A successful influencer marketing strategy requires data for optimal growth. It’s important to understand which factors are most impactful, and plan future campaigns accordingly. The Meltwater influencer marketing suite offers analysis capabilities for influencer marketing measurement, helping brands make the best decisions. Whether your goals are branding or conversions, it’s important to understand the many factors at play. In this exciting guest post, digital marketing specialist Shane Barker is breaking the different ways to drive conversion rates with influencers.
Rated as one of the fastest-growing online customer acquisition methods, influencer marketing has created quite a buzz among brands. Today, it has become a $1.7 billion industry.
Image via Mediakix
87% of shoppers base their purchase decisions on their role models or those who influence them, aka influencers. Digital marketing agencies and brands understand that they have the power to move the needle.
But the problem is, most brands don’t know how to make the best use of influencer marketing to scale their conversion rates and impact their bottom line.
So, to make it easier for you to get around this problem, take a look at some influencer marketing campaign examples or read further and take a look at examples that show how influencer marketing has helped brands scale their conversion rates as much as 3X or even more:
1. Build a Brand Story Influencers Will Love to Share
2. Boost Your Conversion With Discount Codes
3. Turn Micro-Influencers into Brand Evangelists
4. Let Micro-Influencers Review Your Product
5. Measure Influencer Campaign True Reach
6. Use eComm Integration to Attribute Sales to Each Influencer Campaign
7. See the Dollar Value of Each Influencer Campaign Post with Predictive Value
1. Build a Brand Story Influencers Will Love to Share
Every brand has a story behind it and that includes yours. Your stories are your most powerful tool to find acceptance among your target audience and navigate your way to success.
If you think you don’t have a story, then perhaps you need some time to figure it out.
Stories connect with an audience instantly. It’s a powerful tool used by marketers to design user experiences. And you can improve your conversion rate with effective storytelling. Here’s an interesting example:
Zoe Rodriguez’s health and fitness company achieved 3.5x ROI from its influencer marketing initiative through effective storytelling around the brand.
The campaign was aimed at women who wanted to undergo a similar physical transformation. Most of the content was in the form of before and after pictures of people who have completed the program.
To get better results, they collaborated with health and fitness influencers. Brand collaborations with influencers who have established themselves as experts and thought leaders attract tons of engagement.
The first step in implementing this strategy is to find the best niche influencers for your brand. To simplify this process and amplify your marketing campaign, you can take the aid of various influencer marketing tools.
2. Boost Your Conversion With Discount Codes
Once you’ve connected with influencers, you need to begin your influencer marketing campaigns and discount codes can be a great start. Everyone loves a discount. And when it’s on their favorite products or services, it gives all the more reason to act on their impulse. Discount codes encourage people to buy products they don’t want to miss out on, especially if the recommendation comes from someone they follow.
Create and share customized discount codes with influencers so they can share them with their audiences. People are more excited when they are given access to coupon codes exclusive or limited to a small group. It becomes more valuable to them because of the sense of exclusivity.
Followers feel compelled to take action to show that they belong to a tribe. It’s also a good way to keep track of performance when you are working with dozens of micro-influencers. This will help you understand which influencers are driving more sales.
NA-KD, a fashion brand, collaborated with Marieke Kazen, a micro-influencer with more than 16k followers on her Instagram account. She shared a photo featuring NA-KD’s fashion brand clothing line on Instagram.
It got more than 1500 likes and over 100 comments. In her post, Marieke Kazen shared the details of how her followers can get discount coupon codes.
3. Turn Micro-Influencers into Brand Evangelists
Micro-influencers are regular consumers. The only difference is that they are vocal about their customer experience and have more substantial followings.
They document and share their first-hand experiences on various social platforms. This authentic content is extremely valuable for consumers because they offer insights and cover topics that are hard to find anywhere else.
That’s the reason they have a huge tribe of followers. Their followers trust their advice and base their decisions on the content they produce. That way, they won’t have to try several products themselves to find out which one is better.
But if brands cover the same topics, they are perceived as less trustworthy, because they will obviously be biased in their opinions and approach.
