Social media has democratized the celebrity endorsement model. Today, anybody with a few thousand or more followers can endorse a product and help engage and nurture your target audience into a paying customer.
Customer acquisition costs have been increasing across the board for SEO, SEM, and social media advertising. A growing number of ecommerce businesses are now turning to influencer marketing to nurture and convert customers. If you are new to creator partnerships, start with proven influencer marketing tips before you scale spend.
Why Influencer marketing works for eCommerce
Ecommerce businesses, especially DTC stores, suffer a trust deficit problem. These businesses typically have a low barrier to entry and thus compete with hundreds of similar stores for the customer's attention.
These businesses have a limited number of avenues to profitably acquire customers. Search engine optimization is a long drawn process and is getting increasingly volatile. CPC costs on Google and Facebook ads have been increasing the past many years. Email marketing has a catch-22 problem since you can't build a subscriber base without growing first.
Influencer marketing helps ecommerce businesses tide over a number of challenges.
Creates legitimacy: Your potential customers are more likely to trust a social media influencer they trust and follow, rather than a brand they have never heard of.
Budget friendly: With influencer marketing, ecommerce stores can pick influencers that meet their budget. This is unlike PPC or SEO where these brands have to compete with the likes of Amazon or Walmart for the same eyeballs.
Visually appealing: Visual-first social media channels like Instagram and TikTok are ideal for products that rely on video demonstrations to convert.
Ad fatigue: Influencers have a vested interest in keeping their content interactive while converting the viewer for their clients. This creates a win-win scenario where social media followers don't suffer the same kind of ad fatigue with influencer content while also ensuring products see high conversion.
Is Influencer marketing really for you?
If you have not done influencer marketing before, this process can seem a bit intimidating. Unlike Google ads, you cannot start with a small $20 budget. According to Anand Srinivasan from Hubbion, finding the right influencers may cost a lot of money, and this is not something you may be comfortable spending upfront before seeing your first dollar from the customer.
Here are some things to be mindful about.
Do you have a steady stream of income already?
Influencer marketing is great. But it's like any other customer acquisition channel. Your customers are still going to land on your website, evaluate your products, read the reviews, and compare prices before they hit checkout.
If you do not have a steady stream of customers already from other channels with low barriers to entry (like Google Ads), it's perhaps worth investing time on those channels first before investing in influencer marketing. Pair creator traffic with strong on-site conversion habits, including how to generate leads from visitors who are not ready to buy yet.
Do you have organic social proof?
Customers can see through the fakeness of any marketing campaign. If your business does not have organic social proof established already, you may not see much success with paid influencer marketing campaigns. Acquire customers organically, and establish public testimonials and reviews before you pay for influencer campaigns.
Is this your main customer acquisition channel?
Influencer marketing is a powerful customer acquisition channel and can single-handedly build your marketing pipeline. But for someone who has not done influencer marketing before, it is recommended that you start it with a small percentage of your marketing budget and build your way up.
Do you know your customers?
What separates successful ecommerce owners from the rest is that they go by data and not logic. Logic might dictate that your product will appeal to a certain target audience. But data might indicate otherwise. It is important to know who exactly you must target before you start with influencer marketing.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with influencer marketing and early-stage businesses that get burnt can find it extremely difficult to get back on track. Ideally, you should start influencer marketing with a budget that you can afford to lose.
Setting up an Influencer marketing campaign from scratch
Step 1: Build your audience profile
Building a solid audience profile is critical to building the right influencer marketing campaign. This may be the first step, but oftentimes the most important component of the process. Even overlooking a seemingly minor detail here can influence the outcome of your marketing campaign.
There are two parts to this: the profile of the person making the purchase decision, and their buying motive.
You could be selling women's jewelry. But if the buyer is a man looking to gift your jewelry to their spouse, then you must be targeting men in your campaigns.
Similarly, your store could be selling hoodies online. But if your buyer is a college fraternity looking for branded hoodies, then you may need to schedule your campaigns based on the academic calendar instead of the season.
To build an audience profile, make use of confirmed purchases with no returns. This is the segment that is most likely to buy your product.
If you have a large transaction volume, you could also consider restricting your segmentation to only those purchases that have received a five star rating. These are customers that are most happy with the purchase.
