In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, influencer commerce programs have emerged as a powerhouse strategy for brands seeking to connect with their target audiences. From fashion and beauty to tech gadgets and lifestyle products, influencers have become the modern trendsetters, wielding significant influence over consumer behavior.
However, running successful influencer commerce programs requires more than just collaborating with social media stars. It's about crafting a comprehensive strategy that aligns your brand with the right influencers and leverages their reach to boost sales and brand loyalty.
That's why we pulled together our picks for the top five crucial considerations you must keep in mind when running influencer commerce programs, guiding you on the path to success in this dynamic and exciting realm. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or new to influencer partnerships, these insights will help you navigate the intricacies of this flourishing landscape and make the most of this promising channel.
#1 - Optimize content for social media algorithms
Since social media has an enormous presence in influencing purchase decisions, we need to think about the best ways to source that content. Influencer partners are the obvious choice for scaling brand presence on social for a few key reasons:
- Brands can easily partner with many influencers to easily scale their social presence and figure out what asset types are resonating with their core audience.
- Producing content in-house can delay the process of understanding what content works due to slower scaling.
- Producing content in-house can delay the process of understanding what content works due to slower scaling.
- Influencers are the experts in optimizing content for social media algorithms.
- Influencers make their living off of making content that resonates with their audience.
In fact, 59% of survey respondents are loyal to the influencers that they follow and make purchases based on the influencer's recommendations, even if the product is a more expensive, higher quality product. This data presents a huge opportunity for advertisers to capitalize on the bond that influencers have with their audience, as long as the partnership connects with the influencer's vertical.
Consumers Trust Influencer Reviews on Social Media for their Product Recommendations
Are consumers listening to product reviews on social or is it just noise? To answer this, we surveyed hundreds of consumers in the US to ask them where they go when they need a recommendation for a product that they're looking to buy.
The result was about 1 in 5 consumers are prioritizing social media products reviews as their #1 trusted source for recommendations. This is a huge reason that more and more brands are using influencers to scale their presence on social.
#2 - Repurpose Influencer Content Throughout Your Full Digital Shelf
This is has been a huge talking point in the influencer industry lately as brands look to get the best bang for their buck when running their influencer programs. Often times brands will separate their general content production from their influencer marketing programs, causing a gap and a missed opportunity to combine the two in order to streamline their assets for their digital shelf.
Some of the brightest minds and first-movers in the digital space figured that they could run influencer campaigns, then utilize those same videos for all of their content needs. Why are brands doing this? From our conversations on our podcast and other talks with leaders in the digital commerce space, we've learned there are a few main reasons:
- Influencers are professional photographers and videographers that will make high-quality content worthy of any placements on the digital shelf at a cost usually similar, or less than production companies.
- Content Consistency: Repurposed influencer videos help maintain a consistent brand message and image. When the content aligns with the brand's values and identity, it reinforces the core message across different touchpoints, enhancing brand recognition.
- Relatability: Influencers are real people that will adapt and learn your brand messaging. They create content that not only works and thrives on their own channels, but is aimed at appealing to a mass audience on other channels.
Repurposing influencer videos allows brands to extract more value from their initial investment. By using the same content in different formats and across multiple platforms, they can reach a broader audience without the need for additional resources or content creation costs.
Here are some thought starters stemming from how the top digital marketers in the industry are repurposing videos generated from their influencer programs:
- Video content for reviews on product pages
- Email marketing
- Whitelisted paid social
- Display/native advertising
- Offline advertising such as billboards
#3 - Know How Influencer Channel Size Affects Sales
You may have an idea in your head that "the bigger the influencer, the more expensive they are, but the better the results will be." Well, yes and no. There are two major factors brands should consider when thinking about the size of the influencers that they work with:
- What social platform are you looking to build a presence on?
- What are your overall influencers KPIs?
From gen.video campaign data, we see that different channel size groups excel at selling depending on the platform you're using. For this specific study, we took a look at Instagram and YouTube to see who the top-selling influencers were by channel size.
For YouTube overall, we saw that bigger influencers definitely had a higher impact on selling products, with a sweet spot in the 500k-1M subscriber range.
For Instagram overall, we saw something different as the influencers in the 10k-100k follower range performed the best in terms of sales.
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Of course, this is just referring to selling products. When thinking about your overall KPIs, different platforms like TikTok can excel in getting the most video views due to the higher chance that a post will go viral. Here's a general overview of a few common KPIs and which platforms may be best at accomplishing them:
- YouTube
- Sales of products that require a lot of storytelling and explanation (think of Laptops)
- Safe, reliable CPV metrics
- Instagram
- Sales of products that are easy to understand (think CPG, "You see it, you like it, you buy it").
- One of the best platform options for brands focused on getting engagements
- TikTok
- Also great at selling CPG goods due to the short-form video nature of the platform
- High chance of going viral and getting enormous amounts of video views for brands focused on CPV.
#4 - Apply an Always-On Influencer Strategy to Maximize Return
Campaign lengths are a hot topic in influencer marketing as brands have seen success with varying methods. It makes sense to have pushes around product launches, shopping holidays, or other events that are specifically beneficial to a brand.
But something marketers need to be thinking about is considering the value of evergreen content and always-on influencer strategies that significantly increase your SEO footprint. We’ll dive into some reasoning behind that, but long story short:
- Buyers are filling their carts and making decisions months before they plan to buy
- An always-on content strategy is recommended across the board to index year-round
- Specific individual product pushes usually last between 2-6 weeks depending on the brand, platform, and amount of Creators.
- Post-campaign influencer metrics (impressions, sales, etc.) need to be included in ROI reports
As the top minds in the industry know, finding out the ‘Why’ behind points like these is how you take your campaigns to the next level. So, let’s go over some of that.
How Does the Buyer Decision Process Affect Content Timing?
When thinking about the overall consumer buying process, there are several personas to consider when setting the strategy of your marketing programs. In order to cater to last minute shoppers, impulse buyers, buyers like to plan ahead, and any other types of consumers, always-on content strategies are necessary to capture all available value, as well as optimize indexing opportunities.
According to research from our quarterly consumer analysis, shoppers are looking and filling their carts months ahead of when they actually plan to buy. One in every five consumers surveyed said that they’re buying as far as 1-2 months ahead of a shopping event.
If you start posting content in short intervals close to a product launch or shopping holiday, you’re missing out on all of the carts that are filled well before your campaign even started. This causes you to completely miss out on pure value from consumers that like to plan ahead and have already gone through the brand consideration phase months ago.
#5 - Capitalize on the SEO Value of Evergreen Influencer Content
One of the top benefits of running influencer marketing is that the posts live on forever (excluding placements like IG stories, etc.) and if you’re utilizing the always-on strategy mentioned above, indexing will naturally become exponentially easier so you can stand out from your competitors.
In general, when thinking about SEO and indexing as it relates to influencer marketing:
- SEO Benefits are generally underappreciated in the industry
- Views and impressions often have a snowball effect component, building momentum over time after a campaign is over.
- FYI sales will often follow the same path. Post-campaign sales cannot be ignored when evaluating influencer ROI. Many influencer marketers still don’t track sales, mainly because some don’t know that tools like Traail exist.
By the time SEO benefits are recognized, a brand manager can be in an entirely different role, so setting up a method of tracking this type of information over time is vital to any marketer utilizing influencers.
We cover more on indexing and SEO in our Long-Term SEO Value of Influencer Marketing post, so be sure to check that out to learn more.