How to Utilize Influencers for E-Commerce- 5 Easy Steps for Influencer Marketing

In this era where social media presence carries a significant impact, influencer marketing forms the backbone of eCommerce brands. If you are preparing to cast your eCommerce brand soon, you must have heard of the impact of influencers. Influencer marketing is basically the large-scale utilization of the positive and impactful word of mouth.

Modern advertisements no longer surprise customers; word of mouth works as the most trusted form of brand promotion. When that word of mouth comes from someone you look up to, nothing stops you from believing it.

This happens to your target customers when you utilize influencers for eCommerce. Therefore, it’s not only the great engagement rate that makes influencer marketing an ideal strategy. The trust factor is also a vital element here.

Now that you developed some ideas about the importance of influential marketing, you must be wondering how to get started. That’s why we are going to support you to start from scratch. As you read through, you will figure out how to implement influencer marketing in your eCommerce business. Other than that, you will explore different ways of maintaining a strong network of influencers.

Selecting Influencers

This is an essential part of your entire strategy. Accurate selection is not only crucial for ensuring that you utilize influencers for eCommerce effectively and efficiently. It is also necessary for proper brand representation and strong reinforcement of brand image.

There are many ways of selecting the perfect influencers for your brand. You will be happy to know that you don’t even have to take the pain of visiting each one of their accounts. All you require is to study your customer profiles, their backgrounds, their interests in your products, and their social media engagement.

There are tools such as Up fluence that help you analyze the social data of your customers. You can also use other tools that enable brands to utilize influencers for eCommerce. Once you look into this information, you will figure out who your influential customers are.

Influential as in, which customers have a strong follower base and can convince others that your product is worth purchasing. You can also identify celebrities, public figures, and other social media influencers who you think will want to use your product. Once you figure this out, explore the content they make.

See if their content matches your product value. It is also necessary that you verify if the particular influencer you are planning to work with has real or fake followers. Ask yourself how it would look if this influencer representing your brand. Last but not the least, have a look at your budget and see if it will allow you to afford this influencer.

Analyzing Influencer Audience

Once you have identified your potential influencers, you will have to analyze the background of their audience. This is particularly important because just by looking at the audience of certain influencers, you will be able to analyze your opportunities.

The tastes, demographics, age range, income level of their audience must coincide with the nature of your product. If the influencers themselves are your customers, then there are high chances of their audience turning into customers for you.

For example, we usually tend to follow the public figures who represent our inner preferences or whose actions are admired by us.

Therefore, when they endorse a brand, we don’t look much into the brand but rely on the influencer’s recommendation and make a purchase. That’s why it’s highly likely that the influencer’s audience will find their tastes coinciding with your product.

Hence, it is important to choose an influencer who has demand for the type of product you sell. Otherwise, you won’t be able to utilize influencers for eCommerce efficiently.

Reaching Out to The Influencers

The process of outreach is probably the toughest one. This involves sending out invitations to the influencers to collaborate with your brand. Usually, you will need to send emails to them, offering them to collaborate with you.

When you reach out to them, you must make sure to thank them for purchasing your products before anything. Next comes the offer. Do not forget to describe the campaign’s objective while you invite them to collaborate.

Additionally, incentives are a must. You have to offer them some rewards in return for their involvement with your brand. This reward can be monetary or even non-monetary. You can offer any reward that you think will make your invitation seem valuable, from price discounts to free gifts.

Last but not the least, do not generalize the invitation. You might reach out to more than one influencer, and in that case, you might want to forward the same email to everyone. However, if you choose to keep the words the same for every mail, add a bit of personalization.

Add something about the influencer. For example, if a particular influencer has recently announced her upcoming marriage plans, you can congratulate her on her new life.

This makes your invitation sound more organic and makes the influencer feel that the invitation is particularly for them. As a result, it enhances your chances of creating some really valuable influencer networks. On top of that, it lets you perfectly utilize influencers for eCommerce.

Building Appropriate Campaigns 

If your influencers are content creators, you already have added benefits here. In this case, story content about your brand and product will be very impactful. Other than that, the content creator can share the story of their association with your brand.

It can also be their story of using your product. Product reviews, product giveaways, and campaigns with affiliate links and discount codes can also help to boost sales directly. Giveaways not only help to raise sales but also allow you to increase your social media engagement.

On the other hand, affiliate links and discount codes help to increase short-term sales. Before selecting or designing the perfect campaign for your brand, you must ask yourself what will enable you to utilize influencers for commerce profitably.

No matter which form of the campaign seems suitable for your eCommerce brand, you must be prepared to utilize video content. Even if your influencer doesn’t use video materials in the collaborative posts, try to convince them to make videos.

The reach of video content is the highest in all major social media platforms. People prefer to get influenced by videos more than any other form of content in purchasing decisions.

 

Evaluating The Market

Once you have successfully executed your influencer campaign, make sure to evaluate the campaign’s effectiveness. There are several ways for this assessment. Technical tools such as Up fluence software allows you to check how many sales have resulted through various campaign tactics.

For example, this software can easily look at the number of sales made through affiliate links, website clicks, and other platforms. It further allows you to check how many followers your brand page has gained.

Moreover, you can analyze the extent to which your audience has engaged with your brand. Furthermore, you must track the performance and cost-effectiveness of your campaign. This helps to ensure if you should continue at the same pace with the same influencers or not.

Finally, in order to utilize influencers for eCommerce with assured profitability, you must build long-term stable relationships with influencers.

Conclusion 

Today’s social media brings in opportunities greater than what we can see. The opportunity to build connections and networks that comes with modern social media technology is vital for eCommerce. It’s the same opportunity that enables brands to utilize influencers for eCommerce.

If we take a nearer look, we may notice that influencer marketing is a revolution. It is the power of word of mouth taken to the next level. Hope you could gather a clear idea of getting started with influencer marketing from this article.

Did you already try out this strategy earlier? Feel free to convey your feedback to us. Do not hesitate to drop any queries that you may have. We will be honored to help you with our answer.