In a report “The state of influencer marketing 2018” of Linquia said 92% of marketers found influencer made marketing strategies more effective. Gradually, Influencer marketing is recognized as a crucial part of the marketing mix, and this year will witness the growth of this channel.
If you are considering applying it in your eCommerce business. HappyPoints is here to give you a detailed guide for influencer marketing in 2019.
Table of Contents
1. What exactly is influencer marketing?
Stated in Forbes: “Influencer marketing is a relationship between a brand and an influencer”. In specific, a brand collaborating with a person who has significant engagement with niche audiences, to promote brand’s products. This person might be a blogger, a Youtuber, or an actor, etc.
Brands commonly choose to collaborate with an influencer as an effective communication channel, thereby creating awareness and building trust of potential customers for product and service products. Brands can effectively use influencers to promote their products can easily approach to customers.
Although the concept of influencer marketing derived from celebrity endorsement, it is more than just a celebrity using your products. The influencer must be trusted among their niche community and having a certain number of loyal followers. Furthermore, they commonly are experts or have a certain amount of knowledge about what they are promoting.
For example, a well-known beauty guru on Youtube having comprehensive knowledge in skincare and makeup might be asked to do advertising for beauty gadgets or skincare products; A sportswear brand could have a famous swimming athlete advertising for their swimming outfit.
The influencer works independently, creating their unique content and integrating features of advertising products into it. They can choose how they would like to represent the brand’s message. By means of using Influencers, your products can feasibly reach a specific target audience in your niche market.
2. Why do e-commerce merchants need influencer marketing?
Undeniably, Influencers are gradually dominating the market, a recent report from Salesforce said that 70% of brands are increasing spending on social media marketing in the coming years (especially for social media influencer marketing). Because the strength of brand ambassadors accounts for the majority of the purchase decision of customers. They mainly buy things based on their emotions with brands and brand representatives.
“U.S. Brand Activation Marketing Forecast (2016-2020): Key Findings Report” reveals that content marketing and influencer marketing are expected to be the most robust channels in the coming years.
Meanwhile, US digital marketing solutions expert Rhythm One discovered that earn media value (EMV) for every $1 spent on marketing will help the company earn $ 9.60, ROI rate at 960%.
Besides, there are some significant reasons for using an influencer for your marketing strategy.
Generate trust
First and foremost, influencers can easily generate trust. Since consumers tend to be fed up with billboards and TVC, Influencer is considered the most effective technique to attract customers. Instead, they want to do their own research. People prefer experiencing products themselves, hearing about it from people they trust. With the huge advantage of Influencers – having the ability to create content and sharing information, brand experiences to loyal people – then, anticipating the trend, getting audiences supporting before competitors surely will make a huge difference in the success of the business. Moreover, people have the intention to believe people who have influence among the community than the advertisement from the brand. A research conducted by Annalect and Twitter data analysis companies shows that nearly 40% of people purchase a product online after seeing an influencer use it on social networks like YouTube, Instagram or Twitter.
Easy to access
Secondly, Influencers are accessible. Following the rise of the influencer marketing industry is a vast platform related to this has invented. The main benefit of using influencers finder platform is:
- Filter setting function can help you find them at a rapid pace. You can set the filter by location, social media, target audiences, etc.
- You are able to directly connect to influencer and discuss without using service from the third party.
- These platforms help you measure Return On Investment of an influencer marketing campaign. You can see how well your strategy works and which influencers have the best performance.
Finding social media influencers would be easier with 2 following platforms:
- Grin – an easy navigating platform helps you control your marketing campaigns and influencers.
- BuzzSumo – finding key influencers based on content, country, language, etc.
Last but not least, influencers are SEO booster. Another significant method you can use to boost SEO for your e-commerce business is an influencer. In the first phase of building your brand and improving your sales, advertising with influencers definitely helped to enhance the appearance of search engine branding. According to The Social Media Revolution, users who create articles on social sites make up 25% of the search results of the top 20 brands in the world. The more people refer to your brand on social media, the more popular you will be on Google.
3. Three industries can take the most advantage of influencer marketing
You thoroughly see the benefit of using influencers in your marketing campaign, right? Now, we have named the top three industries to stand the most benefit from influencer marketing. Read and apply for your own business!
Healthcare
A survey of Pew Research Center and PwC Health Research has shown that:
- 35% of adults in the US used the internet to look for a medical condition
- 16% of internet users try to find others who have the same health problems on the internet.
- 90% of millennials said that they have trust in health information or participate in health activities found on social media.
As you see, people frequently use the internet as a source to look for when it comes to concerns related to healthcare. As a result, it’s time for the healthcare industry to find influencers.
However, not everyone can be an influencer in this industry. An influencer’s recommendation can directly change the life of users. Therefore, it’s crucial that an influencer in this industry must be a person who had certain knowledge about healthcare or expertise in this industry.
Kim Kardashian in medical advertising for the pregnant woman
The collaboration of Bonjesta and Kim Kardashian advertising for a medical product cure nausea and vomiting for pregnancy in women. This campaign received lots of controversial comments from internet users because Kim Kardashian has no expertise in the healthcare and medical industry. In addition, this product is for pregnant women and it requires a lot of caution and recommendation from the doctor, not from a fashion icon.