Micro-influencers don’t always get paid for the content they produce day in and day out. They often do it out of their own conviction for products they use and are often willing to promote them.
They can be your biggest brand evangelists if you can win their trust and turn them into true fans. When that happens, it will show up in the content they produce. That’s precisely the reason why micro-influencers are capable of achieving 22.2X conversion rates and sometimes even more.
Lyft is a ridesharing app just like Uber. Because of a very broad target audience, their biggest problem was finding the right influencers with whom to partner.
Using various Instagram marketing tools, they were able to scale this campaign by including over 1000 influencers, from celebrities to micro-influencers. The idea was to create a buzz that would make it seem like everyone was talking about Lyft.
Guess what? Not only did they garner more than 6 million engagements, but they also became the most-mentioned brand of 2018.
Here is an example of one post from that campaign created by a micro-influencer, Maggie Baugh. She is an indie country artist with a very modest follower base of 90k. However, she has a very impressive engagement rate.
For Lyft’s ridesharing app campaign, she posted a picture with a Lyft scooter.
4. Let Micro-Influencers Review Your Product
78% of people trust online reviews and take them as recommendations. The product mentions and suggestions that come from influencers have a great impact on their followers, regardless of whether they buy or not.
It also helps build a positive perception of the product in the minds of consumers. It gives them something to share when the discussion around your product comes up among their friends and family.
Many online shoppers intently search for product reviews when they want to consider the pros and cons of different products and choose the best option. Most product reviews are from niche-specific micro-influencers and are highly trusted by their followers. Getting your product reviewed by micro-influencers in your niche will help your product win the trust of your target audience. Learn more about micro-influencers and how to find them.
To get micro-influencers to review your product, you will have to either send them some samples of your product or invite them to try your services for free. Just let them know that, in return, you want them to share an honest and genuine review of your product or services.
People can quickly spot product reviews that are too promotional. Authentic product reviews stand a better chance to win over a new audience. When influencers aren’t hesitant to mention a negative aspect of your product, it helps reinforce the positive things they say as honest and genuine.
Trendy Butler, a monthly apparel subscription for men, sent out their subscription box for free to Kavalier, a YouTuber with around 6,500 subscribers. Kavalier created an unboxing video of his experience and shared it on his channel. He provided his honest review to his viewers.
The video also included a disclaimer in the description section. It mentioned that, although the company sent the box to him for free, they hadn’t paid anything extra. This made the review authentic and more believable.
Tip: Learn more about influencer gifting.
5. Measure Influencer Campaign True Reach
In influencer marketing, True Reach refers to the number of people who are exposed to the influencer’s content. We calculate True Reach by identifying the average number of users who view a piece of content.
True Reach is one of several performance metrics available in Meltwater Influencer Marketing. (Others include engagement rate, Meltwater's brand score, and Meltwater's influencer score.)
Using True Reach as a decision driver helps brands ensure their influencers’ content will be seen by the right people. An influencer might have 2 million followers, but you also need to know how many of those followers are real, active, and seeing and engaging with the influencer’s content.
When planning your influencer campaign, you’ll want to determine your shoppers’ interests and connect with influencers who share those interests. From there, you can use True Reach in Meltwater to discover shoppers who are most likely to convert.
For example, if you’re a fitness brand and want to reach consumers who care about work/life balance, you can use True Reach to find relevant influencers whose audiences share these attributes.
We have enhanced our True Reach capability to also include Verified True Reach. This metric applies to authenticated Instagram influencers. The Verified True Reach metric will auto-calculate the influencer’s reach and show the reach of their last 30 posts and Stories. This gives you an accurate estimation of an influencer’s real-time performance and shows how many users they’re reaching, allowing you to enter collaborations with confidence.
Meltwater's True Reach uses machine learning to predict the number of real people who see this influencer’s content, on average. You can view True Reach of each social media network as well as compare the true reach of different influencers with similar audience sizes.
6. Use eComm Integration to Attribute Sales to Each Influencer Campaign
Meltwater Influencer Marketing's eComm integration allows you to accurately track sales generated by individual influencers. This gives you a clear comparison of how your influencer campaign is impacting your sales month over month. There are a few pieces to this process.
