Micro-Influencer Content: Tribe’s Founder Explains at CMA Digital Breakfast [VIDEO]

Who is the first person you may go to when looking for advice? For many people, it’s friends or family. This is the foundation that influencer marketing is set upon.

Jules Lund, the founder of Tribe, took this concept and revolutionized it. Tribe is a marketplace that connects brands with micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are very similar to influencers, except they have a much smaller following on social media. These are everyday people that have built intimate but highly engaged audiences about a particular passion or expertise (about 3,000 to 100,000 followers). Jules explains why this type of marketing is more effective, and how Tribe utilises it.

Word of Mouth Recommendations

In 2013, it became a trend for people to start ‘following’ strangers on social media. These people are not necessarily celebrities, which created a new type of influencer.

These people, in order to avoid only having advertising posts on their accounts, began increasing what they charged. However, the return on investment did not increase for the brands paying them.

Tribe flipped this concept, and instead of going to huge influencers, went to micro-influencers.

Influence Marketers are More Authentic

Micro influencers using Tribe actually purchase the products they promote. They submit their content to the brands without a guarantee of getting anything back. Tribe enables the influencer to go to the brand, instead of the other way around.

Customers (the micro-influencers) generate more engagement than people with over 100,000 influencers. The smaller the tribe, the greater the trust.

Jules says the ‘sweet spot’ for engagement is 3,000 to 100,000 followers. However, the group increasing in popularity is under 3,000 followers.

In the last 2 years, Tribe has worked with about 4,000 different campaigns and over 22,000 contributors. Tribe’s goal is to take the mass-marketing messages and make them personal. Consumers no longer want just relevancy in advertising, they want it personalised.

Companies that use this strategy include  Airbnb, Etsy, Uber, e-bay.

How Tribe Works:

The company makes a brief, which is then posted via Tribe. Micro-influencers read the brief, go out, and buy the product. They take a picture, make a post, set a price, and submit it to Tribe. The company can then look at all the responses to the brief in their inbox and approve/pay for whichever content they want. There is no charge to submit the brief. Brand safety is guaranteed, since the company has vetting privileges. Once purchased, the content can then be shared on Instagram/used in other advertisements.

‘Who better to create content customers love, than your consumers themselves.’

People-Powered Marketing

• Jules explains that the ROI is more on time-saving: you can cut campaigns that usually take 100 hours down to 10 hours.
• Brands need content more than ever. They need variety to appeal to a wide audience.
• Everyone is a content creator now.
• Technology is the enabler: the creative tools in a smartphone is going to start to rival creative agencies.

To learn more about Tribe and micro-influencer generated content, click here to download the Tribe app: https://www.tribegroup.co/

Follow Tribe on Instagram – @tribe, Twitter – @tribe, and on Facebook – @Tribe Influencer.