One digital marketing trend that has taken the world by storm is the power of influencer marketing – especially for eCommerce businesses. Influencer marketing for eCommerce has proven to be an effective and ROI-driven marketing tactic. Read more about how niche social media influencers can help you grow your business. Influencer marketing for eCommerce amplifies brand awareness digitally and drives traffic to the website. It adds brand credibility, takes the product to a new audience, and helps with sales and conversions.
Like every other digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing campaigns need careful thought. The type of influencers, the domain, engagement, and the right brand fit are only a few of the metrics that we, an influencer marketing agency in Mumbai, evaluate before recommending a complete strategy. Here’s a quick breakdown of micro vs. macro: the best influencer strategy for your brand.
Who is an influencer? How do influencers help with more sales?
Think of a recent individual who prompted you to buy a product. It was probably someone in the family or social circle, which resulted in research on Google or social media. While doing so, several reviews show up, but you only pay attention to the reviews from people that align with you, your values, personality, and interests.
Whether it was a new outfit, hand lotion, or a large ticket purchase such as a car, chances are you researched it online to hear what others are talking about it. Celebrities, social media stars, bloggers, and personalities fall under the category of influencers.
Oprah – the OG Influencer!
Think of the earliest offline influencer marketing. Immediately ‘Oprah’s Favorite Things’ comes to mind. Oprah would select an annual roundup of gifts. Businesses that featured on the show were an instant hit! Think brand awareness, more customers, sales, and an overall boom for the business!
Influencers on any social media platform create an avid following with their content and personalities. They review, recommend, highlight and showcase products and services in a manner that gives their audience an objective perspective of the brand. Thus, enhancing brand visibility and helping drive sales. For small businesses, these two objectives are crucial to driving eCommerce success. Here’s your quick guide to tips and tactics to help boost eCommerce sales.
How can small businesses boost eCommerce sales with influencer marketing?
While a sustained influencer marketing campaign can do wonders for businesses, a long-term campaign may not always be feasible for small eCommerce businesses. Small businesses must keep operating, and marketing costs low and prioritize the Go-to-market strategy. Getting the influencer marketing campaign right to ensure it drives ROI is the other half of it. As a social media marketing agency in Mumbai, we recommend eCommerce businesses work with digital experts for the first few campaigns to ensure success. It is also a good stepping stone to building relationships with multiple influencers across categories. Let’s begin.
Define the campaign and its objectives
Goal setting is the start of every campaign, but with influencer marketing, it becomes even more important. As you have to translate these goals to various influencers to drive eCommerce success. Start with ‘what is the goal for the campaign?’ – brand awareness, more traffic, product demos, sampling, product sales? Then define the measuring metrics for these goals. This will help define the type of influencers the business needs – micro or macro and the message that is to be communicated.
Define the influencer marketing campaign budgets
Influencers have built credible followers and communities on the backbone of great content and value. They regularly invest time, effort, and resources in crafting the right look or researching information to offer authentic experiences and credible recommendations to audiences. It is only reasonable to expect compensation for reaching out to their community.
Businesses must decide on a budget or fair compensation for influencers. Some understand the campaign goals and explain their fee structures for crafting communications based on the campaign. In fact, several influencers clearly share what’s an advertisement, partnership, and collaboration. These influencers also often use the product actively as well.
Others are also willing to work on a barter system where the brand hands over a few products in exchange for promotions or experiences. Like a free skin treatment or holiday in a resort that the influencer shares across their social media network.
Match the right influencers to the campaign
There are between 3.2 and 37.8 million influencers in the world across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. How do you pick? Where do you start? In such cases working with an influencer marketing agency helps create a pool of trusted influencers that can help drive sales for the brand. Start with the industry first – whom does the product cater to? Is it skincare, baby care, personal care, beauty services, automobile industry?
There are multiple influencers across each category. Look at their audience networks – anything between 5000 to 100,000 people following is good. Also, look for engagement on their posts and the quality of engagement. Your budget, industry, and goals should be able to find the right mix of influencers for the campaign.
Pick the relevant social media platform
Not all social media networks would have the same kind of amplification for a small business. Choose the platform to build your campaign on. Most likely the influencers across each platform would be different as their audiences and reach across each platform are different.
So, while one blogger is great on Instagram, another has better reach on Youtube or LinkedIn. Often bloggers are open to cross-posting and creating engaging content to drive campaign goals.
Build a holistic campaign
Besides influencers creating brilliant content around the business, there are tactics to implement for eCommerce sales. From launching a new product to a big blowout sale LIVE on the website- influencers help drive traffic conversions.
Offer unique discount codes to each influencer and personalize codes with their names. Discount campaigns are an excellent tool to generate interest, drive traffic and acquire customers. Influencers create posts around your product or service that generates awareness and interest. The discount coupon acts as an incentive for followers to sample and experience the offerings.
Unique codes also let you track which influencer has helped with traffic on the website and helped boost eCommerce sales.
Depending on the campaign goals, you could host contests or giveaways too. This is a great tactic to reach the influencer network and build brand awareness and credibility. The idea is to start a conversation about the brand, engage audiences, and encourage more people to follow the brand on social media.
In this case, the contest calls for following, tags, and sharing on Instagram stories, thus further expanding into the network of followers. A great way to take the business to the target audience and drive possible conversions.
Ready to start influencer marketing for your eCommerce business?
Our social media teams work with small businesses to craft interesting brand content with influencers, collaborations, contests, and more to drive conversions for eCommerce. Our teams ensure that the eCommerce site directly ties back to the influencer campaigns to exact maximum mileage.
Influencer marketing for eCommerce can become a big boost for the business. Small businesses can benefit tremendously from well-crafted influencer campaigns. It’s probably one of the easiest ways to build authenticity for eCommerce brands in a digital world. A good influencer marketing strategy can generate leads, create brand awareness and help with conversions for eCommerce companies.
