Influencer Marketing for E-Commerce: How Does it Work?

If you have an ecommerce company and want to know how influencer marketing works for your business, you have reached the right place. There are approximately 12 - 24 million ecommerce sites like yours worldwide. But only less than a million of them make over 1000 dollars sales annually. However, ecommerce sales skyrocketed during the pandemic year to cross 4.2 trillion dollars. And as per the Nasdaq report, over 94 % of purchases will be only through ecommerce sites by 2040.

Read Here: What is Influencer Marketing

It is the millennials, and Gen Z which have huge purchasing potential now and, in the future, and they prefer more unconventional marketing like influencer marketing rather than conventional ways. Hence, one should start using the best ecommerce influencer marketing strategy to not to be left out in the crowd.

So, check out how influencer marketing for ecommerce works and its many benefits to be ready for the booming online sales to capitalize it for developing your business exponentially.

How does Influencer Marketing for E-Commerce Work?

In recent years, the transformation of product sales from retail to online increased the need for social proof as trust deceased among people. Word of mouth has been the most prominent and significant factor for retail sales increase, and it is in the form of recommendations from people using the products. And if the said people are influencers having the colossal following to have their trust, it is one of the effective and the easiest ways to increase your ecommerce business.
As per the Twitter report, 40% of its users confirm buying products because of tweets by influencers. The percentage may be higher for other social media platforms like Instagram. It is how influencer marketing for ecommerce works for you to use it to outsmart your competitors and succeed in your business.

What is the Best E-Commerce Influencer Marketing Strategy?

Since influencer marketing is all about providing social proof to build trust among people to buy products online, there are many strategies.
As per Neilson's survey, 92% of the people trust recommendations from individuals even without knowing them over brands. Hence even if you cannot afford to have high-profile influencers with a massive following, you can opt for the best ecommerce influencer marketing strategy to grow your business. For that, you have to know its basics and tools.

All ecommerce companies cannot become top companies to hire the highest following influencers.
Are you one who wants to use influence marketing for an ecommerce business? In that case, you need to know its three basic steps: influencer identification, value content, and measuring performance.
And throughout all these steps, you need to know your target audience for having crystal clear goals and ways to analyze the results.

Let us check them one by one for having the best ecommerce influencer marketing strategy.

1. Identifying the ideal influencer

Identifying the ideal influencers is vital as paying for them to say buy this will not be sufficient for growing your ecommerce business. The influencer should be a perfect fit for your target audience and match your brand, style, niche, tone, and objectives with the right social media platforms. Blogs, hashtags, and social media are the right place to identify your ideal influencer. You can identify which influencer is active in your business niche or genre by checking social media. And by scrolling through their social media profiles, you can check the hashtags for finding the right one talking to your target audience. Also, check for bloggers active in your business niche as stats confirm active in many social media platforms. Researching their SEO statistics and social media details, you can find the best one with the most exposure to your target audience.

2. Create Meaningful Content with Proper Distribution

Even using highly paid influencers with lots of followers without proper content, you cannot have an adequate ecommerce influential marketing strategy. But even micro-influencers using engaging, entertaining, educating, visually appealing content can make all the difference. There are many ways to present creative content to reach your target audience, like Instagram storytelling, using specific influencer promo codes, being transparent, visual content, vlogs, contests, discounts, coupons, takeaways, unique hashtags, etc. Also, treating influencers as partners rather than using them to sell products will enable them to have meaningful relationships.

Read here: Types of content

3. Tracking Performance

All the efforts taken for ecommerce influencer marketing strategy will be only fruitful with proper performance tracking. It would help if you tracked whatever is possible to tack to know the ROI or return of investment. Knowing the monetary value is not direct, but it is still measurable by following revenue from posts and actions. To know the impact of the ecommerce influence marketing strategy, you can assign URL tracking parameters for knowing the actions of every visitor that the influencer sends to the site. The other metrics to know the success rate include brand studies, tracking tags, comments, click to ecommerce pages, likes, follows, reach, views, etc.

Steps before undertaking Influencer marketing for ecommerce brands

Define social media platforms

Different businesses have their target audience based on specific social media channels - my guess is your brand is not different.

If you know your ideal platform, then you can move to the next step away. However, if you don't, you might want to pause and define it before you proceed.

We cannot stress this enough - finding the right social media platform is vital for success. For example, if your potential customers are active on Instagram but you decide to execute an ecommerce marketing campaign on Twitter. then It is highly implausible to get the result you are expecting.

So now the question on your mind would be, ”how can I find my ideal platform”? - start by analyzing your customers and jotting down your campaign objective.

What type of content does your audience prefer?
What is your goal? - Do you want more traffic, sales, awareness or engagement?.
What kind of sites do your consumers frequently visit?

The content of Instagram gets the most engagement than its other network counterparts. If your goals resonate with the photo and video sharing application, then IG is your go-to platform. On the contrary, if sales are on your mind, Facebook or YouTube is your best bet.

Find the right ecommerce Influencers

Finding the right social media platform was the easy part. The real challenge starts now.

Even if you know your destination, you can't reach your audience without the help of the right Influencer - cutting any corners in the Influencer discovery process can render your campaign ineffective. It shouldn't come as a surprise that 73% of marketers consider finding influencers their number one obstacle.

An effective influencer is one whose activities coincide with the brand's messaging, objective, mission, and style - If you find someone who checks on all of these factors, never let them go. These creators are ideal candidates for your ecommerce influencer marketing efforts.

