Can you imagine life without eCommerce? Neither can we! And with it rapidly gaining popularity and branching out to live stream shopping and shopping directly in your favorite social media apps, we do not need to tell you that it is just the beginning of the eCommerce story.
However, as with any kind of shopping, customers still rely heavily on recommendations and referrals, and you know the best way to get a good word in, right? Yup, it’s influencer marketing, and it’s a key factor in building your eCommerce page’s marketing strategy. So, let’s dig deeper into the ways you can leverage influencer marketing for eCommerce.
First things first, though:
What Are The Benefits Of Using Influencer Marketing For eCommerce?
As an eCommerce business, you absolutely have to solidify your position as a trustworthy brand. Besides that, you also have to consider reaching your specific audiences, measuring and optimizing your marketing campaign strategy, and many other things. That’s exactly where influencer marketing steps in to help you out.
Reach Niche Audiences
Most influencers focus on a specific niche with their content. That means, of course, that the people following them are doing so exactly because of that niche content. So say you have an influencer who’s all about houseplants – it’s no wonder that the people following them will be there for the influencer’s tips, hacks, and photos of beautiful plants. Another thing they’ll be looking for would absolutely be fertilizers or nifty gadgets that could help them grow the healthiest and the most luscious plants ever. And this is where you could step in with your product to reach an audience that’s an exact match to what you are offering.
But, of course, that’s not limited to houseplants only – you can find an influencer whose oriented to anything and everything, so there’s always one that’s right for you.
Building Trust
You have to know that people will probably never trust a brand as much as they trust recommendations of their family members, influencers, or even strangers that left reviews after they bought and tried an item. In fact, online reviews hold a very high place when it comes to making a purchase decision.
Now, since we all know that influencers are most often followed for their expertise in some niche, and their followers trust their words the same as they would with someone they know, we can safely say that the easiest way to gain trust in your brand is through influencer marketing. If your brand and your selected influencer (including their audience interests!) are a match made in heaven, you can be almost 100% sure that your collaboration will be fruitful. The creator’s audiences will trust their recommendations or feedback on your product, which will make your brand seem trustworthy.
Tracking And Measuring
With the help of personalized discount codes and trackable links, it is quite easy to track how many website visitors, new customers, purchases, and revenue each collaboration brought to the table. Not so easy with other marketing means, though.
Forget About Ad Blockers
42,7% of internet users globally use ad blockers. That means that the effectiveness of banner and display advertising is simply decreasing and won’t show an increase anytime soon (more likely – never). That said, no ad blocker will block an influencer’s content, allowing you to reach your audience without any roadblocks (or ad blockers).
Of course, there are plenty more reasons why you should be considering influencer marketing as part of your strategy, but these factors alone are pretty convincing of their worth. So, now that we’ve laid the foundation, it’s time to go to the tips on leveraging influencer marketing for eCommerce.
Think About Your Collaborations Carefully
We know you’ve heard like a hundred times before, but it is so important that we cannot stress it enough – find the right influencer for your brand. Especially so if you’re a small business with a limited marketing budget or your product is as niche as socks for ducks. We have a whole article on choosing the right influencer for your brand but let us remind you of some of the key points that should influence your decision:
Matching Brand And Influencer Values
Consider an influencer as a part of your branding; after all, each time you collaborate with one, a part of their reputation becomes a part of your business image. So, although the stats and the follower count might look tempting before you say your ‘I do,’ think thoroughly about whether they really are the right person to be representing your brand. Basically, just like in a marriage. Almost.
Pricing vs. Stats
Influencer pricing might come as a surprise to some and seem as though it is not based on any calculations but rather on a whim. Well, that’s just not true.
Several factors make up an influencer’s pricing, and one of them is reach and engagement count. So naturally, the better the parameters, the higher the pricing. However, before jumping to any conclusions, know this – better reach and engagement also means that the influencer’s crowd is really invested in their content and possibly holds their opinion highly, which absolutely comes in handy for persuading the followers to like or buy from a brand. Also, it’s quite a clear sign of an influencer’s honesty when it comes to their fans. And you might have heard about the rising demand for authenticity from brands, right?
Another factor that makes up a part of a creator’s pricing is the market price. We won’t go deep into it because there’s not much to talk about, except that you should always try to keep track of average pricing and its natural fluctuations.
Now, there’s also a third part that makes up an influencer’s pricing, and it might surprise you – paid promotions reach. See, paid promotions can give you a glimpse into the maximum potential of your future campaign, and if a creator shows solid stats with such promotions, you can be sure their content will also perform just as well for you, too.
SPEND 20X LESS ON INFLUENCER MARKETING
Influencer’s Audience Demographics And Interests
Now here’s another thing you might’ve heard, scratched the surface of, and thought you were good to go – how well your chosen influencer’s audience matches your target audience. And we’re not talking just about the basic stuff like demographics (age, location, gender), but also audience interests. That’s a key parameter in a well-matched collaboration, and you should always dig deeper into that.