Step 2: Define your campaign objectives
At the outset, all ecommerce stores are looking for conversions. However, depending on your budget and campaign strategy, the objectives may differ.
If you sell low ticket items (typically in the sub-$100 range), then you can afford to target conversions right away. However, high ticket items have a longer marketing pipeline and your marketing objective could change accordingly.
For instance, home gym equipment typically has a higher price point. Customers in this segment need convincing on whether they really need this product at home, and also how it's beneficial. Stores selling such products may look to generate leads to nurture instead of a straightforward conversion.
Once you have identified your campaign objectives, you can also establish the specific KPIs to track the performance of your campaign.
Some common campaign objectives are brand awareness, audience engagement, website traffic generation, lead generation, and sales/conversions.
Here is a list of different influencer marketing campaign objectives and the corresponding KPIs to track.
| Influencer marketing campaign objective | Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to track |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Total impressions, reach, video views, and cost-per-mille (CPM) |
| Audience Engagement | Engagement rate, comment sentiment, saves, and shares |
| Website Traffic Generation | Link clicks, click-through rate (CTR), session duration, and bounce rate |
| Lead Generation | Form submissions, sign-up counts, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) |
| Sales/Conversions | Promo code redemptions, affiliate link sales, return on ad spend (ROAS), and direct conversions |
| User-Generated Content (UGC) | Volume of usable assets created, content rights acquisition, and ad performance of creator assets |
| Thought Leadership | Brand sentiment analysis, follower growth, and share-of-voice |
Step 3: Establish the social media platforms for your campaign
Your campaign objectives, and subsequently the social media platforms to use for the campaign, depends on your ecommerce product category and the audience you want to go after.
Low ticket items and products with visual appeal are typically a good fit for platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Some product categories (like an office supplies store) may fit a professional network like LinkedIn instead.
Finding the right social media platform for your campaign not only impacts the performance, but can also impact your budget and ROI.
Here are some factors to consider:
Product category and type: What problem does your product solve? Is it for personal use or business? Can it be demonstrated visually?
Target audience: What is the demographic of your target buyer? Will this be a casual purchase or does it demand an occasion?
Campaign objectives: Platforms like YouTube are ideal for brand awareness. Instagram and TikTok are good for visual lifestyle branding. If you are looking for thought leadership, then LinkedIn or X may be a good choice.
Content format: Do you need to showcase high resolution pictures? Can the objectives be met over a 30 second video or does it need a detailed video? Does it need to be visual-first or text-heavy?
Budget & resource capacity: Production costs differ across various content formats. This, along with reach potential, can impact the cost of your campaign across different platforms.
Tracking & ROI capabilities: Some social media platforms like Instagram do not allow linking from within the post. This can impact click-throughs and can impact campaigns where the objective is to increase website traffic. Other platforms are known to strip referrer parameters making tracking difficult.
Step 4: Find the right influencers
Once you have figured out your budget and campaign goals, the next step is to pick the right influencers to hire for your campaign.
There are a few things to look at while matching a potential influencer for your campaign.
- Number of followers
- Their industry
- Post performance
- Previous influencer campaigns
- Budget
When it comes to influencer marketing, sometimes less is more. A nano-influencer with just a couple of thousand followers — but is a complete fit for your industry — always offers a much better ROI than a mega influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, but reaches a very broad audience.
It's very important to weed out influencers with fake followers, false engagement, and inauthentic content. Such influencers are often a waste of money and don't help you with your campaign objectives.
Step 5: Launch your influencer marketing campaign
At this point, you have a good idea of your campaign objectives, the target audience, the platform you want to target, and the kind of influencers you want to hire for your campaign.
The next step in the process is to finalize your campaign strategy and launch your campaigns. To begin with, formalize the kind of campaigns you want to target. This could be product unboxing videos, product reviews, giveaways and contests, meme-based content, or thought leadership posts.
It's a good idea to restrict one campaign to one kind of content format. If you have a large budget, you could launch two separate campaigns targeting these different content formats. Restricting yourself to one format will help establish the momentum as well as benchmark performance of various influencers and thus set up a baseline for your future campaigns.
Once you have finalized the format and strategy, the next step is to reach out to the relevant influencers and collaborate on the campaign. This may be a long-drawn process involving the following steps:
- Reach out to the right influencers or their agents with a proposal
- Share your campaign objectives, sample assets, etc.
