Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows companies as well as individuals from various industries to create their own online stores and sell their products. One of the most cost-effective ways to drive customers to your Shopify store is by implementing influencer marketing campaigns. Influencers, as content creators, have a large follower base that allows them to generate more traffic to Shopify stores and successfully convert visitors into customers.
Influencer marketing offers multiple benefits, such as amplifying your brand message, improving branding and generating higher conversions, making it a highly effective tool for generating traffic to your Shopify store.
Follow the recommendations below if you want to create an influencer marketing strategy as a method to increase the visibility and sales of your online store.
Discuss with your team the goals you hope to achieve through the campaign. Certainly, most companies are looking to generate more sales and, in general, a higher Return of Investment (ROI). With clear objectives, you can define the content strategy to be developed so that the influencer’s publications reach the desired target audience and perform the actions you expect as a brand. Sponsored publications, discount codes, or tutorials on how to use a certain product are some of the proposals that can result from this “brainstorming” and then become real actions.
Knowing the objectives of your strategy, you can more easily choose the most suitable influencer for your store’s products. To do this, you will have to analyze the influencer’s niche, if indeed it reaches your target audience, the tone of the influencer’s messages, and the credibility and engagement with their audience. Based on these objectives you will also be able to determine which platforms best fits your audience. For example, if your target audience corresponds to generation Z, you will know that the application most used by them is TikTok; if, on the other hand, your audience is mostly millennials, Instagram may be your central platform. It should be noted that not only age is a determining factor in choosing the social media platform. The consumption habits and content formats that you will create with the influencer will help you select the most appropriate tool.
In the specific case of online stores like Shopify, affiliate marketing is very useful since you pay the influencer based on the sales generated. This is a tactic to optimize your advertising budget because the investment is based on the number of effective leads that come from the influencer. The best way to develop these agreements is to define a commission per sale via an affiliate link, a URL tracker, or a promotional code. We recommend you to read on our blog this detailed article: Affiliation as a pillar of Influencer Marketing.
In addition to social networks that will be the main channel for the dissemination of messages created by the influencer, you can complement your strategy by using other tools such as email marketing or the creation of SEO-optimized blogs on your website. Remember that diversifying your communication channels also allows you to reach different segments of your target audience. Some customers may prefer to receive email updates while others may be more comfortable viewing your blog posts or using your mobile app. By diversifying your communication channels, you can ensure that you are reaching your customers in the way that suits them best.
As always, the last step in this process is to evaluate the results based on the metrics of each social platform you utilize . However, our suggestion is that, as a business, you should be aware of what is being said about you as this will allow you to understand how users are interacting with your brand. In addition, by monitoring conversations about your company on social media, you will have the opportunity to gather ideas for future content for your collaborations and detect possible demands that will allow you to improve your catalog of services. In marketing, this process is called “social listening”. If you are interested in seeing how other brands apply this strategy, you can read here: How to use Social Listening for your influencer marketing strategy.
When it comes to converting your influencer’s followers into customers, the most important thing is to build trust, provide value, and facilitate transactions.
To achieve this, start by creating high-quality content that appeals to your community and motivates them to visit your Shopify store. The next step is to offer incentives. Discount codes and promotions are one of the most effective ways to attract social media audiences to your store, and in many cases, end in successful purchases.
In addition, you can encourage follower interaction and participation through collaborative content. Through strategies such as contests, it is possible to encourage influencer followers to visit your store and share their own experience with your product. This not only generates traffic, but also builds a community of potential consumers around your brand.
On the other hand, you can implement remarketing. All those audiences that have previously interacted with your product are potential customers who sometimes with a “last push” can decide to purchase your service/product.
And finally, in terms of ease of transacting, the advantage Shopify offers is that it supports a wide variety of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and cryptocurrencies. This means that customers can choose the payment method that suits them best, making it easy to complete the transaction. The easier it is, the better chance you have of closing the sale.
Shopify Collabs is an application that gives content creators the opportunity to solicit and manage their collaborations with brands. As the platform itself explains,”you can apply for different community programs and partner with brands to promote products with your audiences.” If you are an influencer using Shopify Collabs, you can review everything related to your collaborations, accept freebies or discount codes from brands, track your affiliate sales and even receive payments from the companies you are working with.
Speaking of collaborations, when browsing social media, we find a variety of ways that Shopify stores and brand owners are looking to increase traffic and incentivize sales through collaborative content.
On TikTok, for example, “Shopify Hauls” abound in which influencers share with their community the products they acquire from Shopify stores, mostly as a result of collaborations with brands under the models of swaps or giveaways. This type of content is well received by people on networks who are interested in learning about the references and the subsequent acquisition of their favorite products.
Sponsored posts is another successful format that allows brands on Shopify to expand their reach. Influencer Cathy Nguyen’s post is an example: during a tutorial on how she applies her makeup, she talks about the benefits for creators and brands of using Shopify Collabs. All mentions around the platform are opportunities for new users to purchase products.
Similarly, another model that can work is to create content for your own account that the influencer then promotes on their profiles, or conversely, have the creator generate the posts which you can then share on your networks. Creating visually appealing content of the products you have in your Shopify store could capture the attention of users and lead them to click on the link to your website. You can even give out discount codes to your influencer’s followers to increase the chances of conversion.
There are several strategies to increase conversions on Shopify, here are more details:
A key feature of Shopify is that it offers brands the ability to create thousands of individual promo codes that you can use, for example, for slow-moving inventory or to reward the most loyal followers of the influencer you are working with. Custom discount codes are also efficient for tracking the sales generated by each influencer, providing valuable data to measure the success of the campaign.
Tracking links in influencer marketing strategies allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns with content creators. These links allow you to accurately calculate the amount of traffic, sales, and conversions generated by the influencer you are working with. In addition, you can use different tracking links for each social media platform. This way, you can identify which platforms generate the most traffic and sales, which can help you optimize your future marketing efforts.
In addition to discount codes, creating strategies that are tied to specific seasons of the year to incentivize sales is a tactic widely employed by businesses. Through influencers, you can advertise discounts in your Shopify store for times like Christmas, Black Friday, Halloween and of course, summer sales, which are underway.
We recommend you to read: Increase your Shopify sales with influencer marketing
If you are interested in learning more about Kolsquare, the leading influencer marketing platform in Europe, you can request more information and our experts will contact you to offer you personalized advice tailored to your particular needs.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
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