Investing in influencer marketing as a brand initiative can feel risky. There are many variables involved in partnering with creators – and many ways for it to fall apart if not done correctly.
If you’re new to the world of influencer marketing, you may be wondering if it’s right for your ecommerce brand. After all, there’s significant revenue to be captured online – nearly $5 trillion anticipated in 2021. And more than $6 trillion expected by 2024. If you want to stay relevant—and capture your piece of the pie—you need to stay relevant with your consumers.
These days, consumers value the opinions and recommendations of influencers as much as they do their real-life friends. So if you have an ecommerce brand, influencer marketing is a wise and necessary investment – if you do it the right way.
How to Make Influencer Marketing Work for Your Ecommerce Brand
1. Partner with the right people.
First and foremost, partnering with the right creators is what will make your influencer marketing efforts effective. Savvy buyers value credibility and authenticity, which is why aligning with relatable influencers is a foundational step ecommerce brands need to do in building out this channel. This one step is the best way to build trust, which turns followers into purchasers on your platform.
People who follow your influencer feel like they’re getting recommendations… not sales pitches. It’s the complete opposite vibe from traditional advertising, commercials, or product placement. In influencer marketing, creators offer a peek into their lives, which often includes products or services they’re passionate about. This tone and desired experience is exactly what makes influencer marketing so impactful – and it’s the number one reason you need to recruit authentic, relatable influencers who want a win-win for themselves, your brand, and their community.
2. Set up effective management systems.
One of the biggest headaches ecommerce brands experience when stepping into influencer marketing is the setup process. Finding the right creators, developing the relationship, setting expectations for content review, handling the admin. And these steps can be daunting if you’re a marketer who already has too much on their plate. In fact, all the “to-dos” associated with influencer marketing campaigns are actually what make many brands reticent to try. One way to get around this is to set up effective management systems, like what Creatable offers.
This platform brings together:
- A marketplace to “shop” and recruit influencers.
- A simple content review/approval system so you can sign off on creative and have it go live within seconds.
- Robust tracking with reliable real-time data and simple visual reports.
- Influencer payouts so you don’t have to go through yet another set of processes to pay your creators.
When you have the right management systems, you can streamline the entire process and put your influencer campaigns to work faster, more efficiently, and with less stress.
3. Use the right backend technology.
Customers who buy via social media platforms know to go to a link in bio, swipe up, or click a pic to directly make a purchase. But in traditional models, you have to rely on the platform’s analytics to tell the story of what happens there… then attempt to match them up with your own internal system to complete the story. This is time consuming and not always accurate.
The next wave of technology allows for first party tracking – based on custom web pages and native integration into your own backend. So you can see the full picture all in one place. As an ecommerce brand, you need fast, reliable access to data so you can determine what efforts are moving the needle and which need work. Online sales require real-time decisions, which means you don’t have time to try to parse together separate data sources and hope they’re right. To make influencer marketing work for your ecommerce brand, go with a first party tracking model.
These days, there’s no need for expensive custom software or coding to give you a platform influence marketers dream of. Creatable offers native integration with most ecommerce platforms (Salesforce, Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, SAP, and many more) to not only enhance the consumer buying experience, but also to give you real time data because everything you need is directly linked into your own ecommerce platform.
And best of all, content creators love working with brands that integrate with Creatable because they don’t have to chase down busy stakeholders or be out of alignment with their partners. They have a one stop shop to create content, get it approved, publish it, track results, and collect payment.
To find out more about how Creatable will help you optimize your influencer campaigns for ecommerce, simplify your marketing operations, and generate intentional, sustainable ROI across your campaigns, schedule a demo with us here.
