 Hey everybody, what's going on? It's your man, Kory. Welcome to The Digital Dash, where I've been giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. And for those of you who don't know who I am, I'm a digital marketer myself. I specialize in helping artists get their songs heard through platforms like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, and a bunch of others. So today what I want to talk to you guys about is micro influencers. Where are they, why they matter, and why you should be reaching out to them and figuring out how you can utilize them in your content and song marketing strategies. Now by now, I know it's no secret that influencer marketing has become the go-to thing for content marketers. Instagram alone has created over a billion dollar industry just by relying on these influencers to market stuff outside of you guys, these types of contents. Now I'm sure that when you think of influencers, you tend to think of accounts with insane amounts of followers, but with insane amounts of followers comes an insane price tag. And micro influencers are a cheaper alternative to working with these mega influencers, and they are much more effective in getting your content out there in some cases. I'm here to fight my case for why you guys should be using micro influencers in your next marketing strategy. So what are micro influencers? Well guys, they're exactly what the name sounds like. They're pretty much influencers who have a much smaller fan base, but they tend to be a lot more engaged with the contents that the influencers are posting. Now the number that specifies a micro influencer tends to change from market to marketer. I tend to think of it as an account or a person with a thousand followers to about 50,000 and so. Now I know what you're thinking. Why would I want to go after the smaller account instead of these accounts with millions and millions of followers? Well, contrary to popular belief, most of the times these micro influencer accounts tend to be a lot more engaged than the bigger influencers. Researchers have actually shown that the bigger an account gets, the more the engagement actually starts to fall. This typically starts to happen around 100,000 followers with their engagement and start to plateau. And like I said, it lessens the bigger that the account gets. The reason this may be is that you guys may start to kind of see these larger influencers as more like of marketers. Whereas micro influencers are seen by their audience as kind of like a buddy buddy or a pal. And they tend to trust them more because of the fact that they see that they don't have that many followers. So it's more like an everyday person recommending something to you as opposed to someone that you figure probably got paid to push this content to you. Because of this perceived effect, micro influencers tend to get around a 60% higher engagement rate than most of these mega influencers. So like I said, even though it's a smaller fan base or a smaller like audience pool, it's a much more deeply engaged audience pool that you'll be reaching into. Now, another reason that you should consider working with micro influencers is they tend to be a lot cheaper than their mega influencer counterparts. Like I said earlier, an insane amount of followers does come with an insane price tag. I was recently talking to an influencer page on Instagram the other day and true story, he wanted $6,000 for a 24 hour post, $10,000 for a permanent post on his page. That's a crazy amount of money that I'm sure that most of you don't have or aren't willing to spend. Now, as you can see, most of these micro influencers are charging well below that type of money, giving you a better bang for your buck when you think of the fact that they tend to have these deeper engaged fan bases anyway. Now, I'm sure you're wondering or asking yourself, but how, Kory, how do I find these micro influencers so that I can reach out to them and get something going? Well, the beauty of it is micro influencers exist on every single platform. It pretty much boils down to knowing your audience so that you have a direction to move in and then just putting a little elbow grease into your search. As a matter of fact, I want to show you guys how I'm going about finding micro influencers on YouTube. All right, guys. So here we are in YouTube. I'm on the desktop version. You can use the mobile app. I just prefer to do it on my laptop because I do it faster that way. Now, one of the main ways that you'll use to find these YouTube channels is by pretty much keyword searching. This ties back into knowing your audience and knowing what artists you kind of relate to so that you're not just blind searching on the platform. If you haven't checked out that video already, go ahead and do so just so you can start to figure out where you're going to start looking and which YouTubers make the most sense for you. So what you'll want to do, like I said, is keyword search by typing in artists that relate to you or who have fan bases that you're trying to kind of poach away and find channels and YouTubers that are talking about them or making content centered around them in some type of way. So let's use ski mask to slump God, for our example. So what you'll want to do is type in ski mask to slump God and this will bring up every single page just talking about him or making content centered around him in some type of way. So here you have his video on Lyric Eliminate. You have a post about him on R Irving Central, which is a YouTube channel that pretty much like post music and music news and stuff like that. So like I said, you'll want to just kind of scroll and dig through using every ounce of your patience to go through these channels and find the ones that are more likely to get back to you or may have prices that fit within your budget. So let's just do a little digging. Let's try to find somebody. That's fine. Okay, let's check this guy out. Zay Rashad Reactions. Yes, 16 hours ago, almost 5,000 views. Okay, so this guy has 55,000 subscribers. So he falls within the range for a micro influencer. So what you want to do is look at his videos first, see what types of views he's getting, see what types of content he's posting about. So it looks like this guy pretty much centers his channels around doing reaction videos to different rappers, music videos and songs and whatnot. These are actually the perfect types of channels to get