Ecommerce Influencer Marketing: A Guide to Driving Sales and Increasing Brand Visibility

Everyone is talking about influencer marketing right now – and for good reason.

These days, influencer marketing campaigns are everywhere. You probably see them whenever you scroll through social media – they might come in the form of an influencer promoting a product and tagging it as an #ad, or ecommerce brands using influencer endorsements in paid ad spots.

The reason behind the popularity of ecommerce influencer marketing is simple. When you work with relevant influencers, you're more likely to boost brand visibility and reach a wider audience, which ultimately can drive sales. 

In this guide, we'll look at how to create an effective influencer marketing strategy that slots in naturally with all your other marketing efforts.

We'll also share tips for seamlessly weaving in clever tactics to help you reach your target audience and increase social media engagement.

By drawing on insights from industry research and best practices, this guide will show you how to find the right influencers, plan successful influencer campaigns, and measure campaign performance once everything’s up and running.

Let's get started.

The benefits of ecommerce influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is all about partnering with social media users who have a sizeable, highly engaged audience and working with them to promote your products.

This kind of marketing gives you direct access to the influencer's audience. This can help with building brand exposure and a loyal customer base. As a bonus, introducing your products to a new audience through someone they already know and trust can make your brand feel more relatable.

There are other benefits, too. For example, collaborating with micro-influencers can be a budget-friendly solution that still delivers significant returns. Influencer marketing is a good place to start if you're looking for cost-effective marketing solutions.

Influencer marketing is not simply about paying influencers for posts and expecting a return on your investment. It’s a holistic approach that involves developing a detailed influencer marketing strategy, tracking key metrics, building relationships with influencers, and doing some homework to ensure that all influencer-generated content aligns with your brand guidelines and values. 

When done right, influencer marketing can deliver impressive results by reaching new ecommerce customers through authentic collaborations.

Developing an effective influencer marketing strategy

A great ecommerce influencer marketing strategy begins with understanding the influencer landscape and identifying the right partners. From there, you can develop campaign guidelines, find the right influencers, and get to work.

Step 1: Define your goals and metrics

Before approaching any influencers, define your marketing campaign goals. 

Common objectives for ecommerce campaigns include increasing brand awareness, driving sales, building a loyal customer base, and enhancing customer engagement. 

Then, decide what key metrics you want to track (such as campaign progress, influencer reach, and influencer-generated content performance) to measure the success of your initiatives.

Step 2: Identify the right influencers

Choosing the right influencers is crucial. Ideally, you're looking for influencers with a significant proportion of followers who match your target audience and can help your ecommerce goals.

It's also good to partner with a mix of both macro and micro-influencers, including some niche influencers who feel on-brand. This means looking at those with a larger follower count and lots of engagement, as well as those who perhaps don't have such impressive stats but have created a particularly lively community.

From there, you can create a shortlist of potential partners, filtering them based on audience demographics and engagement rates. An influencer marketing tool like Brandwatch Influence can help with this. 

Don't forget to consider each influencer's reach and overall campaign performance and consider how they fit with your brand.

Step 3: Craft clear brand guidelines

Ideally, you should be aiming for consistent messaging across all your influencer campaigns. 

To get to that endpoint, you'll need to start with clear brand guidelines that detail your brand values, tone of voice, and messaging.

This consistency ensures that influencer-generated content feels authentic and genuine and communicates your intended message – even when you're working with many different influencers simultaneously.

Step 4: Engage influencers

Building a relationship with influencers usually starts by reaching out with a personalized message, showing that you're familiar with their content, and illustrating how your products might appeal to them and their followers.

You might contact them through direct messages on a platform like Instagram or go through their agent (if they have one).

Many influencers also appreciate the offer of some free samples so that they can better understand your product offering. Some influencers might even be happy to mention your brand after being sent free products alone: this can be good for testing the waters to see if there is suitable interest among their audience.

From there, you can negotiate more formal collaborations and associated payments. 

Step 5: Develop your influencer marketing campaigns

When working with influencers, you'll need to provide a clear brief at the outset of each campaign that outlines expectations, campaign objectives, key messages, and required elements. 

This brief should guide influencers on how to talk about your brand while still allowing them creative freedom to produce authentic content.

This typically means sharing your brand guidelines but allowing some room for creative freedom so that the resulting content feels natural. 

You might choose to ask for content approval before posting just to be sure that everything is on-brand. If you've done your homework and you're confident that your chosen influencer partners are a good match, hopefully you won't need to request too many edits, but it can help catch any factual mistakes or forgotten links.

Speaking of links, don't forget to specify the direct links and campaign hashtags that you expect influencers to include. For example, you might ask that they tag your brand in any grid posts or stories and include direct links to specific products through their stories. 

Next, agree on the type of posts that are expected from the collaboration. This might include a mix of static posts and stories that showcase your products in a visually appealing way, as well as some video content to demonstrate product usage or offer reviews.

It's also good practice to plan your campaigns so that every element is measurable against pre-defined objectives. For example, if you want to drive up traffic to your website, make sure you provide a trackable link so that you can see how many people took that action.

The next step is to collaborate on a scheduled release of posts across the influencer's channels and yours so that content is evenly spaced. This can also help when you're working with multiple influencers at the same time.

