Influencer marketing is quickly becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools around. In fact, 63% of marketers intend to increase their influencer marketing budget in the next year. If you’re not already allocating a chunk of your budget to influencer marketing, now is the time.
Creator marketing can help drive brand growth across the entire purchasing funnel, especially since video-heavy platforms like TikTok make recommendations from influencers feel personal, relatable, and trusted. Influencers make ads that don’t feel like ads — making it easier than ever to target high-interest consumers.
Get our top five tips to build a strong foundation for your influencer marketing plan avoid the common pitfalls brands experience when navigating this new territory.
The first thing to consider before investing is your ideal influencer profile. For Startups, it’s best to stay in the micro-influencer or nano-influencer range (more on that in a bit).
It is essential to consider their niche, values, and engagement rate to ensure that they align with your brand's message and resonate with your target audience. Take the time to research and select the right influencer who can add value to your campaign and help you achieve your marketing goals.
We’ll explore the pros and cons of each influencer so you can weigh your options to make your investment go the extra mile.
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When it comes to influencer marketing, there are some common mistakes that e-commerce brands tend to make—first is choosing the wrong influencer for their brand. Startups need to select influencers who have a genuine interest in their products or services. Clear goals and expectations need to be set from the get go.
This ties closely to the second biggest mistake—focusing solely on follower count instead of engagement rates. Many brands miss the mark by only working with an influencer because of their number of followers and end up overlooking what really matters—a content fit and engagement rates.
Startups should be looking for influencers who have a high level of engagement with their followers, as this indicates a more loyal and active audience. That’s where the power of Nano and Micro-Influencers comes into play.
Sometimes less is more. Rather than shooting for one celebrity partnership, it’s becoming a smarter marketing strategy to partner with several smaller-scale micro-influencers. Platforms like Upfluence make it easy for Startups to connect with budget friendly nano and micro-influencers
These smaller influencers are generally incredibly connected to their online communities, engaging with followers 1:1— giving them loads of influencing power.
Since there’s no try-before-you-buy in e-commerce, consumers often rely on word-of-mouth to justify online purchases. In fact, 88% of consumers placed the highest level of trust in word-of-mouth recommendations from people they know.
To make sure you are partnered with the best micro-influencers for your brand, you can use apps like Whym to capture intent-to-buy data and get granular about your influencer marketing campaigns. By using the first-party data collected through widgets like Whym’s Text Me This Item Button, you are able to partner with influencers who appeal to people with a particular purchase intent — increasing the chances of converting those browsers into buyers.
61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations — more than branded social media content.
UGC is especially influential because it's coming from something other than the brand itself. People are more likely to trust a referral from a real person they know or relate to over a brand's message about how great they are and why you should buy their products. Getting products into the hands of their audience and letting them try and talk about them, brands can tap into the power of consumer-based marketing.
One way that you can make it easier than ever for consumers and brand affiliates to share UGC about your brand is through Whym’s shoppable collections. With Whym, your shoppers can create custom, shareable collections filled with products they bought, tried, and loved — including yours. They can share their custom collections via links with their friends, family, and followers alike — boosting conversions for you while generating organic social proof for your brand.
Let’s talk about stories.
2.35 billion people are actively using Instagram. 70% of those people watch Instagram stories daily, and 40% of Instagrammers post stories daily. Pretty much every social media platform is following suit, with TikTok launching a story feature in 2022. What does this mean for your brand? People are now shopping directly from those stories, and it makes sense — they’re already there.
Having an influencer shout out your brand in a story post is great exposure, but if the story isn’t actionable, it’s not going to lead to conversion. One way to make it easier for your brand partners to share your products to their stories is via Minishops — shoppable storefronts that can be linked to any story. It’s like a landing page, but buyable.
Minishops not only make it seamless to shop via social media stories, but they also give shoppers the ability to save items they want to remember via text message — allowing you to capitalize on shopper intent.
Now is the time to leverage brand partners and influencer marketing strategies to boost conversions, increase ROAS, and ultimately, help your brand thrive.
However, to stand out from the crowd, it's important to stay on top of social trends and adjust your strategies accordingly. Additionally, utilizing tools that capture intent data and power shareable storefronts like Whym can help you optimize your influencer marketing campaigns for success.
By staying up-to-date on the latest influencer marketing trends and providing your brand partners with the right tools, you can take your marketing game to the next level and drive outstanding results for your brand in 2023.
