4 Influencer Marketing Strategies for Ecommerce Brands

Gone are the days when Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms were just a place for friends to connect—they’re now also home to billions of dollars’ worth of marketing campaigns. Brands that are looking to take advantage of social media's $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, and 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.

So, how can product brands effectively use influencer marketing to make a difference in their online revenue? Here are 4 strategies brands should be using to boost their influencer marketing results.

1. Prioritize Community

The best results brands can hope to achieve for with their influencer marketing efforts is to create a flywheel of effective, high-performing content. And the first step to building that flywheel is prioritizing 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.

To create an effective community, you first need to know as much as you can about your current customer base. Learn your customers’ gender, age, and location so you can find influencers with a similar demographic in their follower base. By finding influencers with a high percentage of followers that meet your target demographic, you can maximize the efficacy of your campaigns.

An influencer within a specific community that fits your target demographic 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 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 to build a real relationship with them. Consumers sense the authenticity of this newer method and respond much better to these kinds of campaigns.

3. Create an effective monetization 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 monetizing 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

The possibilities for getting extra mileage out of your content really are endless.

4. Track Your Progress

The best way to know if your influencer marketing campaign is working is to track the performance data. Pay close attention to how many page visits the influencer generates and how many units they sold. This information will give your brand a benchmark so you know what kind of results to expect from future campaigns and help you to see where to make changes for future campaigns.

It will also make it easier to determine whether your investment in influencer marketing is paying off.

Drive Better Ecommerce Traffic and Conversions with Pattern

It can seem overwhelming to begin an influencer marketing campaign. It may be difficult to know where to start, how to find influencers that are a good fit for your brand, or how to ensure that content is in line with both your brand and the influencer’s style. Pattern’s data-driven tools and world-class marketing teams can help you take the guesswork out of the process.

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 optimize for each of these areas to reach long-term success on ecommerce marketplaces. Get in touch with us here to learn more.