The growth of e-commerce has been rapid, especially in recent years. Therefore, directing people to online stores and product pages is an increasingly popular goal in influencer marketing. How to leverage influencer marketing for e-commerce to get the best results? Here are some tips and case studies! 👇🏼
Why use influencer marketing for e-commerce?
• Reach a niche audience
Most influencers focus on a specific niche within their content – which means their followers are also following them, especially for this kind of content. For example, followers of a book influencer are always looking for book reviews and recommendations! Therefore, influencers are a very good way to reach a specific target group.
• More trustworthy than regular advertising
92% of people trust other people more than traditional advertising: their friends, family, idols, and even strangers on the internet! In fact, 88% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Influencers are often followed for their expertise in some niche. For example, if someone starts sharing their hair growth journey on Instagram, they’d probably attract followers who are interested in growing their hair. Thus, their followers would also be interested in the influencer’s feedback and product recommendations for hair care.
• Influencer marketing can be measured and optimized
With the help of personalized discount codes and trackable links, it’s very easy to keep track of how many website visitors, new customers, purchases and revenue did each collaboration bring.
• No need to compete with ad blockers
42.7% of internet users globally use ad blockers – which means that the effectiveness of banner and display advertising is decreasing. Fortunately, ad blockers aren’t smart enough to block influencers’ content yet!
📝 6 tips on using influencer marketing for e-commerce
1. Choose the right influencers for your brand
A successful influencer marketing campaign starts with choosing the right influencers. This is especially important for small businesses with a limited marketing budget! Here are 3 things to check before you agree on a collaboration:
▸ The values of an influencer
Influencer marketing is a powerful branding tool: every time you collaborate with an influencer, a piece of their reputation is attributed to your brand. Therefore, you should ask yourself: do their values match your brand values? Is that of a person that you want to represent your brand?
▸ Influencer’s price vs social media stats
Instagram influencer pricing might be confusing at times. Do they ask a fair price for their average post reach and engagement? Keep in mind that the number of followers is not an important metric here – there is no point in paying for the follower number if their content doesn’t reach them or resonate with them! Instead, you should check their reach, engagement rate, and check their comments.
▸ Influencer’s audience demographics
That should be one of the main criteria for choosing influencers: does their audience match your target group? This is a good reason to use an influencer analytics tool, such as Promoty – not only will you see the influencers’ followers’ distribution by age, location, and gender, but also their interests, brand affinity, followers’ credibility, and much more. Create a free account and try it out yourself! 👇🏼
Influencer profile insights on Promoty (learn more)
2. Leverage Instagram Story links
Sharing links on Instagram has always been difficult: previously, only influencers with over 10K followers could add “Swipe up” links to the stories! Fortunately, in 2021, Instagram released story links to everyone.
In e-commerce campaigns, story links should definitely be used. If the influencer introduces the online store, they can add a link to the store. If they show a specific product, they can add a link to the product page. This way, it’s really easy for their followers to go to the store and do the purchase!
3. Be strategic when planning your campaigns
Before you start your influencer marketing campaign, you should be clear about…
▸ Your target group
Firstly, the brand should clearly define the target group before setting up the campaign. Based on the target audience, you can craft the right message and choose relevant influencers.
For example, an e-commerce beauty store MyLook set up Christmas campaigns for Estonian, Latvian, and Finnish markets. Additionally, they set up a New Year campaign to the Russian-speaking target group in Estonia as Christmas is not relevant for them.
▸ The goal of the campaign
This way, the influencers can write their campaign post in a way that supports the goal – and add a specific call to action to their followers. For example, if the goal is to direct people to the online store, the influencer can share the link in the stories, add it to their bio and refer to it in the post caption.
@leane.jpg x Wallstreet.ee campaign post
▸ Implement a long-term strategy
Long-term influencer partnerships always bring the best results. Not only do they seem more trustworthy – but they also generate multiple touchpoints with potential customers which leads to more sales.
Usually, we recommend brands to work with several influencers, then choose the best-performing influencers and turn them into your brand ambassadors.
4. Constantly measure and optimize results
The last step of every campaign is measuring the results. Using influencer marketing for e-commerce, you probably want to measure the store visits, purchases, new customers, and revenue. In general, there are two common ways to do it: using personal discount codes or trackable links.
▸ Personal discount codes
The most popular way to measure influencer marketing results is by giving each influencer a personal discount code. In this case, you will not see the number and quality of visits to the website but you will know exactly the total amount and sum of purchases made using the specific code.
▸ Using Trackable links
Using UTM Tag Builder, you can create a personal link for each influencer. Afterward, you will see the results on Google Analytics – and know exactly how many website visits, new visitors, purchases and revenue did each collaboration bring. Read more about using UTM tags here!
In addition to the overall profitability of the campaign, measuring the results shows which influencers bought you the most website visitors, new customers, sales, and revenue – those are the influencers you should continue working with! It’s basically the same as optimizing PPC ads.
5. Repurpose influencer-generated content
Creating content is one of the superpowers of influencers: they know how to create scroll-stopping content that stands out on social media! That is the reason why more and more brands are working with influencers to get visuals for their social media channels.
If you agree with the influencer, you can also use their visuals in paid ads. According to Meta, ads that use influencer-generated content have 53% higher click-through rates than ads with business-as-usual visuals!
@emskipihla x Cocopanda campaign photo
@marikamiau x Cocopanda campaign photo
6. Use an influencer marketing tool to speed up the process
Promoty is an influencer management platform that allows brands to find the right influencers, see their detailed analytics and manage all their collaborations in one place. Not only does it help you to find the right influencers for your brand – but also saves a lot of time and manual work.
Using our influencer CRM, you can manage all their (potential) influencers, collaborations, chats, and content in one place. Here’s a short demo video of how it works! 👇🏼
Using Promoty’s Influencer Discovery, you can search for influencers worldwide, filtering by their social media metrics or audience data. Additionally, you can see detailed account insights for every influencer – which helps you to find the right TikTok and Instagram influencers for your brand. 🤍
Additionally, you can use our influencer CRM to manage your current and potential collaboration partners, detect branded content, and chat with influencers. Create a free account to get started!
