There are loads of influencers on social media. They’re people with a following anywhere between 1k and 1 million+. You probably come across them on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook on the regular.
The influence that these folks have depends on their follower count, the way they engage with their audience, and the reputation they’ve built. Influencer marketing involves partnering with these people to promote your products, build brand awareness and reach new audiences.
Why is influencer marketing important for ecommerce brands?
Influencer marketing is a way for ecommerce brands to get on their target audience’s radar. It builds social proof and helps grow sales. When your audience sees your products being shared by people they know and trust, they’re more likely to buy.
Just take a look at these stats that show just how important influencer marketing is:
- 71% of people are more likely to buy if it’s recommended by influencers they trust
- 82% of brand’s leads from influencer marketing are better quality than other campaign types
14 benefits of influencer marketing
Not convinced yet? Here’s the proven influencer marketing benefits that’ll make it worth your time and help you grow your ecommerce brand:
1. Increase brand awareness
As influencers create content featuring your products, awareness of your brand will inevitably grow among their followers.
This is especially helpful for new ecommerce businesses that don’t have an engaged audience. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around a new product or collection launch.
For instance, Athletic Greens used TikTok influencers to spread awareness of their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers. These social media influencers created content that showed how the supplement can become a part of their audience’s daily routines.
2. Crack new markets
Influencer marketing can help you tap into new markets and reach specific audiences. Take Bulldog, a UK-based men’s skincare brand that used TikTok’s Creator Program to reach a new audience in Germany. And all without even having a TikTok account! Wondering how? They paired with TikTok influencers to create a series of shaving mistakes videos. The campaign led to 29.8 million impressions and a 5%-10% increase in sales.
💡The key lesson here: identify and collaborate with relevant influencers who’s social following overlaps with the niche audience you’re trying to reach.
3. Increase social media following
The first step to encouraging sales through your social media? Build an engaged social following with influence marketing.
As influencers talk about you and get their audience’s interest in your brand, their followers are likely to follow you too.
💡Partner up on some giveaway campaigns with your social media influencers. The trick of asking people to follow your brand in return for a chance to win a free gift will work a charm. After all, everyone loves a freebie.
4. Get feedback on your product
You can also use influencer marketing to source feedback on a new product, collection, or specific product feature.
Because many influencers engage with specific audiences, they’ll have valuable insights into what your ideal buyers are looking for in a product. Plus, by trying your products for themselves, they can share detailed feedback.
Feminine hygiene company, Thinx, did just that. They invited 25 influencers for a slumber party event in Los Angeles with the aim of getting feedback on their new athleisure line. Thinx used the information they gathered to launch clothing that their consumers would be interested in, and grew their sales by giving influencers unique discount codes. This led to $810,000 in revenue with a per-customer acquisition cost of $35.20.
5. Gain credibility and trust
Content that talks positively about your brand can help you build a good reputation. As influencers talk about you and endorse your products, you’ll slowly build trust with your target audience.
6. Increase sales and repeat orders
Influencers can help increase sales — both directly as they share discount codes or recommend your product, and indirectly as your brand awareness grows. Intimates brand, KNIX, collaborates with influencers for this very reason — using custom discount codes to drive sales.
7. Bring new content to your audience
As a marketer, coming up with new and creative ideas is part of the job. But it can get tiring having to continuously think of new ideas, especially if you’re a small team. Experienced influencers can bring fresh, out-of-the-box marketing ideas to the table. They’ll have a new perspective on your brand and can offer creative ways to promote your product – with little effort on your part.
💡If you’re looking to find influencers or manage your campaigns, take a look at our list of influencer marketing tools ideal for small and growing brands.
8. Use micro-influencers to keep costs down
Another benefit of influencer marketing – and one your boss will love – is that it can be cost-effective. Running influencer campaigns is 30% cheaper than most forms of advertising and marketing strategies.
It’s for this very reason that Doe Lashes’ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other forms of paid ads for the first 4 months of his brand’s launch. Jason worked out that sending a shipment of lashes to micro-influencers would cost less than $10 per shipment. And if he made even one sale from an influencer, he’d break even. If he got 2-3 sales, he’d profit and slowly start gaining traction. This is exactly what happened. One month of influencer marketing led to $2.6K in sales per day!
9. Educate buyers about your product
A non-salesy way to market to your potential customers is by educating them on how to use your product or how to style it — depending on what you sell. By thoroughly briefing influencers about your product, you can empower them to create content that educates their target market about your product in an engaging manner.
Not only does this help grow your sales, but it encourages customers to create user-generated content featuring your product. This, in turn, gives you more exposure and grows brand awareness. Take a page from Supergoop’s TikTok influencer marketing campaign.
10. Collect data to better understand your audience
Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your audience.
As gathering third-party audience data becomes harder, working with influencers can help you source audience data. The more data you have, the easier it is to create better and more audience-relevant marketing content. Your influencer will have data on audience demographics. That’s age, gender, and location — broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you the engagement, reach and impressions their posts get. This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going, and whether it’s resonating with their audience.
For direct sales attribution, it’s worth setting up tracking codes so you can see who’s clicked through to your website and into your checkouts. You’ll need to give this to your influencer before they start the campaign. Keep in mind though, not all influencers are open to sharing their audience analytics.
Building long-term relationships with influencers can often lead to them giving you access to the demographic data they have from social media platforms and any other tools they use. This, in turn, helps you make better-informed, data-driven decisions.
11. Work with experts to boost brand authority
If you’ve got good brand authority, it means your customers view you as the subject-matter expert in your industry. Growing your brand authority will increase brand awareness and you’ll have a better chance at helping prospects overcome objections.
To increase brand authority, you could interview experts as part of your content strategy, create a podcast, run webinars and be a guest on other people’s platforms.
You could also enlist the help of an expert influencer. 💡
12. Turn influencers into brand ambassadors
Another key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators. If they try out your products and genuinely love them, they’re more likely to post about your products organically, as well as recommend them to friends and people outside of their following.
13. Strengthen your online community
Online communities are fantastic places for like-minded people to connect, chat, swap tips and share advice on particular topics. Communities mostly flourish on social networks, which makes them a great place for brands to build connections with their customers. (Just take a look at big brands Gymshark and GoPro to see what we mean).
But building an online community isn’t easy. You need to establish a loyal customer base, a good online following and build enough brand trust for people to want to engage with you. This is where influencers can help. ✨
14. Get better quality leads
As we mentioned at the start, 82% of brands say they see better ‘quality’ leads from influencer marketing campaigns over any other campaign. That’s quite an impressive stat and, after learning about the influencer marketing benefits in this post, you can see why. By partnering with influencers who talk about your specific niche, you can reach a loyal audience that’ll be genuinely interested in your products. 💫
