Marketers and entrepreneurs are always in a search of cost-effective ways to promote their company and grow its revenue. Since e-commerce businesses are as dependant on sales as all the others, influencer marketing can be a real asset that assists with generating more profits at fewer costs.
The Tomoson influence marketing platform persuades that brands earn $6.50 per each $1 they invested on average. Moreover, influence marketing is a fast-growing channel that makes many companies think where to invest more: PPC, SEO or influencers?
A Brief Definition of Influencer Marketing
First of all, I should tell you who influencers are. An influencer is an individual with a certain amount of followers (which is rather large) on a certain social network. Consequently, the process of choosing the influencer who will be promoting your product or service is called influencer marketing.
What does this process consist of?
- Discovering in which social network your audience hangs out
- Finding a blogger whose content is appropriate to promote your product/service (and whose audience is likely to buy it)
Plain example: It is rather a bad idea to promote your computer assembling company on the fashion photographer's Instagram page.
Why is influencer marketing an important channel?
I bet you have seen advertising of different brands with the participation of celebrities dozens of times. Why is that? Consumers are more likely to trust third-parties than brands — especially if this brand is unknown to a wide audience.
It’s been reported that 90% of rising influencers have already cooperated with brands, while 70% cooperate with them constantly.
The popularity of this marketing channel is definitely rising and there are reasons for that. What are they, you ask? Read on.
1. It just works
Good old word-of-mouth still works great in the 21st century. The survey from Nielsen data analytics company finds out that about 92% of consumers tend to trust recommendations more than any other advertising channel.
This research shows the potential benefits of influencer marketing for your e-commerce brand pretty clearly. If the quality of your service and products that are being sold are on a due level, influence marketing will help you attract new loyal customers and, as a result, increase profits and brand awareness.
2. It’s in our nature
Influencer marketing helps you reach the right audience in their natural habitat — social networks. Most of us have a favourite social network where we spend a minute or two (or rather an hour or two) during the day.
Humans are social creatures experiencing the need for daily communication, and social networks are one of the most popular channels for communication these days. This makes influencer marketing even more attractive to some extent.
Why are big brands are so active on their social pages? Because it is simply a convenient way to stay in touch with their audience as well as conduct promotional activities.
3. It’s something that customers want
Surely, TV and print media advertising were the main channels allowing businesses to reach their target audience a two or three decades ago. But, things have changed.
Nowadays, there are more and more people are starting to prefer internet advertisement to commercials and print media ads. In addition, the latter are much more expensive in most cases. The internet offers businesses multiple advertising sources that are possible with almost any budget.
4. It’s good for SEO
It is not a secret that Google has a lot of brain behind their ranking algorithms. So how does influencer marketing affect your e-commerce website’s ranking? There are at least two explanations:
- Influencer marketing helps your e-commerce website get more inbound links
- Influence marketing affects the social reach of your e-commerce website which, in turn, has an influence on ranking
5. One more thing — monitor the performance of your campaigns
Following all the e-commerce and mobile commerce trends is not enough to build a successful business in this field. Since influence marketing is sort of a trend too, it does not mean the adherence to it will help you improve your sales.
You have to cooperate with the right influencers on the right platforms and monitor how your campaigns perform. In the case of unsatisfying results, you should find out the reason why it happened.
Here are the basic metrics you can monitor to learn the performance of your influence marketing campaign:
- Number of website visitors
- Social activity (shares and likes)
- Publicly available conversations (e.g. comments, posts) over social media when your brand’s name was mentioned
Examples of Successful Influence Marketing Campaigns
Let’s now consider a couple of interesting influence marketing campaigns and social media marketing campaigns that stood out and brought positive results.
Buick
Buick is a subsidiary company of General Motors Holdings. They have decided to show their upcoming Encore car model from different angles with the help of users of Pinterest.
What do I mean under ‘different angles?’ They asked various users from various spheres (out of the automotive industry) to show how they see the interior and exterior of the upcoming car.
Users who were taking part in the campaign had to craft a board reflecting their passions in style and life. The most creative boards were used to create a new colour and texture for the upcoming car.
What were the results of this social media campaign? The company has got over 17 millions of visitors from such social networks as Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Zara
This company asked Instagram influencers to become a part of their design project that resulted in the #iamdenim influence marketing campaign.
The main goal of this campaign was to show to the target audience that their clothing is more affordable compared with other brands.
The results were pretty impressive as this fashion retailer attracted about 4.6 millions of new users to the official Instagram page.
Remember one simple rule: the influence marketing campaign will have a short-term positive result if the service at your e-commerce store is poor and products that are being sold there are of low quality. Make sure all the client-focused aspect of your business are polished before launching such campaigns.
