I reject this whole line of thinking. There are all these pundits out there and articles that'll be like, "Micro-influencers are so much better. Nano-influencers are better. Mid-tier, macros are better." At Fohr, we don't make money on clickbaity stupid fucking marketing articles. We don't have that narrow of a view of when and how you should deploy an influencer.

First, let's just say influencer selection for us. We're running 90 of these campaigns this week for our clients. The influencers that we select are the manifestation of all of our strategy. The way we look at it, we say, "What are this brand's challenges? How are we going to solve those problems? What is the brief going to be? What's the concept? We start with like an influential idea. What's the thing that is going to stick in people's brains? How am I going to attach somebody's story to this idea and make sure it integrates with the brand and what that brand does." It is actually quite complex.

All of that is manifested in who you pick. Whether it is a micro or macro, that is about scale and how many people you want to reach and what your budgets are. For us, when people are like, "Micro-influencers perform better than macro-influencers," I know that that person is full of shit because there is no-- Are engagement rates different from micro and macro-influencers? Yes. Engagement rates don't really matter on their own. Is reach better for micro-influencers? Of course, it is because Instagram is assuming for someone with 3,000-5,000 followers that that person knows a lot of those people, has at least some sort of relationship with those followers, and so they're more likely to serve that content to those followers.

The reach numbers are better because the scale is so much lower. That doesn't mean they perform better. Two micro-influencers isn't going to do shit for your brand. Just like one big macro influencer posting isn't going to do shit for your brand. You need robust strategies that are just not only influencers but everything. What are you doing on Facebook? Ads. What are you doing on Instagram? Ads. What are you doing on your website? What's your email strategy? What's your out-of-home strategy? Are you doing TV? Are you doing radio?

What is your fucking product? Is it any good? Are people talking about it? Do they like it? What's your pricing? All of these things determine what is successful. Saying a micro-influencer is better than macro-influencer is idiotic. For us, we look at a few things. We look at all of that hard data, your reach, your engagement, your saves, your swipe ups, how much sales you did. How many DMs you got. Every single piece of data, we get it, we rank it, dependent on the brand's KPIs. Then we look at how you did across all the other influencers in that campaign.

We create benchmarks for that. Then we look at how much we paid you. We're able to come out with a value per dollar number that allows us to look at a person with 10,000 followers or 5 million followers and say for each dollar that we spent on this person, how much value did we get? Then we're able to score them and to look at it in a totally unbiased way and figure out who is actually moving the needle. Sometimes we find out shit. If we had 100 of these micro-influencers performing at this level, it's going to do great.

Let's do that for the next campaign. Sometimes we find out actually because as macro-influencers, as the following gets bigger, you pay less for each additional follower as far as advertising goes. The price per eyeball goes down as the follower rate goes up that sometimes it makes a lot more sense to use macros. Be wary of anyone saying that this is concretely 100% better than this because that person doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.