The influencer marketing size has grown considerably over the past few years. In 2021, the industry achieved a record value of $13.8 billion, and it is likely to develop into $22.3 billion by 2024. In today’s competitive marketing landscape, marketers are collaborating with social media influencers more than ever before to gain more traffic and potential customers to their website or e-commerce store.
For 80% of marketers, influencer marketing has proven to be very effective, and 71% of them claim that the quality of traffic and customers resulting from influencer marketing is better than other sources. Then, it may suffice to say that influencer marketing is a must-have strategy for your business to raise brand awareness and boost sales. However, to set up an ideal influencer marketing campaign and spend your budget more efficiently, here are some tips on finding the right influencers to explode your e-commerce store. If you are interested in knowing more about the topic, continue reading this post.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is essential when it comes to finding the right influencers. Your target audience is not everyone but a specific group of people who are more interested in your content, product, or service. You should know about their demographics, psychographics, location, shopping interests, and more. Therefore, you need to conduct thorough research to define your target audience in detail. Depending on the products you offer in your e-commerce store, you may have varying audiences based on age or gender. In this case, it might be best to hire more than one influencer.
2. Pick the Right Platform for Influencer Marketing
Knowing your target audience will help you to identify the social media platforms that they use. For example, if you know that your target audience is very active on Instagram, you should build your loyal and organic following there. It has to be noted that an efficient Instagram growth service will help you reach out to more targeted and interested followers organically and gradually. Therefore, incorporating the service into your social selling strategy is crucial because if you don’t reach your potential customers on social media, they are more likely to buy from your competitors who have a strong presence on these channels. Hence, having an established presence on various platforms like Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, or Twitter helps build brand awareness and find more potential buyers.
3. Search for the Right Influencers
Most marketers think that selecting the right influencers is their biggest challenge in this process. It may sound scary because while searching, you must pay attention to several key factors. Let’s look at them:
- Work with influencers who have a relevant audience for your business. After all, their audience is yours too.
- Choose the influencers who have built a highly engaged community on the platform. Sometimes the best results are from micro or nano influencers with smaller but much more niche and engaged followings. Note that having a highly engaged audience is crucial if you expect people to act, such as purchasing from your e-commerce store.
- Authentic expert influencers who love your products or services will be great ambassadors for you. Industry professionals or niche-relevant tech influencers who have a proven interest in a specific topic are more reliable and trustworthy partners.
- The right influencers should share your values and interests. To get a sense of their values, check out their bio, photos & videos, and captions.
- Also, try to check their content quality to see whether it can represent you well enough or not?
- If you do not have enough time to find the right and relevant influencers searching through hundreds of accounts, you can easily take advantage of some tools or online services that help you find your ideal influencers.
Some Pro Tips for Influencers to Increase their Chance of Being Selected by Marketers
As an influencer, you should focus on the factors essential for businesses in setting up their influencer marketing campaigns. For example, in addition to the number of followers, ensure that the engagement rate is also high. If you are an Instagram Influencer, consider using an Instagram unfollow app to eliminate fake and inactive (or ghost) followers who can lower your engagement rate. Therefore, you should be proactive and do a regular audit of your followers to remove those accounts that serve no purpose to you.
As mentioned earlier, your content quality is very determinant. Having a content strategy that is relevant, cohesive, consistent, and eye-appealing plays a significant role in your success. Then, suppose you have lots of old irrelevant posts on your Instagram account that make you feel embarrassed about them or plan to revamp your content strategy. In that case, you can use an Instagram post deleter to remove multiple posts at once.
4. Co-host an Influencer Contest or Giveaway
Influencer promotions, contests, and giveaways are great marketing tactics to elevate your e-commerce sales. To do this, you host the giveaway or contest in partnership with the right influencer. The strategy allows you to reach thousands or millions of organic followers that Influencers have on their socials. It also lets influencers increase their social media engagement rate, creating a win-win situation for both parties.
The giveaway entry method can be defined in various ways to achieve your desired business goals. For instance, influencers should direct their followers to your site if you aim to boost website traffic. Moreover, employ practical tools such as an Instagram giveaway picker to choose random winners fairly and impartially.
5. Let Influencers Advertise Your E-commerce Store Authentically
Based on a study conducted by Twitter, 40% of users had purchased an online product after seeing it endorsed by an influencer. The research further revealed that an influencer’s opinions are worth almost as much as a recommendation from a friend or family member when making purchasing decisions. Therefore, you should give influencers the freedom to review or market your product or service in the way they prefer. Most influencers do not like to be told what to create and share. So, it is better to trust them to create authentic and engaging content for you. However, it is necessary to have a tracking system to monitor your campaign’s performance constantly.
Conclusion
Choosing the right influencer is one of the most common challenges in influencer marketing since not every influencer will help your business stand out and increase sales. That is why knowing how to find the right influencers is so essential to your business’ success. Here, we discussed some tips on selecting an influencer to help you drive more traffic and conversion rates to your e-commerce store. However, if you are too busy to handle the whole process yourself, you can work with an influencer marketing agency to make things much easier for you.