Did you know businesses get an ROI of $4.87 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing? 🤯
If you've been unsure about working with influencers, you’ll want to think again. Well-planned influencer marketing campaigns are not only cost-effective but help you grow your credibility, reach a niche audience and increase sales.
We'll take you through the benefits of influencer marketing that make it worth your investment. We'll also look at how small ecommerce brands are driving awesome results to inspire you. ✨
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that works with people who have a big online following to promote products or services. These influencers have built trust and credibility in their niche and create content that speaks to their audience. By working with these influencers brands can tap into their existing relationships and reach their target market in a personal way. It’s not just about brand visibility but also deeper connection with the audience which drives sales and growth.
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 influencer statistics that show just how important the influencer marketing industry 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
15 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, increased brand awareness 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.
The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90.6 million views and 39.5 million views, respectively.
The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90.6 million views and 39.5 million views, respectively.
2. Crack new markets
Influencer marketing can help you find untapped markets and reach wider audiences. Take the food brand, King's Hawaiian, who partnered with creators to create their own #foodtok. The worked with 16 creators who produced slider recipes for 'Slider Sunday' using the brand's delicious sweet bread. They used hashtags like #mealinspo to reach new viewers.
💡The key lesson here: identify and collaborate with relevant influencers who’s social following overlaps with the niche audiences 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. This will hugely benefit your social media marketing efforts.
💡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 niche 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 and is essential for enhancing brand awareness. As influencers talk about you and endorse your products, you’ll slowly build trust with your target audience.
Skin + Me uses influencers and user-generated content (UGC) in their Facebook ads. From people unboxing their products, to before and after videos to show how their skin has improved after using their products — this is sure to build trust and credibility with their target market. This tactic has worked so well that customers often post their own before and after pics in the comments section showing how the improvements they saw on using their products.
This just adds to the positive perception of your brand when customers are making purchasing decisions. 💕
This just adds to the positive perception of your brand when customers are making purchasing decisions. 💕
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.
For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix's products via her Instagram page. You can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE, by checking out the post descriptions. Every influencer has a different code so when someone uses it on their online store, it's easy for the team at Knix to know which influencer has had the most impact.
What's more, if your current customers see their favourite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders. 🙌
What's more, if your current customers see their favourite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders. 🙌
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 by effectively reaching niche audiences!
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. The sunscreen brand reached its ideal audience by pairing up with influencers in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty niches. Their influencers made creative content that highlighted Supergoop sunscreen's features in a light-hearted and entertaining way. This not only aligned with the brand's voice but also educated the influencers' followers on the importance of wearing sunscreen. They also showed how Supergoop's clear SPF50 differed from the traditional, white-cast sunscreen people are used to. Here's a peep:
10. Build a bank of content for repurposing
If you're a small or growing marketing team, it can be hard to find time to create high-quality content. You're already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, and so much more. Working with influencers means that content is created for you and you can repurpose it across your campaigns and channels.
Brands like Starface, for example, use pieces of content created by their customers to enhance their checkout.
Using real people will add a personal touch to your brand's online store, which helps reduce friction when they're getting ready to buy.
However, you'll need to keep track of contracts and image usage rights. If you have content from last year's campaign, it is important to determine if you have permission to reuse it the next year. Using content without permission can lead to some serious brand damage.
By using a tool like Dash, you have the ability to set expiry dates for assets. This enables you and your team to have full control over your content and helps you maintain your brand's reputation.
11. Collect data to better understand your audience
Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your niche audiences.
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.
12. 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 and focus on enhancing brand awareness, 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. 💡
This is something one of our customers, Forthglade, does really well. As a dog food brand, they know their customers only want the best products for their furry friends. So as well as providing lots of tips on their blog, they work with different types of influencers like Dr James Greenwood on their social media platforms to provide real, expert advice on how to look after and care for your best friend. 🐶
13. Turn influencers into brand ambassadors
Another key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators, leading to increased brand awareness. 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.
Just take a look at this case study from Grin who helped online brand, Inkbox, create an influencer campaign designed to build a community of brand ambassadors. They got 70+ creators to post about their products across different marketing channels. This in turn created a 40% uptick in unprompted creator posts. If you can cultivate genuine connections with your influencers, you can turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.
14. 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 sense of community isn’t easy. You need to establish a loyal customer base, a good online following and an emotional connection with your audience. This is where influencers can help. ✨
Take Lick, a UK-based paint brand. They took a slightly different approach and encouraged their Director of Interior Design to be their ‘internal’ influencer. Having this regular face show up on socials is important in building a strong bond with their community. Here’s what Amie, Head of Social Media and Creators at Lick says:
“It's really nice for our community to know that there are real people at Lick, like Tash, who’re there to give our decorators help and advice. This is important for our brand values as well. It's also given us a unique way to lean into video content across our key platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Plus, Tash creates the colours, so who better to tell our community about them than the person who actually creates them?
You can learn more about how Lick builds a strong community on social over on our podcast, Ecommerce Marketing 101.
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15. 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, especially when targeting niche audiences. 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. 💫
How to measure the success of influencer marketing campaigns
Measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaigns is key to understanding your influencer marketing strategy. Here are the key performance indicators (KPIs) to use:
- Reach and impressions: How many people saw the influencer’s content, and how many times it was it viewed? This will give you an idea of the overall visibility of your campaign.
- Engagement: Monitor the number of likes, comments and shares on the influencer’s content. High engagement means the content is resonating with their audience.
- Website traffic: Track how many visitors have been driven to your brand website from the influencer’s content. This will show how well the influencer is at driving potential customers to your site.
- Conversions: How many sales, leads or other desired actions have been generated from the a specific influencer campaign? This is the direct impact on your bottom line.
- Return on investment (ROI): The revenue generated from the influencer marketing campaign vs the cost of the campaign. This will give you the overall financial effectiveness of your influencer marketing.
By measuring these KPIs you can make data-driven decisions to optimise your marketing strategy. Not only can you make sure you’re reaching your audience, but also engaging with them in a way that gets you results.
How to get started with influencer marketing?
Now you’ve explored the biggest benefits of influencer marketing, you might be ready to get started. So we’ve curated a selection of resources from our blog that’ll point you in the right direction.
- Plan your influencer strategy: A step-by-step guide to planning your campaigns, setting aside marketing budgets and makign the most of influencer-generated content.
- Pick your influencer tools: Discover platforms to help you find and manage influencer relationships. Whether you're looking for influencer agencies or you want to track conversion rates of your campaigns—there are loads of software tools to help improve your influencer programs.
- Find your influencers: Use our influencer database to search through 50+ creators across different industries. From beauty influencers to LGBTQIA+ creators, travel influencers and finance experts—this is a good place to look for your next best partnership. 💕
- Put together an influencer brief: Download our free template for briefing your influencers.
Finally, if you need a place to store all your influencer content then make sure to try out Dash!
Dash could be just the single source of truth your marketing team is looking for. 😇 Our digital asset management solution means you can search, manage and share your brand's visual content with your influencers. And they can send you content ready for approval.
Want to give it a go? Sign up for a 14-day free trial, no strings attached. 👇
Masooma Memon is a freelance content marketer for B2B SaaS companies. She's written for brands like Shopify, Vimeo, and Calendly.
