How can you attract customers to your Magento website? One of the possible ways is to partner with influencers. In this article, we’ll go through the steps to launch an influencer marketing campaign in Magento.
Why You Should Consider Influencer Marketing
Suppose you own a Magento online store. You’ve ensured an unparalleled user experience for eCommerce, sped up website loading, and optimized the store for mobiles. All these measures will work well and bring you a good return on investment (ROI) only if you have many website visitors and recognition.
Influencer marketing is gradually winning its place among other promotional methods in the eCommerce sphere. It denotes collaboration between stores and influential people to promote goods, increase brand awareness, and boost sales. And it proves to be effective. But why?
The thing is that such people aren’t like advertising agencies creating promos for your company. Influencers organically earn the trust of their target audience. And as a result, their followers are more perceptive to their suggestions.
Most often, influencer marketing happens on social media, where thousands of people can check celebrities’ lives, trendy clothes, and favorite places to eat or stay. It’s like listening to your friend’s advice. If someone trustworthy likes the product, it has a better chance of suiting me, doesn’t it?
An Influencer Marketing Campaign in Magento in 6 Easy Steps
1. Determine What You Want to Achieve
Start an influencer marketing campaign by outlining your goals. It’s crucial to determine the direction you want to head to choose the best-suited influencers and communicate your goals to them. Bloggers can assist you in achieving various objectives, such as:
- growing your social media following;
- directing traffic to the website;
- encouraging users to subscribe to your newsletter;
- building a positive reputation around the brand;
- offering a discount code to increase sales and decrease cart abandonment.
After setting your goals, specify KPIs and how you will measure the campaign’s success.
2. Define Potential Customers
The second step in drafting your influencer marketing campaign in Magento is building your buyer persona. To whom do you want to appeal? The target audience will differ according to the specified goals. For example, you may want to boost sales among your typical buyers or attract shoppers from another group. They may have other interests and incentives to buy, so choosing the most effective tone of voice, tools, and influencers is crucial.
A target audience also impacts the choice of social media platform. If you focus on aesthetics, you may want to launch a campaign on Pinterest. Or if you need to attract younger and more active clients, TikTok or Instagram is a perfect fit for this goal.
3. Pick the Campaign Type
Considering that you thoroughly understand your target market and consumer personas, choose the type of campaigns to implement.
The ultimate goal for your influencer campaigns should be to encourage viewers to learn more about you or interact with your content.
But first, your plan should be enticing enough to persuade the desired influencers to partner with your Magento store. Several examples of typical campaigns include:
- mentions of sponsored material in the form of promotions, tagging the store in the post, or adding a link to the product page;
- creating giveaways or competitions to drive the audience through gamification and boosting their desire to win something in exchange for easy commitment: following someone’s account, liking a post, or leaving a comment;
- takeovers, where public figures become your social media marketers and show exclusive content on your page;
- affiliate partnerships, giving influencers a commission for every purchase;
- discount codes, allowing you to track the influencer marketing campaign performance and customers to get a product at a lower price.
However, you also want to make sure that each influencer post is consistent with your brand voice and values. The messaging should be conversational and genuine. Here is an example from the Parade online store. The retailer invited an influencer to discuss the new product release and promote its values.
The type of incentives also varies and can be monetary or non-monetary. It means you will pay opinion leaders money or give a product as compensation for the work. The choice depends on the influencer and your product value. For instance, more famous influencers may charge fees, unlike beginners or bloggers with a smaller audience.
4. Move from Preparation to Search
We’ve completed the basic steps in planning your influencer marketing campaign. The next step is to identify influencers that best fit your business. The possible ways to achieve it differ in terms of the difficulty and the level of automation, ranging from a manual search on social media to using dedicated tools.
Suppose you want to start with Instagram, which is the most typical social media for influencer marketing. This platform provides several options for finding relevant opinion leaders, such as:
- looking at your followers and loyal customers;
- checking the brand tags;
- examining trending hashtags in your niche;
- researching competitors;
- asking your audience.
If you fear that the proposed strategies won’t help find the right person, or you’re pressed with time, you may register on an influencer marketing platform. Such solutions contain databases with top bloggers and let you filter them based on the needed criteria. The most widespread platforms include NeoReach, TapInfluence, Upfluence, Traackr, etc.
Below you can find a screenshot taken on the TapInfluence website, illustrating the search for influencers in a certain niche, location, social media, and so on.
5. Get in Touch with Influencers and Discuss Prices
Most influencers have contact information in their bio. It can be a phone number to connect via popular messengers or an email address. The contact person also varies, with renowned bloggers having a special employee or a manager for this purpose.
Describe the campaign in detail and state your expectations, including the number of posts, platforms, types of content, etc. Ask for influencers’ analytics if they reply and agree to work with you. It will enable you to make an informed decision on whether to continue negotiations.
What should you look at when choosing your influencers? While the number of followers may seem the most evident popularity metric, focus on engagement instead. This KPI illustrates the level of trust in this person. In any case, it’s easy to enlarge your follower base with different tricky measures, such as bots and fraud accounts. But views, likes, comments, and shares demonstrate the real situation.
Once you’re satisfied with the analytics, discuss the form of collaboration and influencers’ prices. You will most likely need to pay 50% of the negotiated sum upfront. But note that it doesn’t mean bloggers should put your business in a favorable light. Their feedback may not be as positive as you wish, but it will be genuine. And being honest is better than deceiving customers and disillusioning them with time.
In any case, consumers will know about your partnership with an influencer. A case in point is Instagram and its “Paid partnership” label. So both you and the content creator are accountable for giving the correct information to potential customers. You can check what it looks like in the screenshot below.
6. Employ Analytics to Measure the Results
Once you’ve negotiated with the bloggers and signed the contract, check the posts now and then to see how consumers respond to them. If something is wrong, reach out to the influencer to find the best solution. Even though you may send some guidelines, opinion leaders are independent content creators. It is their content that lured so many people to their accounts. So you should give them the freedom to choose the best content strategy regarding your brand.
Compare the campaign performance with the previously established KPIs. Do you have the expected ROI? Utilize unique UTM tracking links or discount codes assigned to the influencer. Facebook Page Insights account also provides data, such as engagement and reach regarding your Instagram posts.
The example below shows an influencer’s post with a discount code for customers to use in the Sigma Beauty online store. It’s an affiliate program, and such collaboration benefits all parties involved.
To Sum Up
Here are the most critical steps in launching an influencer marketing campaign in Magento. By following them, you’ll have a better chance of making sales through an influencer campaign, and it will be much easier to track results.
In this day and age, where there is so much noise online, it’s important to find ways to cut through the clutter and get your message across in an efficient manner. And influencer marketing can help you with that. Now that you know how to conduct a successful influencer marketing campaign in Magento go out there and make it happen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Parish, CEO of Onilab
Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab, a full-service eCommerce agency with a focus on Magento. Kate has been working on diverse marketing strategies and activities for more than 8 years. In her pursuit to bring up top-notch marketing solutions, Kate is constantly exploring the topics of SEO, branding, SMM, PPC, and Magento PWA development.
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