How can you balance influencer marketing with other digital strategies for your e-commerce business?

Aligning influencer marketing with your e-commerce strategy requires a nuanced understanding of your business's unique needs and goals. It's not just about selecting influencers; it's about aligning their strengths with your specific objectives, whether that's increasing sales, enhancing brand recognition, or fostering community engagement. For instance, a fashion e-commerce site might engage influencers for their ability to drive trend-focused sales, while a tech business might focus on influencers who can bolster brand credibility and connect with tech-savvy communities.

While defining goals and KPIs is traditionally seen as the first step in any marketing strategy, I'd argue that being too rigid about them may stifle creativity and agility. Sometimes, focusing too much on predefined KPIs can lead to missed opportunities. A balance between goal-orientation and flexibility often yields the best results.

Influencer marketing is fairly easy to measure at the conversion level. But the higher up funnel we go, as marketers, the less tangible evidence we have of our impact. We look to create track-able mid and top funnel KPIs that indicate that an influencer is impacting purchase intent prior to actual conversion.

The biggest problem is actually knowing which KPIs lead to incremental revenue… especially when it comes to influencer marketing So I recommend ?? 1. Tracking post purchase survey results ?? 2. Trying to sign performance deals with influencers instead of just pay to post ?? 3. Starting with TikTok shops to find the influencers that actually drive revenue ??

From an agency perspective - a campaign is deemed a success or a failiure because objectives were not clearly outlined/agreed before a campiagn starts. 1) Define success 2) Agree measurment approach 3) Prioritise key metrics - ROI vs Awareness etc 4) Campaign optimisation should drive to performance as agreed vs changing priority mid campaign

Brand tone of voice fits a huge part of the selection, but this is a given! You need to qualify better how your selection fits into your KPIs and if it will hit your goals. Do you need awareness, engagement, or product feedback? Next, it's key to understand platform usage and engagement for each influencer. And how does this play into your own channel mix? Does this influencer drive sales or help grow channel engagement? Scattergun selection is very unlikely to work in most cases. Take time to think about how your choices betters your business and or brand.

Marrying the right platform for your offer is critical. If you have a B2C product, then you want to be spending your money on TikTok, YouTube, or Meta or even consider an influence on that platform. If you have a B2B product or service, you absolutely need to be on LinkedIn, Google ads, and have an SEO game plan. One of the issues with influencer marketing is scalability. Testing to find success takes time, and once you do, you typically see a diminishing rate of return from individual influencers (first post performs well, each additional post performs worse than the previous post).

While choosing an influencer, one should look at not just the current number of followers, but also the growth potential. Some ways to assess that: 1. Look at the their growth trend. 2. Are there other brands collaborating with them? If yes, then other brands are pumping money on their growth. Your brand would grow with them. 3 Does your influencer understanding the craft of influencing (SEO, SEM, Engagement, audience profile etc) 4. Do they believe in your brand? If yes, they would not ask for salary and de risk themselves. They would accept equity.

Long story short. Let's take a look at a case study of an ecommerece business "bagshop.pk". BagShop, leveraging influencer success on Instagram. What they need to do in order to diversify its digital strategy "influencer marketing" with other digital strategies. Things to Consider: Expand to platforms like FB, Twitter, and Pinterest. Implement content marketing, SEO, and email campaigns for broader outreach. Explore paid advertising on Google and Facebook, coupled with retargeting strategies. Combine influencer marketing with an affiliate program, encouraging user-generated content. Analyze data with tools like GA, optimizing mobile experience, and engage customers through loyalty programs. Adapt to industry trends for sustained growth.

In my expierence the top 3 things we should focus for influencer marketing are : Audience Match: The first thing to consider is whether the influencer’s audience aligns with your target demographic. Consider factors such as age, location, interests, and behaviour. Credibility and Trust: An influencer who has built a reputation in their niche can help to build trust for your brand. Do some background checks on the influencer to ensure there are no issues that could potentially damage your brand’s reputation. Quality of Content: High-quality content not only reflects well on the influencer but your brand as well. To increase eCommerce sales we should carefully focuss on each customer segment individually via different digital channels.

