In the next five years, influencer marketing will grow into a whopping $5-10 billion industry. The question is – why are marketers spending a significant amount of their marketing budgets on influencer marketing?
It’s due to its high ROI. In fact, according to a study, influencer marketing can give 11 times the ROI of average display ads.
Image via TapInfluence
So, who exactly are influencers?
They are people who’ve amassed a massive following online. Their audience trusts them because they have established themselves as experts in a specific subject or niche. Additionally, influencers post content relevant to their niche regularly to keep their audiences engaged.
This ensures that their audience is relevant and highly engaged. As a result, when you partner with influencers, your audience is likely to be better than a random audience chosen for ads.
That is why so many brands are adopting influencer marketing and increasing their budgets for it too; it’s the future of sales practices.
Here are six ways through which you can leverage influencer marketing to grow your retail brand:
1. Set Campaign Goals
It’s essential to set your goals before you can start looking for influencers. These campaign goals will help you design the entire campaign, and based on them, you can also set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your performance.
Do you want the audience to know your brand or, do you want them to make a purchase? Do you want them to walk into your store or, do you want them to visit your website? Whatever your goals may be, they need to be well-defined.
Setting your goals will also help you give a clear brief to the influencers on what has to be done. Remember, if you don’t know your goal, you cannot measure it. And if you can’t measure it, you will never know what worked and what didn’t.
2. Choose the Right Influencers & Platforms
There are loads of influencers out there with a varying number of followers. You must decide if you want to partner with micro-influencers or macro-influencers. This decision will greatly depend on your goal.
Micro-influencers typically have a high engagement rate but have between 10k-100k followers. On the other hand, macro-influencers have more than 100k followers.
If engagement is your goal, and you have a small budget, micro-influencers may be the right choice for you. On the other hand, if you want to increase your reach, macro-influencers might be the better choice.
Adidas, in their latest initiative, dubbed “The Tango Squad FC Show,” featured some of the best street footballers from their network of micro-influencers in a web-series divided into two seasons.
While partnering with influencers is helpful, you need to be selective when choosing a platform for your promotion. Nearly 69% of marketers feel that Instagram is the best platform for influencer marketing.
To make the search for influencers easier, you can use influencer discovery platforms. Many software solutions help you to manage your influencer marketing campaign with ease too.
3. Offer Special Deals to Audience
Once you’ve partnered with the influencers, you need to come up with innovative ways of promoting your campaign.
For this, you can use AI-powered platforms such as Cortex, which can suggest content that your audience will love. This can help you figure out what will mutually benefit you and the influencer you are collaborating with, along with your target audience.
Then you can give each influencer a unique discount code or a purchase link to track their performance.
Image via Instagram
Retail brand, FabFitFun, partnered with influencer, Jaclyn Ram (@myviewinheels), and provided an exclusive discount code to her followers. It became a win-win situation for both the brand as well as the influencer as the post generated significant engagement.
Alternatively, you can announce giveaways by asking the audience to perform certain tasks to win. For instance, you can ask them to tag their friends in the comments or visit your website to register for the giveaway. This can generate engagement on your posts and send traffic to your website.
4. Social Media Takeovers
Social media takeovers are a great way to announce your collaboration with an influencer. At the same time, they add some novelty to your content.
Let the influencers take over your social media accounts for a day during which they can conduct different activities like tutorials, contests, polls, and more.
This way, you can attract the influencer’s audience directly to your page while also entertaining your existing audience.
However, you must be careful while doing such a collaboration. You must create a contract in advance that details the deliverables from each party. It should also include the duration of the takeover.
5. Invite Them Over
Yet another innovative way of partnering with influencers is to invite them over to visit your company. This way, you can give their audience a behind-the-scenes look at your company.
Give them a quick tour of your store, manufacturing plant, or an event you’re hosting. When they post content related to your brand on their social media accounts, it will increase your reach.
At the same time, their followers will get an inside look into your organization. This can help build your brand image online.
6. Track the Influence
Lastly, keep an eye on what is working well and what can be improved. Just like other forms of marketing, you need to track the progress of your campaigns.
Track important KPIs based on your campaign’s goals and find out what’s working well and what isn’t. For this, you can use software solutions like Finteza. Based on the conclusions you draw from the analytics, you can optimize your influencer marketing campaign.
The unique link or discount code you provide to the influencer’s audience can help you track quantitative goals. You should also check your increase in followers, website visitors, and so on.
Additional Tips:
Here are some additional tips to leverage influencers for marketing your retail brand.
- Experiment to find out which type of influencers and what kind of content works the best for you.
- Document the goals of the collaboration and express your expectations to the influencer in advance.
Final Thoughts
Globally, brands have realized the value of connecting with their audiences on an emotional level. Influencer marketing has become a great way to achieve this connection. To do it effectively, you must decide on your goals, find the right influencers, and partner with them.
You can announce giveaways or offer special deals to your influencers. Alternatively, you can organize social media takeovers. You can also invite the influencers over to your company and encourage them to give their audience behind-the-scenes look into your brand. Lastly, be sure to track all the major KPIs to figure out what’s working for your brand and what isn’t. This can help you further optimize your campaigns.
Have you done influencer marketing in the past? If so, let us know your experiences in the comments section.