Ecommerce influencer marketing has evolved beyond a passing trend; it has become an integral marketing strategy with substantial impact. The sector is predicted to reach $24 billion by the end of 2024, with more than half of ecommerce firms allocating at least 20% of their marketing budget to social media influencers.
For your ecommerce venture, leveraging influencer marketing isn’t just beneficial—it’s imperative. Influencers, spanning bloggers, content creators, social media personalities, and icons on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, wield unparalleled potential to elevate your brand’s visibility and drive sales.
For those new to this realm or seeking to enhance existing programs, we’ll unpack actionable influencer marketing strategies to supercharge your ecommerce sales.
What Exactly Is Ecommerce Influencer Marketing?
At its core, influencer marketing taps into the power of thought leaders, influencers, or celebrities to amplify your products or services to a broader audience. These influencers boast substantial followings on social media and possess the ability to sway the decisions of their devoted fanbase.
Although influencer marketing’s digital roots are evident, businesses and ecommerce brands have long enlisted celebrities to bolster their products or services among their target demographics.
In today’s interconnected world, human beings are inherently social beings seeking social validation. In this digital landscape, influencer marketing stands as the modern counterpart to traditional word-of-mouth endorsements.
Consumers increasingly rely on individuals they trust, both online and offline, to guide their purchasing choices. Harnessing the potential of influencer marketing can significantly impact consumer decisions.
Step 1: Understanding Your Audience
To effectively engage influencers within your industry, it’s vital to grasp the landscape in which you operate. Clearly defining your niche and unique value proposition is essential groundwork. If these aspects aren’t crystal clear, take the time to establish your brand identity and core values before proceeding.
Consider various factors like the visual themes or social causes your brand aligns with; these will guide your selection of influencers later on.
Moreover, these brand values play a pivotal role in recognizing your current and potential audience. What principles resonate with your customers? Which brands or causes do they champion? Analyze your competitors to gain insights into their customer base, understanding what sets them apart.
Leverage analytics to unveil customer demographics: their average age, geographical locations, and interests beyond your product or service.
Delve deeper into non-customer segments who share similar interests. Identify distinctions between them and your existing customer base. This process should yield at least two distinct audience segments ripe for targeting through influencer partnerships.
Consider an example: an athleisure brand discovers its primary consumers are Gen Z residing in medium-sized cities. Further research might unveil their penchant for gaming and watching online game streams. Both these segments offer substantial potential for influencer engagement in your marketing strategy.
Understanding your audience lays the groundwork for targeting influencers in step two. The perfect influencer will either mirror your audience or be an integral part of it!
Step 2: Discovering Potential Influencers
In your realm, an influencer might already be championing your brand unwittingly. It’s plausible that some of your customers wield influence within their social circles or possess a following on social platforms.
Traditional word-of-mouth referrals remain a potent force in business growth. An easy entry point into influencer marketing involves incentivizing your existing clientele to refer friends or leave reviews. Employ marketing automation tools to prompt review requests post-purchase. Offer referral incentives like discount codes or exclusive features for clients sharing your brand.
Explore micro-influencers whose audience mirrors your own. Platforms such as Buzzsumo or NinjaOutreach facilitate the identification of influencers with a follower base ranging from 1,000 to 100,000. Prioritize those with high engagement rates or filter based on budget and industry specifics.
Target micro-influencers who already align with your brand. Tools like Upfluence Live Capture seamlessly integrate with ecommerce platforms, revealing customer size and engagement data for potential influencer identification.
While follower count matters, smaller accounts generally exhibit higher engagement rates, translating to increased social sales for ecommerce. However, on YouTube, accounts surpassing 100,000 subscribers tend to boast the highest engagement.
Don’t overlook collaborations with major influencers on any platform. Although their ROI may differ from smaller influencers, their vast audience could drive substantial social sales.
Beyond metrics like clicks and likes, assess the influencer’s relationship with their audience. Are followers loyal? How frequently is content posted? Consistent, high-quality content often correlates with a more engaged following.
Employing these tactics will furnish you with a comprehensive roster of potential influencers, laying the groundwork for the next phase of outreach and engagement.
Step 3: Engaging with Influencers
After pinpointing potential influencers, the next step is initiating contact.
Align your outreach approach with your brand values. For instance, if your brand emphasizes digital presence, prioritize online communication methods.
