Influencer commerce programs are a highly effective strategy for brands aiming to engage their target audiences throughout the entire customer journey - from awareness all the way through purchase.
Running successful influencer commerce programs requires more than just collaborating with social media stars at the top of the funnel. It's about crafting a comprehensive strategy that aligns your brand with the right influencers who can engage consumers across channels to boost sales and brand loyalty.
To help brands achieve their highest potential from their influencer commerce programs, we are sharing our top five success strategies.
#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:
Working with influencers allows brands to quickly test and scale content to determine which channels, content types, and content themes resonate most with their target audiences. Producing this same level of content in-house is cost and time-prohibitive.
Influencers are the experts in optimizing content for social media algorithms.
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
Lately, there has been significant discussion in the influencer industry as brands aim to maximize the effectiveness of their influencer programs. Often, brands keep their general content production separate from their influencer marketing efforts, creating a gap and missing out on the opportunity to integrate the two for a more streamlined digital presence.
Forward-thinking pioneers in the digital marketing have realized that they can repurpose influencer campaign content for all their content requirements. What motivates brands to adopt this approach? Insights from our podcast discussions and conversations with digital commerce leaders have highlighted a few key 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.
#4 - Apply an Always-On Influencer Strategy to Maximize Return
Many brands focus on key tentpole moments throughout the year to support product launches, shopping holidays, and other seasonally relevant events. However, developing an evergreen and always-on influencer content strategy can significantly increase your SEO footprint year-round. This is especially important for products with a longer consideration cycle, as buyers are filling their carts and making decisions months before they plan to finally hit that purchase button.
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 that 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, building momentum over time after a campaign is over.
Sales will often follow the same path. Post-campaign sales cannot be ignored when evaluating influencer ROI.
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.