>> Read more: How to Identify Your Perfect Influencer with Artificial Intelligence

Building organic collaborations through user-generated content

A healthy influencer marketing strategy balances sponsored content with organic collaborations. 

These organic collaborations often come in the form of user-generated content (UGC). This typically means reviews and social content. It involves someone talking about your brand or recommending your products without any prior agreement or payment.

There's a lot of overlap with influencer content because UGC on social media often comes from influencers who happen to like your products. You can typically reshare this content to your own channels – but it's good practice to get permission from the person who posted it.

It's worth mixing sponsored posts with this kind of organic content because UGC provides social proof and further validates your brand.

Sponsored posts boost immediate brand exposure with direct links to your online store, while organic collaborations (in other words, those that have no cost) add authenticity to your marketing campaign.

You could also highlight user-generated content on your channels to build a community-driven brand narrative. The person who posted the content will often benefit from this exposure, as it will likely lead to them getting new followers.

You can get more UGC by encouraging customers to share their experiences with your products on social media by using incentives (for example, the chance to be featured on your website or entered into a sweepstake).

This combination of influencer collaborations and user-generated content is great for boosting sales, increasing customer engagement, and strengthening overall brand visibility.

Measuring and tracking campaign metrics

To ensure your influencer marketing strategy is successful, you must track the performance of each campaign. Measuring key metrics clarifies what’s working and where to improve your marketing efforts.

Key metrics to track

As we’re focusing on ecommerce influencers, the biggest metric of success is your bottom line. How much revenue did an influencer help bring in, and was it financially worth the investment?

This will give you an overall sense of your campaign’s success. However, it won’t tell you how you got there.

For this, you need to track campaign performance by monitoring likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates on influencer posts. To see how many sales happened as a result of your influencer activity, assess how direct links drove traffic to your online store.

Engagement rates are important, too. Don't forget to analyze how your content performs across various social media platforms.

Next, look at influencer reach. This will give you an idea of how effectively your campaign drove brand exposure. If you want to dig a little deeper, you could also give a score for the content quality of influencer collaborations. 

Finally, don't forget to track the engagement levels of user-generated content and the overall feedback on influencer collaborations.

The trick is to regularly analyze performance data to identify trends, adapt strategies, and refine influencer marketing campaigns. This way, your results should improve over time, and you’ll come to learn why your ecommerce campaign was a success or failure.

How to encourage long-term influencer partnerships

Long-term influencer partnerships are great for building customer trust and driving sales. The trick is ensuring both sides are happy across the length of the partnership.

Building long-term relationships generally requires a foundation of transparent communication. This means establishing clear expectations and maintaining open communication channels with your influencers.

Then, aim for regular engagement. Stay connected with influencers – even outside of active campaigns – to reinforce your brand’s presence.

Sometimes, offering exclusive opportunities can sweeten the deal and make an influencer more likely to mention you organically. This could involve sending out product samples for new lines or inviting influencers along to exclusive events and previews.

Case study: The Sociable Society

The Sociable Society is a social media influencer and campaign management agency working with influencers across the U.S. and Canada.

They help build organic connections between brands and influencers and have a roster of talent that includes many talented bloggers and social influencers.

However, they were finding it hard to keep track of their influencers before they started working with Brandwatch Influence.

Since they started using the software, the team estimates they've been able to save 30% of work hours that would have previously been spent on admin tasks and automated the tracking of analytics.

Today, 95% of The Sociable Society influencers have linked their social media accounts to Brandwatch Influence, allowing The Sociable Society to share real-time analytics with brand advertisers.

The company's co-founder, Emily Fonda, describes the benefits: “The Sociable Society is growing and scaling, and Influence allows us to focus on clients and strategy instead of analytics and reporting. With Influence, we are able to say yes to more projects. We do with a few clicks what used to take us hours.”

How Brandwatch empowers your influencer marketing

To succeed in influencer marketing, having the right tools to track key metrics, measure campaign progress, and adjust strategies in real time is vital. 

For starters, Brandwatch Influence is a discovery tool that will help you search through 50m+ global creators, making it easy to find the right influencers for your campaign.

Brandwatch Consumer Research and Brandwatch Social Media Management can also help with everything from real-time monitoring to data-driven optimization. For example, you can gain insights into influencer reach, post engagement, and overall campaign performance across social platforms.

You can also use detailed analytics to refine your influencer marketing strategies continuously.

These tools will help you track influencer-generated content, user-generated content, and other key metrics to maintain successful long-term collaborations.

Time to get started

Influencer marketing is a vital component of most ecommerce strategies, especially when a brand focuses its efforts on social media.

Working with influencers can genuinely transform your marketing efforts by driving sales, boosting brand visibility, and engaging new customers. All because it feels authentic and relatable.

The secret to success lies in identifying the influencers to get you closer to your target audience and customers. However, fine-tuning your strategy as you go along is also important.

Remember, influencer and user-generated content are key to building trust and engaging new audiences. These types are closely related, and you want to aim for a mix of both to achieve the ultimate boost in brand awareness and sales.

If you're ready to take the next step, Brandwatch’s solutions can help you get started. Brandwatch Influence can help you find the right influencers for your brand, while Brandwatch Social Media Management enables you to schedule posts and track the analytics once your influencer marketing campaign is up and running.