How to Successfully Structure Influencer Marketing for your e-commerce brand #5

How to Successfully Structure Influencer Marketing for your e-commerce brand

Since Influencer Marketing is such a big topic we are dedicating two parts to this post! 

There is a lot of information to digest so let’s get to it.

Keys to Influencer Marketing Success

When utilizing influencer marketing for your e-commerce brand, you need to develop the following with your influencer partners to be successful:

1. Trust 

2. Tracking

3. Authenticity

4. Well structured agreement up front

5. Willingness to experiment…#AlwaysBeTesting

If you do this you will have a much better chance at developing interest, excitement, trust, brand awareness (views and recall lift), consideration (quality traffic and post engagement), and conversion (purchases) from your prospective customers.

Definition

For the purposes of this discussion we are defining influencer marketing as: 

A marketing activity that sources and pays people with social media followings to promote your e-commerce product for a flat fee and or a cost per action. 

Influencers are sources of trust for consumers in many cases. They are “real” for their followers and as a result have less bias than brand advertising or other marketing messaging. 

Influencer Marketing is often considered separate from Affiliate marketing but there is a significant overlap. I view Influencer as one of the many parts of affiliate marketing. 

ProTip

By using affiliate marketing for tracking like Impact and set up you can go from a one-off paid placement to a long term deal, allowing the influencer to earn a % of commission or a $ per action under the terms of the advertiser affiliate agreement for months or even years later. 

This is a great way to align incentives and create a more mutually beneficial partnership.  

Market Opportunity

This category has exploded over the last 10 years and is poised to scale further:

TikTok is a great example of this. While influencers on its platform are not the only reason they have grown (we discussed TikTok growth on the Pencil Add Creative Podcast), they are a massive percentage of the platform. If you’re in consumer e-commerce and not leveraging 

TikTok you are likely doing something wrong. It’s become a massive User Generated Content, Influencer and Paid Ad Platform captivating a lot of attention and consumer mindshare.

So now that you understand definitions, and the market opportunity, HOW do you manage influencer marketing? 

Collect

Utilizing hashtags, keywords, relevant content, search for social media influencer partners within your available data source. Example platforms include: 

1. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube (platform direct) 

2. GRIN (Influencer network) or in collaboration with 

3. influencer focused affiliate platform like LTK.

Curate

Once you have a master list of influencers you need to filter and prioritize which partners will be most valuable for your brand. Prioritize by the following factors:

1. Brand alignment 

2. Follower Count

3. Engagement

4. Score of previous brand collaborations 1-10 10 = ideal

5. Historical traffic, sales, revenue delivered if available 

6. Do they work with our existing tracking infrastructure?

7. Creators willing to be authentic with like brands

We suggest applying a weighted scoring method to rank stack partners so you ensure your curation represents what is most important to your business.  

Score each of the 7 factors from 1-10, 10 being ideal. 

In this hypothetical example, based on our factors we recommend The Rock (@therock) over other mega influencer options for a brand like CrossFit. 

Once the list is developed, cost would be added in the next stage of the assessment to determine the all important question of affordability, Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC/CPA), and Return On Investment (ROI). 

Recruit

This is where outreach communication is really important. 

Influencers over a certain size often work with an agency or agent to negotiate terms. While we aim for direct messages and collaboration where we can,, there are times when agencies do help take a lot of the back and forth off our plate to benefit all involved.

How you speak to them is important. Succinct, thoughtful, pro partner messaging is important given how many requests influencers receive.

Messaging should be 

1. Brief - if it is too long the message will not be received. 

2. Hit key points like: 

   1. Brand

   2. Commission Rate (% of sale or flat $ per purchase)

   3. Gift or no gift (can they review and keep the product)

   4. Willingness to test paid placement (likely required if over 50k)

   5. Tracking method 

   6. Succinct brand and product value proposition.

3. Show interest 

   1. You want influencers that are pumped to promote your product. If you show interest in their work they will likely be even more motivated to promote your product. 

