to Zefmo. This post will look at some FMCG micro-influencer marketing tactics your brand can use, particularly if you want to reach some niche audiences.

FMCG Micro-Influencer Marketing Tactics:

What's Special About FMCG and Micro-Influencers?

Fast-moving consumer goods, aka consumer packaged goods, are those everyday products that sell regularly and are generally relatively affordable. Many are perishable and have a short shelf life. You might think these are not particularly suitable for influencer marketing, which most people consider best for sectors like fashion, beauty, and homeware. Yet many brands now recognize that influencer marketing can do much for them, even for everyday FMCG items.

According to Kroll's Face Value Report, more than one in 10 marketers at FMCG companies gained  $1.1-$5 million from their most successful influencer campaign. Additionally, Kroll found that FMCG companies predominately work with micro-influencers (41%) and mid-tier influencers (34%).

We have regularly written about the benefits of working with micro-influencers. As we noted in 5 Reasons Your Brand Should be Working With Micro-Influencers, these influencers have enough experience to create high-quality, professional content. Yet, they're still in a stage of growth that allows for maintaining a tight-knit and highly engaged community. They tend to have loyal audiences, giving them great engagement rates. Many micro-influencers are hyper-local, meaning they can communicate well with a specific target audience that may otherwise be difficult for an FMCG brand to reach. Micro-influencers allow you to reach very specific niche audiences. For example, if you release a new vegan food line, you will find micro-influencers with audiences sympathetic to and most likely to benefit from buying your product.

Unlike celebrities and macro-influencers, micro-influencers are comparatively cheap for companies. Sure, many FMCG companies tend to be sizable, even serving communities sometimes, and potentially have generous marketing budgets. But micro-influencers are generally cheap enough that you can partner with large numbers for a campaign, potentially spreading your budget further and reaching a broader spread of potential customers.

FMCG Micro-Influencer Marketing Tactics and Strategies to Consider

As we have seen, if you are a brand selling fast-moving consumer goods, you will benefit from including influencer marketing with micro-influencers in your marketing mix. You need to ask yourself how micro-influencers can help you best meet your marketing goals. This section will look at some suitable influencer marketing strategies and tactics you can use when partnering with micro-influencers to promote your products.

1. Identify Your Marketing Goals

There is little point in carrying out influencer marketing, or indeed any marketing if you haven't set clear SMART goals for your campaign. As we wrote in 9 Influencer Marketing Best Practices To Increase Your ROI, you need a stated reason for every campaign, which you can break down into actionable, measurable goals. And your goals don't necessarily have to be to sell more products. You might choose to use micro-influencers for influencer marketing more for brand awareness and recognition. Just because you sell FMCG doesn't mean that everybody knows of your brand, particularly if you have sizable competitors with a larger market share.

If you haven't already done so, you must establish who the target audience is for your influencer marketing. Even if you sell a popular product type, like bread or soda, there is little value in trying to market to everybody. 

Your goals will impact your selection of influencers. For example, suppose you aim to gain new customers as part of your campaign. In that case, it makes sense to work with new influencers (and their audiences) with whom you don't already have a relationship rather than partnering with influencers you have worked with previously. If you wish to increase your sales as a result of the campaign, you must select influencers who appeal to the types of people who like and buy your product.

2. Select Micro-Influencers Who Are Experts in Their Niche

Too many people falsely equate influencers with celebrities. For example, you sometimes read reports of brands dissatisfied with the results of their campaigns. However, when you inspect closely, you see that the brand chose to work with somebody with a famous name who was irrelevant to the product they were trying to market. Therefore, you must pick influencers whose brand aligns with yours.

For example, if sustainability is vital to your product image, select influencers who display clean-green credentials and don't make posts of themselves doing harmful things to the environment. Ideally, the influencers should already be talking about environmental issues, so any posts they make on your behalf don't stick out as being different from the rest of their content.

The followers of influencers who are subject specialists respect the views and recommendations of these influencers. If the influencer recommends your FMCG, their followers will likely buy the product to see how well it suits them. In the case of celebrities and macro-influencers, many followers only take a casual interest in the influencer's posts and are unlikely to follow through with any of their recommendations.

Sometimes with FMCG products, you might struggle to narrow your niche, as you sell relatively generic products to a broad audience. In that case, go back to your goals. Specifically, who is this campaign targeting? Then, look for influencers who appeal to that audience, ignoring the people you already appeal to.

3. Consider Using an influencer Platform or Agency 

Many FMCG companies entrust most of their everyday marketing to a marketing agency. If that's your norm, then there is no reason to change this with your influencer marketing. There are many specialist influencer marketing agencies who you can entrust to set up and manage your campaign. In addition, they will likely know suitable micro-influencers who could be ideal for your campaign.

Many firms, however, set up their influencer marketing campaigns in-house. So although you can discover and connect with influencers organically, this can be particularly difficult if you haven't kept up-to-date with the social thought leaders in your niche. Moreover, influencers can be busy people, and even if you know the leading micro-influencers to target, you may struggle to make contact with them.

This is where influencer marketing platforms come in handy. These are tools you can use to assist you at various stages of the influencer marketing journey. Depending on your selected platform, they can help you with influencer search and discovery, content amplification, influencer relationship management, campaign management, in-depth analytics, and more.

The influencer search and discovery function can be beneficial when trying to find the best micro-influencers in your niche to meet your marketing goals. And many of the platforms also make it easier to communicate with influencers, improving your chances of having them agree to partner with you.

4. Focus on Engagement Stats Over Follower Numbers

Micro-influencers have small audiences when you compare them with celebrities and other "big name" accounts – that's why we call them micro-influencers. But what they lack in follower numbers, they more than make up for with their ability to influence their followers. This is because the micro in their name refers to their following size, not their level of influence. 

There is a consistent pattern across all social networks and platforms. The more followers you have, the less engagement you have with them. Engagement rates for micro-influencers are considerably higher than for macro-influencers. And the higher an influencer's engagement rate, the more significant the impact they have on their audience.

For example, the average engagement rate overall on Instagram is 4.7%, i.e., for every 100 posts you make, people will interact (like, share, or comment) 4.7 times on average. The average brand engagement rate is just 1.9%, making it difficult for you to reach potential customers with your company account. Influencer accounts with 1,000 or fewer followers have an above-average engagement rate on Instagram of 8%, yet accounts with more than 100K followers average only 1.7% engagement on Instagram.

5. Spread the Load

Micro-influencers charge considerably less than their more famous brethren do. As a result, brands take much less risk when aligning themselves with a particular micro-influencer. Sure, the partnership might not work out as well as you had hoped, but you haven't lost much.

According to Kroll, many marketers at FMCG companies spread their spending across dozens of influencers; 45% of respondents stated they usually work with 51-100 micro-influencers, and 16% said they work with 101-200 influencers at any given time. Numbers varied depending on where you are based, however. For example, the average FMCG marketer in France works with 109 influencers, dropping to 71 influencers in the USA and 66 in the UK.

By working with multiple micro-influencers, FMCG companies are effectively spreading their risk and ensuring that they "don't put all their eggs in one basket." 

6. Use Analytics to Monitor Your Return on Investment

There is little point in setting clear goals for your FMCG micro-influencer campaign if you aren't going to analyze how well your influencers perform. Remember, the M in SMART goals stands for "measurable," so you should measure the success of your campaign as it progresses.

How you measure your ROI will very much depend on what you set as your goal. Remember, an ROI doesn't necessarily have to be a monetary figure. It measures how successful you have been at meeting your goals

You might have chosen to use micro-influencers to increase the diversity of your target market. In that case, you need to find some way to measure "increase the diversity." How will you know if your micro-influencer campaign has succeeded or not?

You might have set your influencers to increase the number of people who visit your company website. In that case, you will need to look at your Google Analytics (or other website analytics software) to see if you have increased website visitors during the campaign period.

Alternatively, you may have set a goal to increase online sales as a percentage of your overall turnover. In that case, your essential metrics will likely relate to sales made at your eCommerce store or perhaps Amazon page. You will often be able to determine this by looking at where store visitors originate in your eCommerce store analytics and whether customers have used special influencer links you have allocated.

7. If You Target a Young Audience, Partner with TikTok Influencers

If you're older than 30, you might not understand the allure of TikTok. However, you are likely to have at least heard of the platform, even if you don't realize its massive impact on younger generations. 

TikTok is now the most downloaded social app globally, so it can no longer be considered niche. It has more than 1 billion active users, many of whom could be your potential customers. It thrives on user-generated content and has many micro-influencers who understand how to make content that attracts attention. 

Paying for TikTok ads can be costly and challenging if you don't understand the platform. However, working with micro-influencers to make short-form videos can be viable, particularly if you target a relatively young clientele. 

The most important lesson from TikTok is to avoid coming across as salesy. TikTok users expect to be entertained, not lectured to. 34% of TikTok users claim to have purchased products because of influencers; many of these will have been fast-moving consumer goods. Red Bull understands the value of TikTok micro-influencers. Their influencer marketing on the platform makes no apparent effort to sell the benefits of Red Bull to you. The energy drink merely becomes a prop in a comedy video, yet benefits from viewer attention.

About the Author

Werner Geyser

Writer

With over 15 years in content marketing, Werner founded Influencer Marketing Hub in 2016. He successfully grew the platform to attract 5 million monthly visitors, making it a key site for brand marketers globally. His efforts led to the company's acquisition in 2020. Additionally, Werner's expertise has been recognized by major marketing and tech publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, BBC and Wired.