Influencer Collaboration for Ecommerce: 5 Key Things to Keep in Mind
While there are many factors that contribute to the success of an eCommerce store, none come as close as their online advertising and marketing strategies. Of course, there are other contributing factors such as eCommerce order fulfillment and inventory management, but a strategy such as influencer collaboration can bring a steady stream of customers and revenue for your brand.
This is why you will find that online stores are more open to investing money into influencer collaborations. When done right, they are able to get consistent returns out of the strategy and even achieve their marketing goals more efficiently.
With that in mind, here are the five things that every brand should consider when collaborating with influencers for their eCommerce store:
5 Things to Consider When Collaborating With Influencers For Your Online Store
When you are working on collaborating with influencers for marketing your eCommerce store, there are some considerations that you should pay attention to. Here are some of the primary ones that you should know about:
1. Alignment of Content
Before approaching an influencer for collaboration, it is important that you get your research in order and ensure that the influencer’s content is aligned with what you have in mind for your brand. So finding influencers with relevant experience creating that kind of content is important.
For instance, if yours is a luxury skincare brand and you want to collaborate with a few influencers to promote your products. Now, if you want influencers to post videos of elaborate skincare routines using your product, choosing influencers who only post makeup tutorials or product reviews would not serve the purpose.
2. Target Audience
The next factor of consideration while choosing an influencer to collaborate with, is the target audience. Sure, you want the influencers you choose to have a significant amount of clout and engagement, but what's even more important is that it is from the right audience.
Consider the same example that we discussed in the previous point. For this campaign, you would want to go for influencers who use a lot of premium products in their content, because their target audience will consist of people who would be open to buying these luxury products. Instead, you opt for an influencer who is popular for budget skincare products, it might not work for your brand.
3. Reach and Authenticity
Perhaps the most important factor that you should look for in an influencer before collaborating with them is their reach. More than the number of followers these influencers have accumulated, it is more beneficial for them to have a decent amount of reach among the target audience that you are focusing on.
It is also a good idea to ensure that all the followers that an influencer visibly has on their account are actually authentic. There are many unethical or bad ways to increase follower counts without gathering any actual ones, and these will not help in promoting a brand in any way.
4. Quality of Content
For an influencer marketing campaign, the content quality that an influencer delivers is something that you should never take for granted. After all, this is the aspect that will define whether the campaign for which you are collaborating with an influencer is a success or failure. You may collaborate with the right influencer considering their follower count, reach and target audience, and yet fail if they are unable to deliver content of good quality.
What’s more, the value and quality that the influencer is able to bring to the table will reflect on your brand image and product. The content quality of an influencer is usually assessed by checking how witty, informative or engaging it is.
Of course, the ability of an influencer to deliver value depends on your company’s objectives, and the extent to which an influencer is able to help achieve them. So, if your aim is to provide value with your content, you may not want to go for a highly popular influencer who can get you the reach but not the amount of engaged audience you would like to have.
5. Engagement
The amount of followers and the reach an influencer has on their account means nothing if they do not have enough engagement. Engagement is defined by the number of times their content is liked, received with comments or shared.
You want to specifically seek answers to the following questions:
Are your target audience interacting with the influencer on their platform?
What kind of engagement are they able to bring to their posts?
Are these points of engagement converting into transactions?
The social media engagement statistics associated with an influencer are important to be monitored because they tell you whether the influencer will be able to spark interest for your brand and products among their audience.
Concluding Remarks
If you are looking for ways to boost the customer base and revenue for your eCommerce store, there are very few strategies that will help you as much as influencer collaboration. However, in order for the strategy to truly succeed, you will need to find the right influencers who will be able to engage your target audience and convince them about your brand or product. Applying some of the considerations listed here will ensure that you do not have to worry about the success of the campaign.
