A hot topic in the ecommerce industry right now is how to effectively use influencer marketing to drive ecommerce sales. Brands that are looking to take advantage of social media and the $16.4B creator economy are smart to do so, especially as the millennial and Gen Z generations become bigger players in the retail space.
Influencer marketing works for discovering demand for your products, driving traffic to your listings, and ultimately converting users—76% of people buy products they see in social media posts, and from a consumer sample size, 50% of respondents said that user-generated content would make them more likely to buy a product.
Influencer marketing, especially when combined with Pattern’s experts, dependable data, and best-in-class technology solutions, can really boost your sales. Here are 3 strategies ecommerce brands should be using to ensure effective influencer marketing results.
1. Prioritise Community
The best results brands can hope to achieve for their ecommerce efforts with influencer marketing is to create a flywheel of effective, high-performing content. And the first step to building that flywheel is prioritising community.
Communities are an incredibly effective tool for influencer marketing performance. Social media communities are loyal, likeminded, share similar values and desires, and thrive when they feel like they’re supporting one another.
An influencer within a specific community already has the trust and deep understanding of their audience needed to craft highly effective content that works to drive traffic and conversions for your products. When their community begins to engage with your products and understand their value, the right influencers can capture that interest, share it, and keep the flywheel moving to promote your product effectively.
2. Build Long-Term Superfans
Influencer marketing used to work solely as transactional deals between a brand and an account. As the industry has evolved, however, consumers are much more likely to engage with content that feels organic and products that fit their communities and speak to their values and desires.
Now, we know that it’s much more effective to create a curated promotional process with influencers and their audiences. Rather than paying brands for a single piece of content with a short lifespan, brands are working with influencers to create long-term ambassadors, test content and processes, and bring that influencer into the brand, building a real relationship with them. Consumers can sense the authenticity of this newer method and respond much better to these kinds of campaigns.
3. Create an Effective Monetisation Strategy
The benefit of building a community and a long term relationship with brand superfans is that those things create a great foundation for effectively monetising the content you have. There are so many ways to do this now, and brands should really be trying to take advantage of as many of these methods as possible.
Creator content can be repurposed for things like: running ads behind organic content, using whitelisted media, creating spark ads (an ad that comes from an influencer’s page, therefore making it seem more authentic and organic), repurposing content for all social platforms, creating a blog post, using it within an event, and more. The possibilities for getting extra mileage out of your content really are endless.
Drive Better Ecommerce Traffic and Conversions with Pattern
Through more than 10 years of working with brand partners on global marketplaces, Pattern knows what it takes to succeed in the ecommerce space. Success is built on performance in these three areas of the Ecommerce Equation: traffic x price x conversions = profitability. With the right experts and resources on your side, you can optimise for each of these areas to reach long-term success on ecommerce marketplaces.
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