One thing I recommend is driving external traffic to Amazon! This will help drive your organic rank and get the flywheel rolling

The key to have deep consumer connect is to add physical experience to you consumers for the product or service, this doesn’t mean you have to open store or office, even if you set up a small pop up in the communities or be part of any reverent business expos would bring the customer closer to the product which give more credibility to the brand and improve the awareness

While collaborating with influencers if you are using a common coupon code across 5 influencers let’s say ABC10 it becomes imperative to have specific UTM (linking platform 1 &2) that will help us track the business generated from each influencers while they use the same coupon code to drive the traffic on our website. Otherwise, only link clicks would be tracked on Instagram (platform 1) & not the conversion on our website (platform 2). Keep in mind our target is total sales from individual influencer not cumulative sales from all the influencers with the same code.

Implement tracking mechanisms to measure conversions from different channels. Attribute sales or leads accurately to understand each channel's contribution. Update your budget accordingly

In addition to this, identify your audiences. Know who you are speaking to no matter the channel. Messaging for those marketing efforts should all connect to each persona.

The influencer campaign content has multiple layers of purpose - Its prudent to keep monitoring them with defined short & long term perspective. Further, If its owned ,then it can be re-boxed at another juncture to trigger composite objectives

Tracking and analyzing influencer marketing campaigns, along with other digital strategies, is essential to determine their effectiveness. Tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics, and influencer marketing platforms can help collect and compare data on metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, ROI, and sentiment. Gathering feedback from influencers and customers provides insights into their preferences, opinions, and pain points. With this information, you can make necessary adjustments to campaigns, allocate budgets accordingly, and test new ideas to optimize performance and achieve desired goals.

This goes back to my comment in a previous post about weaving ‘influencer marketing’ into buckets. What is the metric? Do you want to drive conversion, new customers or engagement? You can then review which platform and goals will be most beneficial. Are you looking at visibility scores or ROI through SA360? Do you want to look at conversion and, therefore, use software like GA4 and Content Square? It would help if you looked at it with a lens of ‘how do we continue to improve our CX?’ you can then use A/B testing platforms like Monetate or Optimisely and then create tests on how we use influence marketing to gain the KPI you find most important.

A monitoriza??o contínua das campanhas de marketing de influência é crucial para o sucesso a longo prazo. A empresa deve empregar ferramentas analíticas para avaliar o desempenho em tempo real, ajustando estratégias conforme necessário. A otimiza??o contínua com base em dados coletados ajudará a maximizar o retorno sobre o investimento (ROI) e a manter a eficácia em rela??o às outras estratégias digitais.

La clé pour des campagnes de marketing d'influence réussies tient à 3 choses : ??une pré-production carrée avec des contenus alignés sur des objectifs clairs et mesurables ??un vrai dialogue avec les influenceurs pour avoir leur propre feedback sur le travail ?? et un effort dans la durée. Pour qu'un partenariat avec un influenceur porte ses fruits, il faut l'envisager comme une campagne marathon. Une collaboration en one-shot n'est pas aussi pertinente pour la cible. C'est sur la durée que l'audience s'engage vraiment.

Influencers like any other strategy is great but may not work for every brand, at every stage for every campaign.. but what will give you the strongest chance of success is authenticity, finding partners who believe in your core product, who share your mission and passion so that even if the efforts dont drive results in the short term, you can more easily optimize and test your way to success

Consume every bit of data possible about the influencer campaigns to inform decisions at the "speed of social." Once lost, momentum's gone forever, so every bit of data counts to understand how each influencer touches the brand, respond in the channel, engages each audience, and affects follow-on campaigns.

Be careful about reputation. A good influencer today may not be the best tomorrow. If they won't use or try your product before becoming an influencer - don't use them. If they don't like your product or can't speak from the heart - it's a problem. Remember that I Love Lucy scene where she is promoting the drink? Google it!

It's crucial to adapt swiftly. I've seen brands struggle due to delayed adjustments. In my playbook, influencer channels are not just hedges but alternative content sources. When programs underperform, swapping content between paid media and influencers is a game-changer. It tests audience reach and emotional tone simultaneously. Efficiency matters – if an influencer's profile outperforms paid ads, it's a signal. Also, keep the next version of paid creative ready during testing!

Trabajar con micro influencers en ocasiones es más lucrativo que trabajar con grandes. Dependiendo la plataforma el alcance de los micro es más impactante que los seudo-grandes. Usar el crossover es una gran manera de presentar tu marca ante ojos nuevos y si el cameo puede ser con alguien que explique tu marca através de los conceptos de su mismo canal, el impacto es mucho mayor.