Direct messaging individual influencers on their preferred platforms, such as Instagram for Instagram influencers, is a straightforward method. Since influencers often engage with numerous messages, this approach can be effective.
If the influencers are also your customers, capitalize on this advantage by using additional contact details. Utilize emails or phone calls to delve deeper into the collaboration opportunity.
While direct outreach is suitable for smaller influencer programs, employing automation tools becomes essential when engaging with multiple influencers. Marketing automation software like Klaviyo streamlines the process by enabling you to email segmented groups of influencers, boosting response rates. Integration with platforms like Shopify facilitates automated customer emails post-purchase.
In cases where email contact details are unavailable, platforms like Upfluence streamline direct messaging across various social media channels within their interface.
Craft personalized outreach messages emphasizing why collaborating with the influencer benefits both parties. Highlight the specific reasons they align with your brand and what they stand to gain from the collaboration. Express gratitude if they are existing customers, acknowledging their loyalty.
Maintaining a clear, well-researched, and personalized approach significantly enhances the likelihood of successful influencer partnerships.
Step 4: Crafting Campaign Strategies
Developing a strategy for influencer collaborations is key to maximizing your investment.
Nurture ongoing relationships with chosen influencers. Regular communication, providing insights into your business, sustains engagement, eliminating the need to repeatedly identify influencers for every campaign.
Influencer campaigns, commonly used for brand promotion, can be ongoing or one-time. Typically, influencers receive an affiliate link or a coupon code, earning a commission per influenced purchase. This model incentivizes proactive promotion, fostering a shared objective and strengthening professional ties.
If an affiliate marketing program isn’t established, alternative compensation methods include flat fees or offering free products/services in exchange for promotion. While providing freebies was once common, this practice is dwindling as consumers expect products of value to be worth paying for.
Strategies like product reviews, user-generated content (UGC), or content marketing such as how-to videos and blog posts resonate authentically with consumers, aiding informed purchasing decisions. This approach allows influencers to offer genuine feedback and valuable tips to their followers, creating a mutually beneficial campaign.
Capitalizing on video content is crucial, given that 72% of consumers prefer learning about products or services through videos. Tailor your campaign strategy based on the content style of influencers and their preferred social media platforms. YouTube suits detailed reviews, while Instagram may excel for giveaways and special offers.
Consider implementing giveaway campaigns tailored to an influencer’s audience. You can promote existing offers or craft exclusive discounts/giveaways, aligning with your overall marketing strategy. Timing these campaigns—such as running large-scale sales during the holiday season and leveraging influencer followings during the off-season—can optimize engagement.
Recognize that no universal blueprint fits all businesses. Customizing influencer marketing strategies to align with your brand’s unique needs and objectives is paramount for success. Experiment and adapt to discover what works best for your business.
Step 5: Evaluating Return on Investment (ROI)
Irrespective of your chosen strategies, assessing the return on investment (ROI) is crucial to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns and influencer partnerships.
The primary goals of any influencer campaign revolve around boosting brand awareness and driving conversions.
For evaluating awareness, scrutinize the impressions or views garnered by influencer content alongside engagement metrics. While the number of views matters, engagement indicators like likes and comments offer insights into genuine audience interaction. For bloggers, analyze traffic to their blog and the time visitors spend on the page.
Monitor content shares or the usage of associated hashtags—increased shares correspond to more views and potential sales.
Every brand awareness initiative should culminate in action, whether signing up for a newsletter or visiting your ecommerce store. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversions, clicks, overall conversion rates, and click-through rates from views to clicks.
The most impactful conversions are sales, serving as a reliable measure of an influencer’s effectiveness. Utilizing affiliate marketing software facilitates tracking sales via custom influencer coupons or links, enabling measurement of conversion rates—how many link-clickers completed a purchase?
In the absence of affiliate marketing tools, rely on tracking links for referral traffic or other methods to assess resultant sales.
Once social sales generated by a campaign or influencer are determined, calculate the ROI by subtracting campaign expenses or influencer fees from the overall revenue.
Recognize that seeing a positive ROI might require multiple campaigns. Don’t be alarmed if initial returns seem underwhelming; consider the potential gain of new followers and the creation of quality, enduring content. Evaluation over time offers valuable insights into long-term value.