- Negotiate a price for the campaign
- Send product samples or coupons to buy the product
- Coordinate video production
- Launch the campaign
- Track performance and gather insights for the next campaign
While it is technically possible to handle this campaign over email and spreadsheet, it can get messy when you are negotiating with dozens of influencers at once. It's a good idea to invest in an influencer marketing software and an agency to handle these conversations — this makes things organized and efficient. Teams that outgrow spreadsheets often evaluate social media and influencer tools before they hire more creators.
Here is a list of tools and services that can help you run an influencer marketing campaign effectively.
Dash Social
Dash Social is a social media management and influencer marketing platform that helps brands manage social media campaigns, along with creators and influencer relationships.
Key features:
- Unified workspace and workflow management
- Sourcing, vetting, and discovery
- Advanced AI & predictive analytics
- Verified data and ROI reporting
- Multi-channel social and ecommerce integration
Stack Influence
Stack Influence is a micro-influencer and product seeding platform that connects brands with a vetted network of micro- and nano-influencers.
Key features:
- Automated product seeding
- AI-powered vetting and targeting
- Product-based compensation
- Verified social posting and guarantee
- Ambassador and affiliate conversion
HireInfluence
HireInfluence is an award winning influencer marketing agency that has worked with the likes of Adidas, Microsoft, MTV, eBay, Starbucks and McDonald's. The agency handles the entire gamut of influencer marketing activities, including building influencer strategy, curating the right influencers, content production, launching UGC campaigns, running paid media amplification campaigns, and tracking performance.
Key services:
- Strategy development
- Influencer curation and validation
- Influencer presentation and negotiation
- Content auditing and FTC compliance
- Paid media and tailored analytics
SARAL
SARAL is an all-in-one "Influencer OS" for ecommerce and DTC brands, bringing creator discovery, relationship management, product seeding, affiliate tracking, and campaign reporting into one workspace. Its partnership-ad and whitelisting workflow helps teams spot creator content, request usage rights, and organize approved posts for paid amplification from the creator's handle.
Key features:
- Creator discovery and vetting across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
- SIA-assisted outreach, inbox replies, and follow-ups
- Creator relationship and campaign management
- Product seeding and shipping workflows
- Affiliate links, discount codes, and performance analytics
- Social listening, whitelisting permission requests, and creator content tracking
Setting your eCommerce influencer marketing campaign for success
Influencer marketing is not simply about finding the right influencers and getting them to talk about your product. There are a number of seemingly minor issues that could impact the success of your campaign.
Blitz or drip: Product launches and flash sales need all your different influencer campaigns to launch at nearly the same time. This is the blitz strategy and can also help you dominate the algorithm. However, for campaigns that need engagement through a pipeline, a drip-based strategy works better.
Co-creation and product guardrails: Some brands prefer dictating every word uttered by the influencer, while others encourage a more organic content format that establishes credibility and builds trust. Either way, a brand has to be mindful of the product guardrails that must not be breached in order to keep the content focused and drive the campaign towards meeting the KPIs.
Demographic misalignment: The demographics of the viewer is perhaps the most important component. Unfortunately, there is no real way to guarantee that the social media algorithm will ensure your video is watched by your prospective buyer alone. As such, the only control you have over ensuring high demographic alignment is picking the right influencer to work with, and the right content format.
Track your project progress: The objective of any marketing campaign is profitability. If you are outsourcing your influencer marketing campaign to an agency, it is a good idea to track the time spent on the campaign, especially if you are paying them by the hour. Time tracking tools like actiTIME can track the billable hours and help you understand your agency's productivity to ensure your campaign ROI metrics are being met.
Wrapping up
Influencer marketing can be an incredibly powerful customer acquisition channel for ecommerce stores. But the success from this campaign depends on finding the right influencers to reach the right audience with the right kind of content.
Given the overheads involved, it is important to be absolutely sure about these factors before investing your marketing budget in this campaign. Once creator traffic lands on your store, keep the conversation going with Instagram shopping tips and a clear path from social proof to checkout.
Ultimately, even with all these factors falling into place, brands must be careful about the budget since even the best performing campaigns can fail to make money if the returns on your investment do not justify the spend.
