The Shopify Store Owner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing: How to Work With Influencers

in e-commerce, Influencer Marketing, Shopify

Catch up on Part 1 of our Shopify Store Owner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing here.

Recent data predicts that brands are set to spend up to $15 billion in influencer marketing by 2022. This isn’t just some passing fad. Influencer marketing is here to stay and if you’re a Shopify store owner who hasn’t experimented with using influencers, there’s no better time than right now to get started. In Part 1, we shared why you should use influencer marketing and how to start finding influencers using Sideqik.

Now let’s cover the different ways you can work with influencers to promote your Shopify store.

Set Your Goals

The first step in any campaign is to set your goals so you know what to measure once you’ve kicked off your campaign. Remember, likes on an Instagram post won’t translate to dollars spent at your store.

There are several metrics you can track with your campaign including influencer reach and engagement on your posts, store traffic and sales.

Any influencer campaign will generate brand awareness and you can measure the Earned Media Value in the reach and engagement of an influencer’s posts but the most important metric to track and set goals for is sales. How many sales do you want to see from your campaigns? How much revenue should your influencers bring in to your store? Once you have this goal, you’ll be able to set your budget and better measure the results of your campaigns.

Ways to Work With Influencers

With your goals ready to go, it’s time to start planning your campaign. There are several ways to work with influencers and the one that’s best for you will depend on your business, goals and budgets.

Reviews

Product reviews are one easy way you can begin to leverage influencer marketing. 71% of customers are more likely to purchase a product based on social media reviews.

Product reviews are especially beneficial for Shopify stores that sell products that need to be touched, smelled or experienced. For example, items like candles, beauty products and food and beverages can benefit from product reviews because your buyers can get a better understanding of the details of your product from an influencer review.

Product reviews can also help build excitement around new products or upcoming launches. You can kick off a product review campaign before your store is officially open or before you’ve launched a product to increase buzz and excitement.

If you have a very small influencer marketing budget, you can also use the product review as a way to get started with influencer marketing. Many nano and micro-influencers will offer reviews in exchange for products. (But remember, it’s always best practice to ask for going rates or if they are open to exchanges for products instead of just assuming that someone will do a review in exchange for only products.)

Product Promotions, Giveaways and Contests

Partnering with influencers for product giveaways and contests is a popular choice because it’s a win-win for both parties. Brands can introduce their products to the influencer’s audience and the influencer is able to offer something tangible to their audience.

Promotions, giveaways and contests can do more than just increase sales too. You can use them to increase social media engagement and follower growth.

You can create any type of giveaway or contest. One of the more popular methods is partnering with an influencer and the influencer will host the giveaway to their audience, usually requiring their audience to take some social actions, such as commenting on the contest Instagram post and tagging two friends or following both the influencer and the brand.

Or you can host the giveaway or contest on your own and work with influencers to share the giveaway or contest with their followers. This method requires more management and work to put together than partnering with an individual influencer but the benefit is that you’ll be able to partner with multiple influencers and expand your reach even further.

Sideqik’s Promotions tool can streamline your promotions so they’re easy to create and manage. You can create a customized promotions sign-up page for people to enter without any coding or advanced design knowledge and you can incentive actions on over 10 different social networks so your audience can gain entries or points.

It’s also easy to leverage your influencer network and attribute entries to each individual influencer. Sideqik’s analytics will then track the performance of your promotion and you can automatically select winners by random or by votes or points.

Discount Codes

One of the simplest ways to partner with influencers to promote your Shopify store is to simply offer an influencer a discount code. You can ask influencers to feature your products in their content and then provide a discount code they can share with their followers. They can include their links in their bios or captions or in their Instagram story swipe-up links.

Another benefit of this tactic is that you can tap into an influencer’s creativity and have entertaining content around your product. Since you’re not asking specifically for a product review, the influencer will have more creative freedom which can result in fantastic videos, photos and content about your product.

The benefits of using discount codes is you can track the actual amount of revenue each influencer brings into your store. With Sideqik’s Shopify integration, you can create and assign discount codes to your influencers directly in Sideqik and Sideqik gives an in-depth look at how much revenue each influencer generates for your store in your campaign module so you know which influencers are your best partners.

Best Practices for Reaching Out to Influencers

After you’ve identified how you want to work with influencers and the influencers you want to partner with, it’s time to start your influencer outreach.

Crafting the perfect influencer pitch isn’t as hard as you might think it is.

Personalize your requests. You’re requesting their help so don’t send out a generic email to every influencer. They will be able to tell when it’s a generic pitch.
Explain the benefit for the influencer and their audience. Why is your product a good fit for their audience? Influencers spend a lot of time and energy building up their audience and they want to make sure they only share the best content and products with them.
Be specific with your request. Outline exactly what you’d like from the influencer and what you can offer in return. Remember the easier you make it for the influencers, the more likely it is that they will say yes.

You can use Sideqik Forms as an easy way to organize your influencer outreach. You can create a custom form for influencers or affiliates to fill out that connects to your Sideqik account so you can gather all the necessary information and keep your influencers and campaigns organized.

(Need more help crafting influencer pitches and requests? Contact us to learn more about how Sideqik can help.)

You are now ready to start planning your campaigns and reaching out to your influencers!

In our next installment, we’ll share how you can measure and scale your campaigns to ensure long-term influencer marketing success.

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Nancy Rothman

Nancy is a passionate, results-driven marketing executive with more than a decade of experience in building robust integrated marketing programs for brands of all sizes, with specific expertise in the martech space. Prior to Sideqik, Nancy held roles at four successful martech startups, each of which received multiple series of fundraising and included two acquisitions. At CallRail, specifically, Nancy served as the director of marketing where she built the company’s brand and established it as a leader in its space. She also held roles at MeetEdgar, where she oversaw the entire sales and marketing practice, increasing the company's user base and annual recurring revenue, as well as PureCars, which was acquired by Raycom Media in 2015. As vice president of marketing for Sideqik, Nancy is responsible for developing and executing on the company's marketing strategy to drive overall business growth.