Influencer Marketing promotions have become an absolute necessity for E-commerce businesses in 2021. They are quick and effective to increase brand recognition, trust and consumer loyalty. Data reveals that around 49% of consumers make online buys based on influencers' recommendations. Such is the potential of this powerful symbiotic relationship.
When you launch an influencer marketing campaign for your business, the influencers’ followers become your audience, and in addition, they also bring in new ones! Here are five pro-tips to strengthen your E-commerce strategy, increase your social media exposure and reinforce consumer decisions:
Plan a Platform-First Influencer Mix
A well-planned influencer media mix will add a human touch to the brand. It makes the promotional experience through social media platforms more personalised and credible for your audience. Businesses should collaborate with influencers having different follower levels, be it micro, nano or mega influencers, as this will help in increasing their reach and allow them to tap into niche audience segments.
Brands can also organise quizzes, competitions, and contests for their consumers via influencers on social media to create buzz and enhance brand exposure. Influencers, too, can implement affiliate marketing by using customised URLs and promo codes to bring organic traffic to your E-commerce website.
Sell Stories and Experiences
People do not buy just goods and services; they buy relations, stories, and magic. Hence, businesses should focus on selling stories and experiences through influencers to build trust and relationship with consumers. Influencers can push consumers to break their 'media fasting' and support in giving your brand the required consumer attention and acknowledgement.
Data says that influencer content performs 2.7 times better than regular branded advertising content through paid channels. Take brands like Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom; for example, they have collaborated with various fashion influencers to promote their brand stories on Instagram via innovative posts and reels. This made the consumers embrace brand authenticity and also assisted in increasing business revenue.
Amplify Your ROI
An influencer marketing campaign is fundamental to boost your E-commerce sales and to drive heavy returns on investment. Studies tell us that influencer marketing strategies offer an ROI that is eleven times higher than non-influencer digital marketing campaigns.
D2C E-commerce businesses should offer lucrative incentives through influencers in the form of referral codes or tracking links in order to increase traction and engagement numbers. Capitalising across social media platforms can be done, wherein influencers use hashtags/tags within their stories and posts to redirect followers and new consumers to your website.
Brand Awareness & Promotion
In today's D2C landscape, brands can take advantage of influencer-created content to improve engagement, create brand awareness, enhance promotions and post more content without overwhelming followers’ feed. Influencers can help narrow the business sales funnel and get more leads for conversions by prompting relevant, targeted customer traffic.
Influencers can contribute to your website blogs and write product reviews to create more natural social interaction with your target audience, which can easily be converted into sales. For example, Glossier, a beauty brand, has an influential community called 'Glossier Girls' wherein followers can use their unique URLs and get a 20% discount on their first purchase.
Beef up Brand Loyalty
Businesses should encourage consumers to give referrals by offering influencer-specific brand loyalty memberships, which will make them feel like a part of the influencer community. While collaborating with influencers, businesses should focus on GenZ and millennial demographics to re-share UGC (User-generated content).
Work on cross-promotions aggressively wherein consumers can see that the relationship between the influencer and the E-commerce business is positive. This will help urge more sales. Businesses should use influencer marketing platforms like Trend to enable them to verify preferable influencers, hyper-target consumers, and cut campaign costs.
Influencer marketing is an absolutely viable and essential strategy for us as marketers. The goal becomes to utilise an army of influencers supporting in building and developing the E-commerce business faster. It is not needed for a company to spend big bucks here, as there is a little known truth that more followers do not necessarily equate to more influence.
It is critical to focus on setting your marketing campaign in sync with the influencers, your audience and your objective. Businesses must focus on cultivating trusting relationships with influencers to engage them with their brand and manage them to build a vast media network.
