How to Use Influencer Marketing to Promote Your eCommerce Business
One of the hottest trends right now is influencer marketing. Influencers can connect with a niche audience that is difficult to reach through conventional marketing campaigns. Overall, it is a great way for ecommerce marketers to improve their current customer base and boost revenue.
What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy where you need to work with different influencers to reach a certain number of followers. They will help you promote, create your content, and publish posts about your product on their accounts on social media.
To increase e-commerce conversion rates, some social media platforms you can tap into are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Some influencers can promote you on their websites if they’re getting a lot of traffic.
Now, here are strategies on how you can utilize influencer marketing to promote your ecommerce business.
Pick the Right Influencers
The success of your campaign depends on the influencer and their audience or following. Thus, it’s vital that you only work with an influencer that aligns with your brand values, principles, and audience.
How can you tell whether or not an influencer is right for you? Here are some important points:
- Belongs to a specific niche in your industry.
- Has an audience that matches your target audience’s demographics.
- Has an excellent engagement rate.
- You can create engaging content that aligns with the aesthetics of your brand as well as your messaging.
- Share the same values as your brand.
- Fits your budget.
After you find the right influencer for your brand, one of the first things you need to do is engage with their content. You can comment on posts that are relevant to your niche and style. Then, look for ways you can appreciate their work.
To avoid any conflict in the future, you can also create and sign an agreement with the influencers you partner with. It should define all the benefits, deliverables, and payments in writing.
Ask Influencers to Review Your Products
When you use a product reviews strategy, you can ask a specific influencer to talk about and showcase your product on your social media account.
You can even give them a script or ask them to be honest about what they think about your product. A product review will examine a customer’s experience of your product, what kind of impression it left, and their lasting feelings about a particular brand or product.
Repurpose Influencer-generated Content
One of the strengths of influencers is making content. These people know how to create appealing content that stands out on social media.
This is why more and more brands want to work with influencers to get visuals on their social media platforms. Depending on your arrangement with the influencer, you can even use their visuals in paid ads.
In fact, according to a study, influencer-generated content tends to get 53% more clicks than your average visuals.
Hosts Giveaways and Contests
Contests and giveaways are one of the best tactics that you can use to engage with your audience. Once you use these tactics in your influencer marketing campaigns, they become more effective and personalized.
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You can even work with a particular influencer in running contests or giveaways or simply announce it on their social media platforms.
Here are some handy tips that you can use:
- Agree with influencers to ask their followers to follow the accounts of your ecommerce brand or sign up for a newsletter if they want to join a contest or a giveaway. It opens new doors in marketing your products.
- Contests and giveaways can be delivered to your audience via influencers who can serve as a teaser for your newly launched products. Just ensure you announce these contests and giveaways in your product launch emails.
- Utilize FOMO marketing as influencers create a sense of urgency or scarcity when they promote your contests and giveaways on social media. Doing so provokes people’s fear of missing out.
Offer Unique Affiliate Discount Codes
Many brands provide influencers with discount codes to improve their ecommerce sales. Doing so helps track the effectiveness of a particular influencer when it comes to driving sales.
Daniel Wellington is an excellent example of a brand that made it in affiliate discounts and influencer marketing. This famous watch brand regularly collaborates with many micro and nano influencers in promoting its collection of watches. They provide unique discount codes to help influencers encourage their followers to make instant purchases.
Partner with Micro-influencers
It would help if you weren’t afraid to partner with micro-influencers with a smaller following but higher engagement rates.
A direct messaging strategy lets micro-influencers leverage their connections with their audience so they can learn more and purchase your product. Instead of focusing on influencers with a relatively high following, you can also look at their engagement rates to ensure that they have an authentic following.
One way to do that is to always check the engagement rates on their posts. This ensures that they connect authentically with their audience and don’t have fake followers.
Allow Creative Freedom
Always keep in mind that the purpose of having influencers in your ecommerce marketing is to use existing connections and the trust that they already have with their followers. That’s why you shouldn’t micromanage their content.
While you want to ensure that your content is correctly conveyed to your target audience, you still need to trust that the influencer you’re working with knows how to reach your customers best and will provide you with the right content.
Measure the Success and ROI
The results outperform other tactics, which is one of the main reasons why many ecommerce stores use influencer marketing.
In fact, in a study conducted by Tomoson, a software seller that automates influencer marketing efforts, these campaigns will usually yield a return of approximately $6.50 for every dollar spent. These numbers are backed up by other studies as well. That’s the reason influencer marketing campaigns help create significant returns.
When using influencer marketing for ecommerce, you probably need to measure store visits, purchases, new customers, and overall revenue. Generally, there are two common ways that you can do this – to use your personal discount codes as well as tracking links.
Although you can’t see the number and quality of visits to a website, you know the total amount and the sum of purchases made on a single code. You can also build personal links for every influencer with a UTM tag builder. You can see the results on Google Analytics afterward; you’ll know exactly how many site visits, new visitors, purchases, and revenue every collaboration bought.
Wrap Up
So, there you have it. By now, we’ve already established that influencer marketing is one of the most indispensable tools that ecommerce marketers use.
Although carrying a specific influencer marketing campaign can sometimes be a challenge, if you use the right strategies and tools at your disposal, then the effectiveness is incomparable. A great influencer marketing campaign allows you to improve your ecommerce sales in large numbers, especially if done well. Good luck!
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