So, what is the procedure to find them? - you can go at it by yourself. You can start by scouring social media sites.

You also have the option of picking someone from your dedicated customer base - word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool. People heed recommendations and suggestions from fellow consumers more than any advertising outlet.

Mention is a perfect social listening tool that helps you find influential people who are talking about your products on various social media platforms.

The strategies listed above are effective but also time and resource-intensive - we don't recommend it if your in-house staff lacks the necessary expertise. Fortunately, you can task Grynow - a top agency, to find ideal candidates for your ecommerce influencer marketing strategy.

Hand the reins over to your Influencer

Trust your Influencers. We say this because many brands are often sceptical of giving creators a free hand during content creation. Restrictive actions like scripting events beforehand or asking for something obstructive can act as mental blocks to the Influencer creativity and reduce the authenticity of your content.

If you have followed all the mentioned steps, you will have an influencer suitable for your project. These people connect with your brand's target audience at a personal level and have won their loyalty. I think this should be reason enough to give influencers the freedom to do what they know best for the sake of your ecommerce Influencer marketing campaign.

Of course, you may want to play a role to take your campaign in the direction of your end goal. Suppose your objective is to get more sales - \ you can ask your Influencers to share a discount code (that you provide) to their audience.

If more engagement is your target, you can take over the internet celebrities’ social media handle and produce content showcasing your brand or product.

For more brand awareness, organizing contests or giveaways are a viable option.

Now that you have made your campaign plans known to your Influencers let them run with it however they see fit. They know how to get their audience to take action.

Evaluate your goals and ROI

All the best ecommerce Influencer marketing campaigns have one thing in common. Brands that executed them had well-defined goals from the start. Ask yourself this, Do I want to generate more brand awareness? Higher sales? Or launch a new product?. When you know what you want, you can effectively evaluate your return on investment.

Let us look at some standard Influencer marketing metrics.

Total website traffic
The total number of conversions happened through affiliate links.
The total increase in the number of followers on your brand account.
The total number of new email sign up.
Brand hashtag performance

If you work with a single influencer, it is easy to track metrics associated with his performance.

However, as your business needs start to grow, you tend to employ multiple Influencers - now, extracting data from social network sites gets a tad more challenging. Fortunately, you have management tools that automatically track important campaign-specific metrics needed to determine the success of your Influencers marketing ecommerce venture.

Social media platforms change frequently. By reviewing the data acquired, you can position your campaign to work optimally in any situation. You can adapt to changes or continue doing activities that generate a desirable outcome.

Not all influencers generate similar results. The insights you gain will help you decide who you want to retain for future campaigns and who you want to let go of.

What are the tools for influencer marketing for ecommerce?

There are many influencers marketing tools available for connecting with many potential influencers. Automated email tools can reduce the e-commerce challenges like cart abandonment as stats two out of three visitors do it. Also, many tools help you find new micro-influencers rather than only those known to you. And to track their influencers' niche's engagement rates legality, among others. A few efficient tools simplify the processes by taking care of all communications, monitoring, posting content, etc., without any hassles.

Also read: Influencer apps for collaboration

What are the Benefits of Influential Marketing for E-Commerce?

Influential marketing is the new age version of celebrity endorsement as it offers many benefits.

Boosts brand awareness by converting audience to customers as influencers will actively engage with them
Expose the brand to an entirely new audience for building trust among them to buy the products and be loyal customers
Enables reach of a niche audience by making closer and direct connections with them to have higher engagement and more interaction with their followers
Improves SEO to generate natural inbound backlinks to the site by having authority sites with quality content in the niche business

Only the best influencer marketing agency can provide all the above benefits and more for having the best ROI for influential marketing for ecommerce businesses.

When should you use influencer marketing for ecommerce

Launching a new brand

When you set up your new ecommerce store, your reach is limited to your friends, family and colleagues. These social media personalities can come to your assistance. They have the audience you want, and with their help, you gain exposure to hundreds if not thousands of potential customers.

Let's see how you can do that.

Contests and giveaways

Who doesn't love free stuff? As part of your ecommerce influencer marketing campaign, ask your creators to organize a competition, and the prize to be won can be one of your products. People will actively interact with your brand when there is some to be gained at the end.

Of course, you need to set some criteria for entry. For instance, ask your contestant to share your posts, tag a friend in the comments or follow your brand on social media.

Launching a product

Are you a prominent brand within your industry? Do you think influencer marketing for ecommerce brands is a thing of the past? - think again. Launching a new product can be just as challenging as launching your first one - even more if the market is saturated with suppliers.

If you can help generate more sales, link clicks and awareness by using the following methods.

Product unboxing videos

Unboxing videos are a surefire way to get more comments, views and overall engagement. The process is relatively simple. All you need to do is send your products to your Influencer and ask them to create/upload content on platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

In the video, the ecommerce influencer will speak about your product's features and benefits and how its usage will help your consumers.

Product reviews

Put yourself in your customer's shoes. Suppose you are presented with two scenarios. First, a brand is advertising its products directly. Second, the Influencer you trust is endorsing the same brand.

Now, between the brand and Influencer, who prompted you to purchase the product? - I think the answer is obvious.

91% of millennials trust Influencers the same way they trust their family and friends. How can you use this to your business's benefit? Well, for your ecommerce influencer marketing strategy, you can have your social media stars create blogs or videos where they review your brand's offerings - this results in more awareness and adds to your social proof.

Thank you for staying with us till the end. We hope you have gained valuable insights from our article.

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