Worth to know:
Choosing the right influencer is the key point in the marketing campaign. You can reach out to your target customers and increase brand awareness. Knowing that an influencer with a huge number of followers drives much attention to your last line products. However, with the healthcare and medical industry, the influencer should have solid knowledge about medicine and work in this industry to generate trust from audiences (doctors or pharmacology professors could be the best choice).
Beauty
Fashion is changing rapidly, and consumers always seeking the latest trend update from famous trend leaders. Consequently, influencers and beauty make a perfect match. Recent researches showed that 60% of fashion and brands using influencer marketing. Once you can connect influencers with brands, your reputation might increase, too.
Exclusively for the new fashion/beauty business, your products are good but your brand is not popular enough in the market. If you keep in touch with social media fashion influencers, they will absolutely promote your last line products, your brand is introduced to fashion lovers that may have never aware of your brand. Also, brands can share some limited codes with the influencers to boost conversion. 
Beauty blogger Kathleen Lights – partner up with Colorpop in her own eyeshadow palette: Kathleen X Colorpop.
Top beauty influencers on Instagram usually upload makeup tutorial videos or skincare routine. It’s a piece of cake for them to introduce your products in the most natural ways. The reviews from these people are generating a huge trust for customers about your brand.
Technology
Like fashion, technology is something change frequently, the new technologies trend has been updated by hours. In addition, high-tech products are usually expensive and require lots of introduction to how to use it. Thus, the customer will need some pioneers who have experienced these devices to give them a clear review about it, does it work well, is it worth the money or not. In this case, you might need tech influencers on Instagram to help deal with this.
A customer who is interested in your tech device is potentially searching “Product name – brand name – reviews” on Google; for example Kindle Paperwhite 2019 – Amazon – reviews. There is a list of review blogs about this product on Google. 
Kindle Paperwhite 2019 on the search engine
By having the influencer experience your tech products and create an SEO blog review about it on the search engine, it might be on the top of the search engine. Customers might find the reviews from famous people are more reliable than the introduction from the brand.
4. What Shopify merchant should consider when launching the influencer marketing campaign?
The purpose of using influencers in your marketing strategy is to drive the most impact on customers’ purchase decisions. The statistic from Influencer Marketing Hub reveals that there are 60% of millennials purchase products based on the advice from KOLs. Consequently, building an effective influencer marketing strategy is important for the success of your business.
Time
Surely, influencer marketing is the shortest way to introduce your brand to the world. But using it in which time is making the most benefits for your brand. Here is a list of golden time to partner up with influencer:
- Launching new products: definitely, the customer wants to know how good your new products are. They should work well, up to date, and different from the same products type from the other brands.
- Launching the upgraded version of the old one: the old version must be a product that receives a lot of welcome from the customer. So the new version of it will make customers curious about it.
- Decreasing the number of customers purchasing a product: Your products receive good feedback, however, it’s not as standing out as the other. Influencers now are potential channels to give a boost in brand awareness and bring it back to the game.
Budget
HYPR – an influencer marketing platform – said that 5000$ – 10,000$ that is the expected price to pay for a post by an influencer who has 500,000 to one million followers across their social media profiles. The more followers influencers have, the higher the price they get.
Stated in Digiday’s survey, a common price for influencer marketing on the Instagram platform is $1,000 for every 100,000 followers. This is the same formula Lee Anne – a lifestyle blogger – charges for her Instagram sponsored posts. (She has 241K followers). Snapchat is the same, about 10$ per 1000 followers and for Youtube is $20 per 1,000 subscribers and 100$ for 1000 views on a review video (Youtuber charges higher because creating video content requires much more effort than Instagram and Snapchat posts).
From the number above, e-commerce merchants can estimate the budget for influencer marketing.
Marketing tips: For a newly established business, Influencer is definitely the most effective way to reach out with customers who haven’t known your brand. But remember that, one influencer can not drive attention for your business, it requires more than that, depends on the field you are focusing on. Therefore, estimate your budget before launching the influencer marketing campaign. The advice is focusing on 3 or 4 micro-influencers (1000 – 2000 followers) who are well-known with the audience in your niche market to drive the most attention from customers.
Goals
Once you have decided on the budget, do not waste the money. You need to create a plan for influencer partners and follow it strictly to control the effects of the campaign. The big three features can be set in the plan are:
- Timeline: which time the influencer will post the advertising post for your brand? (calculate the most active time of audiences to post)
- Key Performance Indicators (or brand awareness): Certain goals are needed for the influencers, their post must reach KPIs to be paid. The KPIs of advertising posts will be measured by engagement comments, likes, shares, etc. on different social platforms.
- Backlinks: Make sure influencers attach your homepage’s link in their post (you can also calculate the CTR from this source to measure how effective this marketing strategy are. Creating trackable link as Bit.ly or UTM codes to measure how much traffic the influencer cause.)
Final thoughts
So, what is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a viral trend in the eCommerce industry and every business can use it to promote their service or product. After reading this blog, maybe your idea of influential people is no longer vague and you also know where to start to look for them, right? Correctly choosing Influencers is the first step to lay the foundation for a successful campaign. Then, make a detailed plan to make the most of the Influencer’s advantages to deliver results that are not only visual but also help to increase the revenue significantly for the business after each campaign.
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