How Influencer Marketing is Important for eCommerce

By Ray O’Donnell

Influencer marketing is becoming one of the rapidly-growing channels for brands beating paid search, organic search, and email marketing. As per one study by Statista, it has been found that global influencer marketing value has been more than doubled since 2019, which is around 13.8 billion U.S. dollars by 2021.

If traditional advertisements are inefficient to boost sales, eCommerce brands need to adopt other strategies to increase sales and reach the target audience. They can follow the eCommerce trends that are recommended by the experts.

One of the effective ways to grow your audience through social media channels is influencer marketing. You can design your social media strategy including influencers. Using celebrity influencers to help sell your products is a successful connective eCommerce strategy to spread awareness. It is impossible to have celebrity influencers by many brands where a similar influencer marketing system needs to be adopted.

Influencer marketing has gained its place amongst marketing channels due to its advantages. It helps increase brand awareness, build credibility, drive purchase decisions, and enhance sales. Leading brands have retained these strategies by leveraging the credibility of influencers with the help of sponsored endorsements.

Influencer marketing is useful if you find the right influencers and use effective methods while reaching out to influencers and getting responses from the right influencers.

Top companies and online marketplaces such as eWorldTrade have made remarkable success stories with the help of influencers. It is considered to be one of the most powerful marketing strategies for small or big social eCommerce brands. Thus, that’s the power of influencers.

Influencer marketing platforms help marketers to plan and design the right influencer marketing strategy for their businesses. Attrock- a digital marketing agency prepared the best list of Influencer marketing platforms and 

This article will guide you with various benefits, types of influencers, and ways to succeed in your business with influencer marketing that can help drive your business to the next level. 

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing can be defined as a type of marketing that uses influencers to promote a brand, product, or service to your target audience.

Depending on your campaign, whether it is SaaS influencer marketing or eCommerce influencer marketing, the goal is to leverage the influence of individuals to reach and engage with your specific target audience effectively.

They usually share the content for marketing your product to the audience they have connected with. Influencers may help to run contests, online live stream shopping, plan giveaways, or other events.

Social media influencers should be such that they can easily convince the customers to purchase a product and become returning customers. With increasing competition, getting your product in front of the right customers becomes equally challenging.

What is an Influencer?

An influencer can be defined as a person who has established credibility among their target audience. It can either be a blogger, Youtube channel star, an expert, or a person active on social media.

Many peoples get confused about affiliate marketing and influencer marketing. Both are different ways of promoting your business and brands. Affiliate marketing affiliate partners earn an affiliate commission to promote business. Businesses find the best affiliate marketing programs to get better results for their business and brands. In other ways, influencer marketing is the process in which business owners do collaborations with relevant influencers to promote their business and in return, they get a fixed amount. The amount may be per posting or campaign-based.

This strategy mainly focuses on driving your business to a larger market instead of marketing directly by yourself. The other two techniques, such as social media and content marketing, play a crucial role.

Influencers have a great skill in convincing large audiences to promote, purchase and follow a brand they feature on their pages. It is essential to look at certain factors before choosing an influencer which is as follows:

The cost of an influencer largely depends on the number of followers they have. 

Why Does Business Need Influencers?

Social proof is powerful and matters most to the people. As per the keyword research conducted, it is found that nearly 40% of Twitter users have purchased as a result of a Tweet from an influencer. For Pinterest and Instagram, the number is even much higher.

This marketing strategy is an effective way to build trust and create brand recognition, and it not only brings loyal customers but also encourages the customers they already trust. Hence, influencers have the incredible ability to drive more traffic to your site, increase engagement and sell your products.

Thus, influencers can be the perfect choice that will help to build trust among the audience.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

We will guide you with some of the benefits of influencer marketing and how it will help you to scale up your business which is as follows:

Helps increase brand awareness

Mass printing advertising materials, traditional newsletters, and blogging without any promotional activities have become outdated. Target audiences find influencers more engaging and genuine than other conventional advertisements.

Need an example?

Shopify store gets 220k pageviews for Coconut Bowels through a social media giveaway. Influencers can help you run these types of giveaways for your products and services.

When such a person recommends your product or service by writing a detailed product review and mentioning other platforms, it not only gains visibility but also helps to increase brand awareness.

It is equally essential to create fresh-looking content that can quickly grab the attention of your target audience. Thus, the created content should be meaningful and bring value for both followers and influencers. Quality content builds authority and also helps in boosting conversation rates.

Establishes Credibility

Influencers have a huge impact and maintain good relations with their followers, and this helps to have a significant influence on them. As a result, people may even follow them blindly. If they were to share about a great new nail salon, for example, their recommended products and opinions will matter to the target audience.

It is even believed that most of them also review from their favorite social media influencers instead of following the traditional celebrities.

Saves Time

It is possible to reduce the time to create your fans by collaborating with others in the market. It consumes considerable time producing the images, duplicating them, and scheduling the ads accordingly. By creating partnerships with influencers, they will help you in outsourcing and save time.

Influencer marketing helps to promote your brand through various channels. Even influencer-created content is becoming popular these days. Influencers also generate content while staying at their home or studios and deliver fresh content when required. 

Branded content can be reused or repurposed by companies to run marketing campaigns. As a result, using this content would save time and money. Thus, the feedback received can be used to target a specific group of customers.