Finding the Right Influencer for Your Brand
After you have defined your goals and the kind of influence you require, it is now time to find the right one. To ease your search and tracking of performance, you may use various social communities and influencer platforms.
- Klear (Meltwater)
Klear offers a database of 900 million influencers categorized into 60,000 topics for easy filtering by skill, location, and much more. The tool also features performance reports in real-time and granular metrics such as mentions, hashtags, and follower count.
- Upfluence
Upfluence is an artificially intelligent platform that simplifies discovery and campaign management of influencers. It dispels the burden of manual searches and cumbersome spreadsheets through tools such as hiring influencers, creating promo codes, tracking sales, and measuring ROI in one place.
- Awario
Awario is a social listening tool that monitors brand mentions on 13 billion web pages. It will help you track and join relevant conversations, monitor brand sentiment, and identify the top influencers. It is thereby well suited for multi-channel campaigns and reputation management.
- Aspire
Aspire is the top sponsorship marketplace connecting the best brands with the right influencers. It is often the go-to choice for platforms like TikTok, Meta, Pinterest, offering tools for campaign management, building relationships with influencers, and measuring ROI.
Winning Brands on Ecommerce with Influencers
Gainful
A brand that sells particular protein supplements and nutrient support, they collaborate with nano-influencers to produce user-generated content in paid and organic channels, building a community that is considered seriously while concentrating on your fitness goals.
Curtsy
For this social commerce app aimed at women, downloads are where Curtsy finds a knack for success-by way of collaborating with Gen Z influencers. The brand uses these creators to showcase their Curtsy purchases and savings on secondhand name-brand goods that are both fashionable yet sustainable to an audience that embodies style-savvy sensibilities and is eco-conscious.
Nutpods
One of the fastest growing plant-based creamer brands makes money from a massively successful influencer campaign, “nutpodsquad.” The campaign got Nutpods a third of its online customers, thus making it Amazon’s top-selling non-dairy creamer.
Pros and Cons of Ecommerce Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing initiatives can provide ecommerce firms with numerous benefits, including:
- Relevance: The best-fit ecommerce influencers ideally have the same target demographic as your brand, making for a highly relevant collaboration. Your target audience already knows, likes, and trusts the influencers who endorse your items, so they are more inclined to buy.
- Cost-effectiveness: In the past, brands frequently committed a significant portion of their marketing budget to a single celebrity endorsement. However, with the rise of the creative economy (particularly micro-influencers on TikTok), marketers can accomplish spectacular outcomes with limited resources.
- Increased return on investment: According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing report, influencer marketing is one of the top three marketing trends with the best ROI of any channel.
- Scale: Influencer seeding enables organizations to reach out to and collaborate with multiple influencers at the same time, allowing them to rapidly scale up their influencer marketing activities. Ecommerce merchants can also reshare influencer-created content (depending on usage rights) to alleviate the burden of continual content development.
Collaborators may be pricey and lacking in authenticity. It is not commonplace for creators to manipulate their social media numbers in order to earn more money from ecommerce firms.
To reduce the danger of working with a dishonest influencer, request to review their social media statistics, samples of previous partnerships, and the results of previous sponsored content. It is always a good idea to be sure beforehand than sorry later.
Summarizing Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing, like all other marketing initiatives in your e-commerce business, requires a well-planned approach. It’s all about identifying the perfect influencer and collaborating with them to develop the type of content that people like on social media sites.
Thus, influencer marketing can help you get your items in front of your target audience rapidly, making it a more profitable technique than others. The only thing you need to do is create a decent marketing strategy for your brand and a method for selecting your influencer.
Suggested read: Top Digital Products You Can Sell: Speedrunning Profits
Common FAQs on Ecommerce Influencer Marketing
How to identify the right influencer for your brand
Begin with determining the micro/nano audience, identifying influencers who align with brand values and the type of product you’re offering. Research all major social media channels: Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Review metrics such as engagement with followers and content quality to understand the nature of audiences.
What are micro-influencers, and do I need to consider them?
An influencer with a small but very engaged audience, typically ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 followers, is known as a micro-influencer. Sometimes, they can be less expensive and more authentic than megainfluencers-meaning they’re ideal for ecommerce brands with niche markets.
How do you measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign?
By definition, key performance indicators of success might be engagement rates and click-through rates, as well as conversion rates. Tracking tools, together with special discount codes, may turn out to be a determinant of sales impact.
