How to Use Micro-influencers to Your Advantage With Christine Loredo

It’s a common misconception that influencer marketing is only effective if the influencers you work with have huge followings on social media. But that isn’t always the case. 

Smaller influencers — also known as micro-influencers — may not have millions of followers, but they often have higher engagement rates and are more accessible to companies with smaller budgets. 

Christine Loredo, President & COO of TiFiPay, knows this all too well. When she started looking for influencers to drive customer acquisition for her company’s bill management solution, her first stop was FinCon.

She found a number of established influencers with large social media audiences at FinCon, but the only way to engage with them was sponsorship. That was a large investment considering Christine’s budget. She needed to acquire customers at cost per acquisition instead.

So how did TiFiPay end up engaging with micro-influencers?

Christine experimented with a few pay-for-referral ad campaigns.

Rather than fork over the big bucks for sponsorships, Christine decided to try paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to drive customer acquisition. To incentivize users to share the promotion, she used a couple of pay-for-referral tactics.

First, users were able to win tickets to be entered into drawings for bill pay credits in the TiFiPay app. The more referrals a user gave, the more tickets they could win. Smaller drawings were held multiple times per week for $100 in credits, with a large drawing at the end of the month for $25,000 in credits. 

Then Christine added an instant-win component by awarding $5 in credits for each referral, no other conditions attached. While all of these campaigns drove action, Christine found that the instant gratification of $5 per referral far outperformed the others. 

Through these campaigns, micro-influencers found TiFiPay.

These pay-for-referral campaigns brought micro-influencers to Christine. And that makes sense — after all, every campaign incentivized participants to share the promotion with their networks. Although Christine had placed a cap on how many referrals a given user could have, some pushed the limit as far as they could. One user even went so far as to refer 172 people(!).

That’s when micro-influencers started contacting TiFiPay to ask if the cap could be lifted. And when Christine reached out to a few of them, they explained the work they did for other fintech companies to drive customer acquisition. 

Those conversations helped Christine understand both the power of collaborating with micro-influencers and the practical details of how such partnerships typically work. 

Finally, Christine tested campaigns with micro-influencer input — and invested more into them.

With the input gleaned from these micro-influencers, Christine was able to test new referral campaigns. Using what she learned from those tests, she shifted promotion dollars from media spend into the micro-influencer campaigns.

Not only did leveraging micro-influencers give Christine a growing waitlist of beta testers for TiFiPay’s app, but it also allowed her to test various customer acquisition mechanics to inform future promotions. 

Want to learn more? Listen to Christine’s full podcast episode, Understanding Your Target Market with Christine Loredo, on Scrappy Fintech Marketing.