How to Use Influencer Marketing to Maximize eCommerce Sales in 2019

How to Use Influencer Marketing to Maximize eCommerce Sales in 2019

If you use ad blockers and follow certain people on Instagram or YouTube, then you could become a potential target for influencer marketing. The first thing to do when approaching influencer marketing is to identify your target audience because it will dictate the choice of social media platform. It is important to know exactly what people like and need because you are launching a marketing campaign for them. Choosing the best social media platform Below you will find an overview of the most popular social media platforms used by eCommerce businesses. Since you want people to learn about your products and buy them, these platforms are the best for posting reviews and holding competitions or giveaways. Choosing the perfect influencer for your brand Once you have a list of influencers (up to 100 potential candidates), pitch them and ask more about their values, what they think about their audience and whether they are interested in a collaboration. So when choosing an influencer, look at the engagement from their followers but not at their number. Outline the main points that you’d like them to mention: an announcement of a sale, discount, or a new product line. Important: make sure the post will be labeled as sponsored or will have this caption. Entertaining content One more campaign is simply featuring the product in content.

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How to Use Influencer Marketing to Maximize eCommerce Sales in 2019

If you use ad blockers and follow certain people on Instagram or YouTube, then you could become a potential target for influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is all about building connections with people and presenting your product in an honest and transparent way. For eCommerce, this is especially important. With tight competition and declining impact of paid ads, the industry has to come up with a brand-new marketing strategy that is persuasive for shoppers. Influencer marketing seems to be the perfect fit.

Influencer marketing 101

Influencers differ from celebrities in the following way:

  • Smaller audience
  • More authenticity
  • Better engagement

The main point about influencers is that they share the same values and interests as their audience and therefore are perceived as honest and reliable.

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Today social media platforms contribute to revenue generation and audience reach significantly. 30% of online shoppers are willing to buy from a social media platform and 23% of the shoppers say they are influenced by recommendations from social media.

Social media is the natural habitat of influencers so it’s a great opportunity for a brand to reach the correct audience in a natural and non-obtrusive manner. Don’t forget the fact that more and more people are getting annoyed with sponsored ads and actively use ad-blocking technology to avoid seeing an unwanted advertisement.

Summing up, influencer marketing is:

  • Native.
  • Not annoying.
  • Corresponding with an audience’s values.

For eCommerce specifically, social media is a new marketplace with vast opportunities for growth and promotion. Considering the level of customization of certain eCommerce platforms (Magento, mostly), the incorporation of social media in a store is a piece of cake. So once you have everything ready, you can go ahead and outline your influencer marketing strategy.

Before you start planning how to reach influencers and what kind of campaign to launch, there are some steps to take.

Groundwork: prepare for big deeds

Ok, so you want to collaborate with influencers in order to reach your audience and sell your product to them. From there comes a question: do you have a clear portrait of your target audience?

The first thing to do when approaching influencer marketing is to identify your target audience because it will dictate the choice of social media platform. If you have multiple target audiences, choose in accordance with the campaign goals.

Once you have a clear and defined portrait of your audience, you can:

  • Send surveys to learn about their preferences.
  • Do research about the social media behavior of your shoppers.
  • Have a closer look at the competition and its strong and weak points.

It is important to know exactly what people like and need because you are launching a marketing campaign for them. And if you miss the target, you may not only lose money but hurt your reputation too.

Alongside the audience research, set your goals. Influencer marketing can serve one of the following:

  • Drive customer acquisition
  • Build awareness
  • Both!

Every goal requires a different social media platform for better results. So we are gliding towards the next step in your influencer marketing campaign, which is the platform choice.

Choosing the best social media platform

Below you will find an overview of the most popular social media platforms used by eCommerce businesses. Each of them helps achieve different objectives and serves a different audience so choose what will be the best for your business.

Instagram

Last year, Instagram claimed to have approximately 1 billion active users and the number seems to grow in a steady manner. Here are the main takeaways on Instagram:

  • Audience: 35 years old and younger; the majority of the users are female.
  • Great for: growing awareness, expanding audience reach, communicating with your audience.
  • What’s awesome about it: Instagram Stories are gaining immense popularity and now offer an option to tag products so they are shoppable on the platform.

YouTube

YouTube is a powerful social media platform with about 2 billion monthly active users.

  • Audience: millennials and boomers between 25-44 years old; the majority of the users are male.
  • Great for: both branding and traffic acquisition.
  • What’s awesome about it: it works efficiently at every part of the marketing funnel, offers engaging visual content and, at the same time, drives traffic to your site.

Snapchat

This platform caters for the youngest audience among them all but is a force to be reckoned with.

  • Audience: between 18-24 years old; the majority of the users are female.
  • Great for: creating a buzz in real time.
  • What’s awesome about it: the spontaneous nature of posting on Snapchat can help your brand gain incredible audience reach, if the post is crafted well.

Since you want people to learn about your products and buy them, these platforms are the best for posting reviews and holding competitions or giveaways.

Fantastic influencers and where to find them

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