Your Customers as Potential Influencers
For starters, if you sell products online, chances are some of your customers are already effective “influencers” for your brand. You have an existing network of customers who have already had the benefit of trying your products and falling in love with them. They’re probably even sharing all the great things about you with their own audiences, even if they don’t qualify for “influencer status.”
Identifying and Engaging Brand Ambassadors
Meltwater Influencer Marketing helps you identify existing brand ambassadors so that you can strike up conversations and form lasting partnerships. You can assign each influencer a unique coupon code, tracking link, or offer they can share with their audience. All sales that come from those codes or links will be directly attributed to the influencer, so you can see at a glance the impact they’re making on your ROI.
In-Depth Campaign Reporting
The campaign reporting tool automatically aggregates and analyzes influencer campaign performance. See all your most important KPIs at a glance, including reach, engagements, and earned media value.
Activating Your Brand Ambassadors
After laying the groundwork in seeing how your influencer campaign will perform, you can activate your ambassador program and manage all aspects of the campaign. We suggest starting with an influencer marketing brief that will outline the influencer’s requirements, legal agreements, payment terms, and other details. We provide a campaign brief template you can customize to your brand and influencer campaign. (See an example below.)
Additional requirements and details you might include are:
- Connecting the influencer’s Stories or YouTube channel
- Request for contact information for product gifting
- Requirements for sending content for approval prior to posting
- Campaign tracking links or coupon codes
- Links to drive traffic to a specific landing page
- Brand guidelines
Creating this brief is one of the best ways to ensure alignment between your brand and influencer partners. It should clearly outline the influencer campaign objectives, expectations, timelines, deliverables, and payments so there’s something certain you can go back to if questions arise.
7. See the Dollar Value of Each Influencer Campaign Post with Predictive Value
Every piece of content your influencers create on your behalf has value. That value might be worth far more than what you’re paying your influencers in terms of free products and/or sales commissions. You can know this value with certainty with Meltwater Influencer Marketing's Predictive Value.
The Predictive Value feature provides an estimated dollar value of the impact of your influencers’ posts. This way, you can confidently determine the effect that influencer marketing has had on your top line.
Predictive Value is part of Meltwater Influencer Marketing's Predictive Mode, which helps you predict the success of your campaign before it goes live. You can anticipate campaign outcomes prior to engaging influencers, allowing you to make the right connections the first time.
Predictive Mode identifies a number of success indicators you’ll use to measure the overall impact of your influencer campaign. Your campaign KPIs are dependent on the goals of your influencer campaign.
For example, if you want to increase sales, then conversions would be a relevant KPI. If you want to increase brand awareness, then Impressions would be a telling KPI.
Here’s how to access this feature:
- Go to Campaigns in the Influencer Marketing platform.
- Go to Predictive Mode.
- Click the campaign you want to review.
- Meltwater Influencer will calculate the predicted outcome of your campaign based on a range of metrics and factors.
- Click the Share menu, then choose Export Predictive to save the predictions in a .csv file for future reference.
Ultimately, you’ll use Predictive Value and other data in Predictive Mode to decide which influencers to partner with and which deliverables will get you the highest campaign ROI. These data points can be helpful in negotiating with influencers and determining a budget for the influencer campaign. Many of our clients use these points as a scorecard to compare the actual campaign results.
However, these predictions should not be a replacement for your end-of-campaign reporting. You will also want to generate a report that quantifies the campaign and the impact of each influencer and each post. You can see these reports and results under the Performance tab in the Meltwater Influencer platform.
Takeaways
Influencer marketing is a great way to boost conversions and drive sales for your business. But since every business is different, there is no blanket go-to strategy that is applicable to all.
Influencer marketing involves a more personal approach.
The strategies and real-life examples we have given above should help you start thinking in the right direction. Take them with a pinch of salt to come up with your own influencer marketing plan. Just make sure you pick the right influencer and the platform that resonates most with your target audience.
If you have any questions about these tips, leave your comment below. You can also share your experience with any of the tips mentioned above.
Want to start your own influencer marketing campaign? Schedule a demo with a Meltwater influencer marketing expert and get a free tour of our platform:
