Rev & Reach Episode 25 Transcript
How Tiny Influencers Beat Big Ad Budgets

00:07
Hello. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach from PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC. We create this podcast to share behind the curtain what we do as a digital marketing agency to help our clients get ROI out of their social media, websites, emails and social advertising.

So today what I want to talk about is your best sales people aren’t on your payroll: The Small Business Guide to Micro Influencers. If you are a small business, you need to know about micro influencers, and that’s where serious marketing dollars are moving in 2026, and here’s why. Because micro influencers are in your community. They’re in your neighborhood. Everybody knows them. They are affordable as far as influencers go, and they can really make a difference in your bottom line and bring you new customers.

01:10
So I would ask you, what if your best marketing asset is one of your customers that has 4,000 Instagram followers and she just loves you to pieces? She could be your best sales rep. And I tell you, I don’t know about you, but I buy things online all the time. I cook from things that I see on reels. I’ll see something on reels and go that looks really good, and I’ll start writing down what they’re doing so I can make it for dinner that night.

A lot of us are influenced by the things we see online. In particular, our local influencers often tell us about our local businesses. They’ll go to a restaurant and eat everything there, or they’ll go to a really small antique store, or they’ll go to the pet store. So they’re out in your community engaging with your customers, and they have an audience that you can buy access to. That’s basically what you’re doing. You’re buying access to that influencer’s audience. So forget what you think influencer marketing is. It’s not the Kardashians. It doesn’t have to cost $50,000.

02:16
But micro influencers — and they define a micro influencer as someone who has a following of between 1,000 and 100,000 people — they often have super engaged communities, and their recommendations feel like they’re coming from a trusted friend, so people believe them.

So the engagement math on that is micro influencers see engagement rates of five to ten percent. Creators, larger creators, their engagement may only be one to two percent, like the Kardashian people, the people that are really expensive. So if you’re paying, you’re paying for attention. You want to pay the micro influencers in your community to deliver that high engagement and that really nice authentic connection.

03:05
So here’s what small businesses sometimes get wrong in working with influencers. A lot of times a small business coming into a relationship will have their own preconceived ideas about what that means, and they will look at the big follower counts. “Well, you only have 4,000 followers. You only have 5,000 followers.”

Instead of looking at the fact that that young woman that runs all over town and you know her people, her tribe, follows her as she lives her life and goes to restaurants and goes shopping and dances with her grandmother, is a perfect fit for your audience. It’s really more important that that influencer fits your audience than it is that they have huge follower counts. Because I got to tell you, the follower counts are great, but I would take someone who had 4,000 really engaged followers over someone who had 25,000 that were not so engaged. So the micro influencers are really something to consider.

04:05
A lot of times small businesses will use an influencer and then say, “Well, that didn’t work.” The influencer’s audience may need to see you more than one time to actually create results. They used to say in television advertising that your audience would need to see your commercial five times before they would even remember it.

Now social media is different. It’s a lot more personal, and we don’t get up and go get our drinks and go to the bathroom when the commercials are being shown. We’re usually scrolling by. But if you don’t do more than one post, then you don’t know if it’s going to work. You have to do something strategic. You have to do something that is an investment that is going to be more than just a one hit wonder, because it won’t work. I mean, I can just tell you that right now. So when you say “I did one post and it didn’t work,” you’re right. If you do one post, it won’t work.

05:00
So the other thing is, a lot of businesses think that the influencer is working for them, and that they can tell the influencer what to say and how to say it. Well, they can’t. If you truly want to get the best results from an influencer, you’ll pick somebody who is in your community, your company will do its best providing the service, and then you’ll let them tell the truth.

If you don’t let them tell the truth, it won’t be authentic, it won’t be effective, and most influencers won’t bother because they don’t want to be told by everybody that they work with exactly how to do what they do, because that really degrades their credibility. They should tell you the good, the good, the bad and the ugly. Make sure your business is able to handle business from influencers before you hire one. If you’ve got weak points with your staff, you’ve got people that aren’t going to be able to perform at a level that the influencer will be able to talk positively about, don’t get the influencer on payroll until you have all those bugs worked out.

