HOW DOES INFLUENCER MARKETING BRING SALES?

According to a study done by Tomoson, “Businesses are making $6.50 for each $1 spent on influencer marketing, with the top 13% earning $20 or more. 70% are earning $2 or more, and the rest are breaking even or not generating return on investment.” In fact, Tomoson states that in the different marketing channels that they studied, Influencer marketing topped the charts as the most effective way to bring customers. Followed by Facebook. Based on this marketing statistic, we should all be leveraging the power of influencer marketers and or Facebook in our marketing. Of course, not all strategies are created equal, and if you are not measuring your campaign’s success you will never know what brought you the sales.

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INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR STARTUPS & SMBs

Influencer marketing for startups and or small to medium-sized businesses that are budget conscious is mostly based on collabs (unpaid/paid), product seeding, unboxing and hauls. However, there are ways to maximize your budget and expand your reach, with good strategy. First of all let’s break it down:

What are Collabs?

Unpaid Collabs or Unpaid Collaborations is an unpaid strategic partnership with the influencer of your choice for the sole purpose of creating content together to generate follower growth on either side. It is based on product giveaways or could also be product/service based brand takeovers. Paid collabs are similar but include your brand compensating the influencer.

How to do an Instagram Collab

To do an Instagram Collab, simply follow these instructions. 1) Create a post or reels as you would, then tap Tag people before you post, and tap Invite Collaborator. 2) Choose the influencer you would like to collaborate with and write the caption and share the post. 3.) DM (Direct Message) the influencer asking them to accept the collab request. 4) Comment on the influencer’s most recent post with a compliment relevant to the post, and ask them to check their DMs. 5) Once the influencer accepts, your post will be shared to their community and have your username on it. Amazing! 

Product Giveaways (Product Seeding)

When a brand gives a product to an influencer in hopes for a mention, this is called “product seeding” Product seeding doesn’t necessarily guarantee a post, and if the product is over $100 in value, an Influencer will have to pay taxes on the value of it, so make sure your product is something they would want. If you are giving a product to your influencer of choice, make sure their followers align with your target market and see if you could have a mini agreement with them to do a post and perhaps a story for your product. If you want quality content for free like this, it would be best to approach an influencer that is a nano influencer with a follower count of 1000-10,000 followers, or a micro-influencer with a follower count of 10,000 to 50,000. If you try to approach a mid-tier influencer with 50,000-500,000 followers, they could say no, or ignore you, but hey it’s worth a try as well; because there may be some that say yes. However, studies show that micro-influencers have great engagement. Apparently, 91% of all post engagement was created by micro influencers. Based on this statistic, it would be best to approach micro-influencers first. 

Product/Service Based Brand Takeovers

If you are a brand and offer a product or service, you could get creative and ask for a Brand Takeover. Now, this can be paid or unpaid depending on your agreement with the influencer. Brand Takeovers work in such a way that you can partner with another brand or an influencer. An influencer promotes themself, a brand will promote more of its products and or services. Sometimes an influencer has products, but they promote them using themself. Either way, with a brand takeover, you can determine with your influencer or brand you are working with on the duration of how long the takeover will last. Then have them curate content for you, and you for them if you are trading. Once they curate the content, you can post it to your social media, and definitely use a Highlight to keep their content if it was a story. 

Unboxing

Just as it sounds, an unboxing campaign involves giving the influencer of your choice a box that they can open live on camera. These types of collaborations can be unpaid or paid. The influencer will then open the box while recording the entire process. The reaction is 100% genuine and their fans usually love this. Transparency in marketing is always a win. So, if you are having an influencer unbox your product, make sure it is chock full of amazing goodies and leaves an amazing impression. Of course, your product should be like this (amazing) not just for the influencer but for all of your customers as well -who watch the video and buy from you.

Haul

A haul is a bit more detailed and organized than an unboxing video campaign because it involves the influencer trying on different outfits. A haul video is perfect for a clothing brand, shoe brand, jewelry brand or makeup brand that wants to give the influencer multiple products to try and use live on video. Presentation of your products, quality, and added personal touches should help the influencer make a really nice haul video for your brand.

MEASURING YOUR INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Before starting your campaign, you should first decide what you want your campaign to bring. It is Likes? Comments? Followers? Sales? Brand Exposure? Views? Audience Reach? These are your KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators you would like to measure going into the campaign. Based on your main goals, your influencer marketing campaign can be curated. Once you know what you would like to accomplish, you can have your agency or you can find influencers. Once you find the influencers, it is time to track your success. We call this the baseline. Provide a link to your influencer that is trackable to place in their bio, if you are taking over that space during our campaign. If you are not, then simply provide your influencer with a coupon code. You can do both if that is your agreement as well. At this point, your agency will track the success of the campaign for you; and you can as well based on coupon code uses.