you a video out there and start to build like these organic listeners around your songs and your music videos who come from these types of channels. A little tip, sometimes typing in reaction after the artist that you're looking for helps you find these YouTubers the most as reaction videos are one of the like source content that YouTubers rely on when they need it, especially music YouTubers when they need to rely on like putting something up. And this guy does specialize in posting about artists or smaller artists, at least they're artists I've never personally heard of. Like I've never heard of Lil Chicken or Glock 9 or Blackpink and he's actually getting pretty good numbers. So once you've kind of looked at what he has or what he's gotten, what you would just want to do is come to his about section and see if he has some kind of contact information, maybe an email. And it looks like this guy doesn't, but he does have his Instagram and his Facebook and his Twitter listed. So that means he is open to being reached out to and probably open to working with you types of guys. So it would just be a matter of reaching out to him going, hey, I found you a channel on YouTube. I like the stuff you're doing. I want to know if maybe we could work out a way that you could do a reaction video to my video or reaction video to my song. And then you will want to make sure that the price that they're charging makes sense for the engagement that they're getting. I can't really give you like a normal price, as every YouTuber genuinely just does charge like what they think their channel is worth. And the good thing about YouTube is there are literally channels about any and everything. So you don't have to stick specifically to just music YouTubers. Another way to get your songs out there is to kind of dip into these different niches by getting your songs onto these other channels and working with the content that they have. So let's try to find one within another niche. Let's look for a gaming channels. Gaming channels are pretty big on YouTube and they usually work well with music artists with promotions and stuff like that. So let's just go here and type in gaming channels. A way to kind of make this a little easier is to come to the filter section and filter everything out by view count. Now this is going to bring up the most watched channels first of course. So all you would need to do is just scroll through and find the smaller accounts and figure out a way to contact them. So let's find one right now. Okay, here's one right here. Protoscope. Let's check out Protoscope. So Protoscope has 30,000. Let's make sure he's active. Okay, his last video was three days ago. So he's a pretty active YouTuber. He's not getting insane numbers, but he is still doing numbers. So for someone like this, it'll pretty much be the same thing. You would just want to find their contact information, hit them up and figure out a way that you guys could work together. With a channel like this, you probably would be better off just asking them, hey, can I have my song posted on your channel maybe at the beginning or the end or have it playing underneath your audio while you're speaking stuff and you just stole my information in the bio and we work that way or maybe you could work out something a little more in depth. It really does depend on you and the YouTuber. Yeah guys, so that's pretty much what you would want to do. Like I said, this does work for any channel within any niche. You could work with makeup artists. You can work with fashion stylists, food YouTubers, literally anything. You guys know how YouTube is. There's literally any and everything on YouTube and a lot of these people are open to working with you. You just have to find them, make sure that they fit within your budget and then figure out how you can make content or your content makes sense with their channel and with their posting. So I hope that helps you guys out with finding YouTube channels. Good luck in your search. So like I said, finding these influences on these platforms really just boils down to knowing your audience, giving yourself a direction that you can move in so you're not blind searching and then just learning how to navigate these different platforms like whether it be Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it be. If you know how to find most of these mega influences, a little pro tip. A lot of times these micro influencers are hanging around in the comment sections of these guys as they're trying to grow their audiences as well. So they're not hard to find. You just got to do a little digging. Now, once you've found these micro influencers, what you'll want to do is evaluate them. Make sure that the money that they're charging is worth it for what kinds of engagement that they have. And then you want to figure out how you're going to use these guys. This comes down to what exactly types of content that you're trying to push and how creative you guys want to get. Maybe you want to hit up a food YouTuber and say, Hey, I see the types of stuff that you're making. I like the meals that you're making. How about you use one of my songs in your next video? And we work together that way. Maybe you hit up a Twitter and say, Hey, let's do a listening session during your next live stream. Maybe you hit up an Instagram meme account and say, Hey, I'm going to put my song under this viral video and we're going to work together to push it out that way. The possibilities are literally endless and really come down to what platform are you using and how creative you and the influencer want to get. Now, with all of that being said, guys, I want you all to seriously consider using micro influencers and your next marketing campaign or content dispersion strategies. They can be a very effective way of getting your content and your music out there all while building a very organic fan base. And the thing about it is you don't have to stick to just music influences. Like I was saying earlier, as long as you're willing to try to figure out how your content makes sense with the influencers content, you can really work within any type of niche. Now, if you feel like you're learning anything today, guys, please like and share this video, turn on those post notifications as well. I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything just because YouTube is being iffy. Once again, my name is Corey and I'll see y'all next time.