E-Commerce: How to Create an Influencer Campaign for Your Brand

The last few years social media usage had significantly increased. This is combined with the fact that consumers rely on online shopping. After the pandemic and the rise of e-commerce, people prefer to do their shopping online either for products or services. These habits are most likely by 80% to continue for many years. Through online shopping, people can access anything that may need easily and hassle-free.

In E-commerce, any advertising strategy will be heavily dependent on social media platforms, and most specifically on influencer marketing. Below we will have a look at what is influencer marketing and how you can plan your influencer marketing campaign.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is related mostly to social media marketing, as most opinion leaders gather their audience from social platforms. Influencer marketing takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.

More specifically, a social media influencer is a content creator who has a significant following on social media. Here, we don’t necessarily mean a large number of people: paid influencers can have as few as a thousand followers as a nano influencer.

Influencers can occupy different roles within a niche or industry. Some, especially in the B2B space, or in E-commerce. Others are doing it either as a hobby, either run a blog or enjoy taking photographs of everyday life. Nevertheless, they are sharing these passions with a wider audience on social media.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

• Brand awareness growth
• Content strategy enrichment
• Cost-effectiveness
• Quality lead generation

For any influencer marketing campaign, the first thing you need to is planning. If you want to receive rewards for your campaign it is necessary to plan thoroughly. A good place to start is some research, on different Influencing marketing guides.

During the planning process you need to consider:

What is your campaign’s objective?

Here is where you define your goals. It could be brand awareness, drive sales or improve overall brand image, or increase content creation.

Who are your target audiences?

It is difficult to determine which type of audience you want to attract. Thus, you need to consider their interests and demographics. Your audience could be the same audience as your brand’s current audience or you might be targeting a different type of consumer through your new campaign. You need to focus on creating your «buyer persona» for the type of audience you want to target. You need to consider where they spend their time. Facebook? Instagram?

How much do you have to spend?

You need to consider how much you are willing to spend on this campaign, what is your budget? Your budget can determine which type of influencers you can work with. Also, you need to think about how many influencers you want, as well as the media type and Instagramers social media channel you choose. The costs differ whether you work with Instagram influencers or TikTok influencers.

What is your timeline?

Moving on to the final step. Here is the time when you need to decide the timeline you want for your campaign. Do you want to launch a campaign on a particular date or during a season? Perhaps you’re launching a seasonal line just in time for the holiday season. Consider doing that in advance.

Incentive

After the planning process when you have already established a budget you need to consider as well the type of incentive you want to offer influencers. Incentives can be monetary or non-monetary depending on the value of your product/service. Influencers are split into different categories including micro and nano influencers, macro and medium influencers, and influencers with managers. Micro-nano and macro–medium influencers usually don’t charge fees and if they do it’s a small price. However, influencers with managers or influencers with extremely high followers are more likely to charge fees.

In order to make e-commerce profitable is to offer influencers discount codes and a commission-based incentive. In this way, they will promote your product to their followers via a digital catalog and give them a discount code that will save them money.  Also, this will increase traffic to your site and result in increased sales as consumers are more likely to buy at a lower rate. Influencers will benefit as they will earn a commission for every person who uses their code.

Find influencers

The next step now is to find those influencers. You need to find influencers who will be right for your brand and your campaign. This can be done in many ways, but some will be more difficult than others. Influencers can be found manually with a simple search on Instagram; thus, this can be time-consuming it may prove to be the most efficient for your business.

You can also look for influencers within your follower list to find out if they are already fans of your brand. Then, you need to check your brand tags to identify potential influencers, have a look at the comments sections and check out if influencers might be interested to participate in your campaign.

Monitor Your Campaign

Before you launch your campaign, it is necessary to plan how you will track the progress of your campaign. A good example to do that is to set up a system to track key performance indicators and then analyze the campaign’s results at the end of the campaign. The most popular tool that has been used by many marketers and e-commerce professionals is Google Analytics. This free analytics tool can help you keep track of important information for your campaign:

• Published Content
• New followers gained
• Influencers drive website traffic
• Sales driven by influencers
• Impressions on Influencer Content
• Discount codes used

If you keep track of the metrics using an analytics tool you can be more organized when analyzing the success or failure of your campaign. The data can be analyzed to determine which influencer achieved the best results, which social platform performed well, and most importantly how many sales were made by these influencers.

Before any Influencer campaign, research and planning are essential. E-commerce businesses can use influencer marketing to achieve their goals, and the last few years’ influencing campaigns are the most successful. However, you need to always remember to proceed only with well-planned campaigns and ensure that the influencers chosen are the right fit for your brand.

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