How can you do it? Well, to make sure audience interests are an exact match to what you want to promote to them, you could check the list of an influencer’s followers and check each individually (things they post, like, and comment on). However, that’s loads and loads of work, so why not leave the most bothersome parts of choosing an influencer (and running a campaign) to a platform like Agenic, where all of this critical info is given to you straight away?
Use Instagram Story Links
Any link is a good idea but especially so when it comes to Instagram Stories. If you know that your chosen influencer’s audience best reacts to their Stories, don’t ever forget to ask them to put a link directing to your store (or straight to the specific product they are talking about) in each piece of such content. And if Instagram is your main marketing channel, forgetting to put in links would be a real shame.
P.S.: Said links are also a very good way to track the website traffic coming directly from an influencer campaign.
Strategize And Prioritize
Doing an influencer campaign out of the blue without any groundwork first will not give you the results you might’ve expected. Now, building the perfect and the most efficient strategy takes a bit of time and thought put into it, but you can read all about it in our older article. However, if you’d like a quick recap, here are the key points to strategizing and prioritizing:
Target Audience
Again, we know you’ve heard about it and thought about it extensively, but there are always new things to learn about your target audience. Say you do know who your people are, their age, and where they live. However, have you thought about where to find them? That is, not their exact home address, but the platform that they are on.
Think of it like this – your product is aimed at Gen Z, and you’re betting all your marketing efforts on promoting on Facebook. And however much you try, it’s just one huge flop. That’s because the Gen Z’ers ditched Facebook long ago and are residing on TikTok almost exclusively.
Also, there are many instances when a brand thought their product should be relevant for families with small kids, for example, when in fact, the group that was the most interested in their item was childless Millennials. That’s the case of SodaStream
and it’s as solid as it gets.
Campaign Goals
Again with the ‘everybody knows this stuff already,’ right? But hang on, because same as with the target audience, we too have some fresh stuff here.
Think of it like this – you know your campaign goals to the bone, but have you mentioned it in your brief for influencers? If you did, well then, kudos to you! If you didn’t, you robbed yourself of allowing them to create a unique call to action that works specifically for your campaign goals.
Here’s a very simplistic example – if your goal is to direct people to your online store and you’ve explained it to your influencer, then they could add Story links to direct their followers there, add it to their bio, and refer to it in their post caption.
In short, campaign goals aren’t just for you but also for the influencers you’re collaborating with.
Long-Term Strategy
If you saw that one particular collaboration worked like a charm, why not create a long-term partnership with that influencer? Ambassadorships always bring the best results, mostly because they make your brand seem more trustworthy and also generate multiple touchpoints with potential customers, which absolutely leads to more sales.
So, when an opportunity presents itself, always opt-out to suggesting a well-performing influencer to become your brand ambassador.
Measure And Optimize
How else would you know if your campaign performed well, right? However, you should probably want to abstain from monitoring content the moment it goes live because those stats tend to fluctuate highly, so it is best to do your measuring and optimizing once the campaign is over.
So besides checking out stats like reach and engagement for the whole campaign and each individual piece of content (which is so easy to do with Agenic), you can also employ several other tools to help you track your progress.
Personal Discount Codes
The absolute favorite for measuring tangible results! Create a unique discount code attributed to each of the influencers you are working with, and you’ll be able to see not only the number and quality of visits to your website but also the exact amount and sum of purchases made using this code. So, don’t forget about it in your next campaign!
Following Relevant Data
That’s a fancy name for reporting, which will never be unimportant. There’s one catch, though – we’re pretty sure that getting (or not getting) a screenshot of campaign stats from your influencer isn’t the ideal situation here, but what can you do, right?
Well, you could trust Agenic to run your influencer campaign; that way, neither your influencer nor you will have to worry about some wonky screenshots. With Agenic, all of your reporting is in one place, right in the platform, and you can access it whenever you like. Sounds fantastic even to us.
Repurposing Content
Nobody would argue that part of an influencer’s allure is their aptitude for creating excellent content. And that’s one of the reasons why more and more brands are working with influencers to fill their own social media pages with eye-catching and relevant content.
So, if the influencer that you are collaborating with creates awesome content, you could try using the visuals in paid ads, too. There’s even some data to base this recommendation on! As per Meta, ads that have influencer-generated content as the main visual have up to 53% better click-through rates compared to anything that’s clearly an ad.
There you have it – if the content is great, why not use it to your extensive benefit?
Takeaway Note
There’s loads of proof that eCommerce will be the ruling entity in your internet experience very soon. And although that presents awesome opportunities for any brand, it also has some challenges. The main one is to get noticed. And in this article, we’ve highlighted the importance of influencer marketing and its clear benefits for achieving this key task.
INFLUENCERS
ARE
WAITING