07:00
Your employees and loyal customers bring an unmatched level of authenticity. They know your company, their experiences are firsthand, and they are genuinely advocating for your organization. So it looks a lot less like a sponsored promotion, and it’s a lot more like something that’s authentically true from a neighbor you know, somebody in your community.

So how do you actually start that engagement? First things first, find creators who are already talking about your niche or your neighborhood. Look for the quality of their comments. Look for a local audience. Watch 10 or 15 of their reels. See what happens. Does the audience engage with them? Do they have a lot of comments? Do they speak in a way that you would be happy to have your product in their feed?

If so, great. And what I would do is when you do a pilot with three different creators, you’re going to see three different results. I would highly recommend it. Again, it’s an investment — three creators, 30 days.

08:17
You tell them what to deliver, whether it’s a post, two videos, three stories, and then you have to track it. You have to track what the influencer does. That could mean they get their own link for placing orders so that they can share that with their audience, and all the sales from that link you know came from them. It could be that it’s a coupon, and there’s three different coupons and each one gets their own coupon.

And it’s not a big budget experience. It really doesn’t have to be a huge budget to make this happen. But watch what happens in those three creators, 30 days of posting, and you will learn so much.

09:03
And I’ll give you an example. There’s an organization called Olipop and they have a huge creator program. They started it with $36 product samples and a 10% performance commission for the influencers, and now that drives 12% of their total sales on an ongoing basis, and the campaign actually brought a 982% ROI. That is crazy.

You can do it with a product sample that you send to that person, a free coupon, an offer to come in and have dinner, those kinds of things so that you get to know the influencers.

09:42
Invite them in for a free dinner. Just say, “I’d like to sit down with you, kind of learn what you do, take a look at your work, hear from you what you think you could do for us.” Do that with three different creators and then see what happens. Do a pilot and measure that ROI. You have to measure the ROI because you have to know if influencer campaigns are going to work for you. If you don’t measure it, you won’t know if it did or didn’t.

But the upside of that too is you can actually negotiate part of the agreement that you get to take the creator content and share it on your social media and in your ads. So it gives you more of what we call UGC, user generated content, which looks like it’s created by a consumer, not the brand. And people love UGC. They love to see what other people are doing and think, “Oh look, she’s making her own bracelet at this really cool store downtown. Let’s go.”

10:54
So make sure this is something that’s on your marketing radar. I’ve got a challenge for you as we wrap up this episode. Identify one happy customer or one local creator influencer this week and send them a direct message or a free product and see what happens. Make it a cool coupon, put it in a fancy envelope, mail it off to your customer or that creator, or DM them a graphic that has that on there. That’s your pilot.

Have them in. Just say you’d like to give them a free dinner and spend some time talking with them. Then watch what shows up on that influencer’s social feed related to your business. That will help you understand if they’re going to be a good fit. Some of them won’t be. I’m going to tell you right now some of them will not be good fits.

11:50
There are a lot of influencers out there right now that think you should pay them thousands and thousands of dollars, and a lot of them aren’t proven. So as you’re looking at who you’re going to hire, even a micro influencer, look for them to be paying attention to the data. Make sure what they give you isn’t just “look at my pretty content,” but “I did this for this restaurant and they got a 20% bump in sales.” So remember, trust sells better than reach ever will, and micro influencers are a really great way to build trust.

So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Again I’m Lori Jo Vest with PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC and you are listening to Rev & Reach. You can find us on all of your favorite podcast channels as well as YouTube. If you are watching on YouTube please subscribe, give us a like, and help us spread the word about how to get marketing ROI from your digital initiatives. Thanks so much, I’ll see you again soon.