How to use influencer marketing for Ecommerce Success

Scaling an ecommerce store comes with its fair share of challenges.

Getting endorsements for your products from influencers helps. In this article piece, you’ll learn how to use influencer marketing for ecommerce success the right way.

Let’s get started.

Why Should Influencer Marketing Be An Important Element Of Your Overall Marketing Strategy?

In the marketplace, there are tons of products, and if you think about it, many of them are similar to yours.

But at the end of the day, it’s not the product that’s the best that wins market share, it’s the product that gets promoted the most that people buy. Money follows attention on social media.

Most people, by default, look up to celebrities and influencers, and when they see that a certain product has gotten public approval from an influencer/celebrity, they are very much tempted to give it a try.

At the same time, as the influencer promotes your products on social media, it offers them an opportunity to engage with their audience and generate more activity surrounding your business.

Influencer Marketing and Ads

There are a few ways to incorporate influencer marketing to scale your eCommerce store. 

You can hire influencers to help you create videos that you can run as ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Or, you could partner up with them and come up with an arrangement with them where they promote your product through their personal profiles and audiences.

• Things To Consider Before Partnering Up With A Potential Influencer

1. Get clear on your demographics

You’ll want to get clarity on demographic data and figure out if your ideal customers actually follow a particular influencer.

For instance, if you’re trying to reach an older audience, it would  make more sense for you to target a content creator that the elderly are familiar with.

2. Assess Track Record

You might also want to work with someone who has a track record of partnering up with ecom stores, and helping them build strong brand identities.

3. Choose The Right Channels

The other thing you need to think about is what would be the best channel to reach your potential customers.

Would Tiktok be ideal, or should you be trying to reach your customers through Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube.

This pre-planning phase will ultimately help you nail your email marketing campaigns.

4. Researching Influencers

The other important thing you need to do is research relevant influencers.

For this, you’ll want to leverage influencer marketing platforms.

These platforms have curated databases that are regularly updated, and will offer you insights on the number of followers, engagement rates etc.

That being said, some of the best influencer marketing tools you need to check out include Grin, Upfluence etc.

If you want a more thorough list of influencer marketing tools/platforms, feel free to check out this article piece that goes into exhaustive detail about many other influencer marketing tools.

5. Evaluate Costs

Reaching out to influencers

Once you’re done figuring out what kinds of influencers you want to work with, your next step will be to reach out to influencers.

There are a few ways you can do this. 

You can send them a DM on social media telling them about your proposal.

Or, you can reach out via email, and let them know about your proposition.

Alternatively, you can hire an influencer marketing agency, and let them handle these operations.

You’ll find many agencies who offer services of this nature on sites like clutch.co

Additionally, you can also look for potential influencers to partner up with on Fiverr.

If you’re planning on running paid ads, you can ask influencers to record a video for you, and do a provide review.

You can use this Influencer Generated Content (IGC) in your ads on social media to build brand awareness, get engagement and make sales.

OTHER MARKETING STRATEGIES

It’s your duty to make your users’ experience as effortless as possible.

You can also collaborate with influencers and host giveaways. For that, you will want the influencer to send their audience your way, and people interested in the giveaway will give you their email address. This lets you build your email list, and nurture new leads into eventual paying customers.

You can also send free stuff to influencers, and ask them for a shout-out on social media.

If you’re partnering up with Youtube influencers, you can help them out with keyword research, and propose to them act as brand ambassadors and affiliates.

Last but not the least, you can also collaborate with influencers to create viral hashtag campaigns, and grow your eCommerce brand with powerful word-of-mouth advertising.

Practicing caution with influencer marketing

While there are many positives to influencer marketing like enhanced publicity, increased brand awareness, and more sales — it’s also true that this only happens when you’re targeting ACTUAL influencers.

Because one of the things you need to be wary of if you plan on leveraging influencer marketing is that oftentimes people use bots to grow their Instagram following.

It doesn’t help you at all if the influencer you’re partnering up with doesn’t have a real audience. Just something to stay mindful of.

THE future of influencer marketing

In recent years, in-stream shopping has been on the rise. The buying behavior of young people are heavily influenced by icons that they look up to. Here are 11 Advertising Ideas To Reach New Customers In 2022

Partnering up with influencers and promoting your products through live in-stream shopping experiences would be a fantastic way to generate more revenue for your eCommerce brand.

FINAL WORDS

With all that being said, in today’s world, influencer marketing when used correctly can provide you with the much-needed publicity you need to grow your e-commerce brand and scale your sales.

Here are some words from Ben Precious on why customer loyalty is critical for business success (and what you can do to get it).