With the importance of social media, a new way of marketing has emerged when promoting a brand or a service. This way of marketing is typically called influencer marketing where customers rely on someone’s review regarding a product or service which lead generally to a buying decision. However, when a company plays the role of an intermediary that links the customers and providers, a marketplace to put it in another way, the function and visibility of the social media influencer differs.

What is a micro-influencer?

Small-scaled marketplaces will have to focus on a niche market before growing since they will not have the adequate budget to work with a top Instagram influencer. Since there is no specific statistic regarding the classification of influencer, we will use rough estimations. In fact, a micro-influencer generally possess between 1 000 and 100 000 followers, and actually, those with fewer followers tend to obtain higher engagements rates than those with a bigger audience. Hence working with a micro-influence will convert better due to a tighter relationship with their subscribers and because being a small channel owner judgments brings a feeling of sincerity and sympathy regarding follower’s opinion.

Can Micro-Influencer marketing really work for marketplace platforms?

It seems risky at first, but the answer is Yes! In fact, sometimes your micro-influencer expose extra services in order to promote other services, as Tommygas.com demonstrates. They work with macro (500K – 1M followers) and micro influencers but the only requirements are that they care about cars and car lovers. Additionally, their collaboration involves a renowned car vlogger micro-influencer with 90 000 followers, Salomon Drin, as well as the Californian car luxury micro-influencer Avi, who just passed 36K followers.

                                       Example of Instagram Car Micro-Influencer

You will note that both of these Instagram influencers speak to Tommygas’s main selling points: users want the best spare parts for their cars (custom wheels, covering, louder tailpipe) and they will never worry about leaving their cars in someone else’s hands.

How to choose the perfect car micro-influencer? 

Undoubtedly, if you seek to growth an automotive marketplace you must find an influencer that fits the domain of cars since your audience is defined in three categories: People who seek to buy a car, car lovers and car specialists.

Keeping that in mind, your perfect car influencer must check the following requirements:

• You should search a relevant car influencer where on his/her channels feed cars will the main theme. A follower of a car Instagram account will be hardly interested in beauty products. Since micro-influencers often focus on a narrow field, make sure his niche is relevant to your marketplace (for example luxury cars if you seek to promote and sell this kind of vehicles).
• Choose an influencer who interacts a lot with his social media account (likes, comments, and reposts) since the more channels he interacts with his audience the more exposure will get the marketplace. Which may provide a higher level of engagement.

How to find a relevant car-micro influencer?

Searching for a car micro-influencer, in general, would require a time-consuming process. Yet, finding a car micro-influencer would take less, since there are not millions of car social media channels that will fit your marketplace business model. But here are some advice in order to fasten the research process.

1. Use of hashtags

Your social media followers will use some hashtags in order to match with your product or service, therefore, an investigation is needed to find the most relevant channel that boosts already your brand. On the other hand, micro-influencer tagged themselves with the specific hashtag such “car vloggers” or “car influencers” which is a useful technique to facilitate the process.*

Using Hashtags as a User Generated Content tactic

2.  Google search

Thanks to its reputation, Google is known for its wide research scope hence you may surely find the appropriate vloggers or bloggers via this search engine. To help you, here are some car micro-influencer involved in the Instagram spectrum: James Walker (@mrjww) and Joel Beukers (@joelbeukers) as well as Seb Delanney (@sebdelanney).

How to use car micro-influencer to growth your marketplace?

1. Increase visibility through user-generated content

The main goal of marketplaces is about connecting people. In order to supply both providers and buyers, your influencer marketing campaign has to go viral which will lead to a maximum engagement.  The best way to do that is to encourage your followers as well as the influencer community (if you can) to create their own content about your marketplace. Such as the fashion retailer Old Navy who push its customers to create and share brand content through its #SayHi hashtag.

2. Power of Story Telling

The tactic of telling stories under an influencer marketing campaign engaged greater audiences by immerging followers into an adventure which make them feel unique for being part in this story. As an example, Morris and Bullen, two influencers known for travels, empowered the Land Rover Discovery by giving their followers a trip to Namibia.

  Example of a Story Telling Post on Instagram