4. Do your homework

   1. Having an understanding of their previous successful posts or those that you think are primary examples of what you are looking to accomplish for your brand show that you are prepared and have an idea of what shared success could look like. 

How do we define influencer marketing sizes? 

• Nano 1k followers 

• Micro 50k followers 

• Macro 500k followers

• Mega 1M followers 

The follower count and engagement are critical to the next piece. Social media engagement is the measurement of comments, likes, and shares. Your engagement rate is the number of comments, likes, and shares divided by total followers. 

Compensation

• Flat Fee - e.g. $10,000 for a series of 3 social media and blog posts with an estimated reach of 1,000,000.  

• % commission - paid a percentage of product purchases e.g. 10% of all tracked e-commerce sales   

• Gifting - keeping e-commerce brand product after review / post

While you might be surprised by this, you should strongly consider paying out on all three. 

Agreement, Set Up, & Activate

Contract

This is an area where an affiliate influencer network like LTK can be helpful in the event that you are low on time and have more budget options at your fingertips.

When you think about agreement, setting up the guiding principle of trust is important. While you will want to be explicit about what is included in the agreement for example:

• Cost

  • Flat Fee

  • Commission Rate

  • Gifting

• Timeline Start Stop

• Number of Posts

• Brand Guidelines to follow 

• What not to say - avoid any topics

• FTC requirements

• Images of product or not

• Termination of agreement

While your contract is going to cover all topics and those that could arise to be prepared in the event of unforeseen circumstances, the best influencer partnerships are built on trust.

Brands that get the best results allow influencers to follow brand parameters and guidelines but let their voice sing. They encourage and give influencers the space and tools to speak in their voice to their audience - something they know how to do quite well. 

We are a huge fan of leveraging influencer marketing in paid marketing posts. For example include a clause in your contract enabling the e-commerce brand to use influencer posts within their own marketing paid ads as a paid ad asset. 

Consumers will respond more positively to third parties like influencers saying how much they love a product rather than simply relying on a brand’s own voice. We have been recommending this approach for years in our RBL Flywheel post and it continues to bear fruit. 

If you are using an influencer platform like Impact or GRIN you can utilize their platform to make it easier.

In the event that you go direct with an influencer, you will need to work with them on a contract to ensure all terms are covered 

Follow FTC requirements

The FTC requires that influencers disclose they are receiving compensation from brands in their posts to ensure consumers are aware of that relationship. For example including #ad in their post. FTC requirement details.

Tracking

Coupon Code is a great way to apply improved tracking visibility and enable partners to give something “special” to their followers. You will need to define code use terms such as:

1) one time or multiple use 

2) discount or not (discount preferred if possible ) 

3) utilize an appropriate tracking tool to ensure coupon code is tracked and attributed to the influencer. 

4) vanity code? e.g. enter ROCK25 at checkout when working with @therock

For example, Impact allows you to attribute a Coupon Code to one partner and one partner only so only they get credit and coupon code leakage does not drain brand resources.

Linktree is a widely used tool for influencers. Many of the affiliate tracking platforms have an agreement in place with them allowing you to more easily track performance from within the platform. 

E-commerce brands can utilize UTM parameters within Linktree to ensure visibility of traffic and purchases via Google Analytics and other tracking platforms. 

Reporting Review 

Most brands will want to start with the end in mind and set up tracking via audit and test to ensure that your brand has visibility into the following metrics:

1. Impressions

2. Clicks

3. Sign Ups (if applicable)

4. Downloads (if a native application)

5. Purchases

6. Revenue

Measurement has been a challenge for many e-commerce brands and stakeholders in this channel at times. 

Example Integrations/Collaborations

Conclusion

Influencer marketing can work really well to deliver brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

But it takes a lot more time than paid search and paid social media to ramp up and understand what works. It also requires a lot of intelligent human interaction, recruitment, management and long term thinking.

If you don't follow these keys to success… you could lose your shirt.

As always if you have questions, we are always here to help!

Fun Retro Bonus Material: How Influencer Marketing took shape in the 90s.