Boosts Conversions

Influencers have the extraordinary ability to influence their followers in the direction of their products or services. They will provide their opinion and recommend the followers about the products they should invest in. As a result, it would turn content consumers into product buyers.

As per one study, 66% of brands would increase their influencer marketing budgets. After seeing a product promoted on either YouTube, Instagram, or any other social media platform, most people purchase it. TikTok is an emerging social media influencer platform and influencers and marketers increasing their TikTok followers over there and getting amazing results. TikTok for business is a trending topic for now and businesses considering TikTok for their marketing strategy.

This strategy is also effective for your dropshipping business. It helps to sell products online through social media platforms.

As a result, influencers can easily allure visitors to purchase and convert the lead into sales. 

Types of Influencers

Mainly influencers are of three types:

Mega Influencers

Mega Influencers are the ones having more than one million followers and can drive almost 2%-5% engagement per post. Moreover, generally, they have the highest reach and massive impact on the audience, and it helps to drive more engagement and increase sales.

Macro-Influencers

Macro-influencers are also known as “mid-tier influencers.” They have more than ten thousand to one million followers, and they can drive around 5%-25% engagement per post. They are more focused on specific niches like the fashion or clothing industry. 

Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers are more focused on specific niches or industries, and they are generally industry experts or specialists in that area. They have 1000 to 10,000 followers, and such influencers have strong relationships compared to other types of influencers.

Micro-influencers have the power to sway public opinion about brands. An Experticity survey found that 82% of people are “very likely” to act on influencer recommendations. Better still, micro-influencers are more direct in their recommendations, often urging their fans and followers to “try or buy” the products they review.

The reason why people trust micro-influencers so much is because these marketers put their money where their mouth is. They almost always promote brands and products they believe in or for personal use. In the long-term, this will help reduce the WooCommerce abandoned cart rate, improve sales, and overall business performance.

Ways to eCommerce success with Influencer Marketing

For eCommerce retailers to create a successful influencer-led effort, these factors should be present: 

Establishing social channels

Selecting the right social media platform is essential to running a successful campaign. It is crucial to determine who your target audience is and have an idea about the booming platforms among potential buyers. You can choose a better platform as per their social media engagement.

For example, if you run Facebook ads but your potential buyers prefer using Instagram, the campaign would surely fail. After choosing the perfect platform, it is crucial to analyze your target audience and define campaign objectives.

Find out the sites that your target audience uses the most. What is your aim behind influencer marketing? Do you want to drive more traffic, sales, engagement, or awareness? 

For example, Instagram is the best choice to spread awareness and increase engagement. According to Statista, the United States ranks first with an Instagram audience of over 130 million users by July 2020. Owing to the popularity of this photo posting site, business owners use Instagram feed to fetch Instagram images for creating beautiful Insta shop to grow and scale up your business. If sales are the primary goal, YouTube can be the most preferred choice.

Thus, after choosing the best platform, start searching for the perfect influencer.

Identifying right influencers

Identifying ideal influencers is one of the foremost and the most crucial steps in the entire process to promote your solar business opportunities. Without an influencer, a campaign is at the dead-end and cannot reach the target audience. You can find relevant influencers on various platforms such as Influencer search platforms. Influencers are also engaged with side hustles to earn extra money as per their expertise.

In a few years, social media influencers playing a big role in corporate social responsibility campaigns. They are more active over the available platforms to connect with their followers and fans. They can help you to boost your camping reach to big numbers audience and you can easily achieve your CSR goal in an effective way.

According to Forbes, identifying the right influencers is most challenging for almost 73% of respondents. An ideal influencer should easily align with the brand’s value and style. Finding influencers with all such qualities will help to quickly attract the target audience.

One can even effectively use Google and social search functions to locate influencers.

Being creative and trusting the influencer

While running a marketing campaign, influencers have proved to be capable enough of reaching a larger target audience and have even gained a trust level. And so, the focus should be given to content creation and facilitate the influencers to perform their best.

Content should be created in such a manner that helps to get the best followers and run the campaign effectively with good results. So, the influencers should be creative enough and specific enough. You can create infographics to show your data in visual mode and get more engagement.

There could be no better option than running a contest or planning a giveaway to generate buzz to build awareness. Giving discount codes through user-friendly payment platforms such as Shopify Payments to audiences would also help promote brand awareness among the target audience and make hassle-free purchases.

Hence, influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote eCommerce businesses. Brands can quickly gain trust and accept the products or services by using social proof.

Major Disadvantage of Influencer Marketing

Like two sides of a coin, it has advantages as well as disadvantages. One of the drawbacks of influencer marketing is as follows:

High Costs

Influencer marketing strategy is costly enough as compared to other traditional marketing strategies. Some of the popular influencers on social media cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per post. 

Most of the brands cannot easily afford such high prices, so they opt to hire low-tier influencers. Moreover, even the average rates of influencers can be thousands of dollars. 

Thus, the sellers opt to partner with the team of micro-influencers and produce content. This will help to identify the problems and run a profitable campaign. 

Conclusion

Influencer marketing would produce desired results when done correctly, creatively, and strategically. It has been one of the most popular marketing ways that help social interaction with your target audience and can easily convert into sales.

Thus, it would help get your products quickly in front of your target audience and is a more profitable strategy than other methods. The only thing you need to do is design a good strategy for your business and choose the influencer wisely.

  Back to Small Business blogs