The secret to a good influencer event.
The first thing that is most important when working with an influencer — decide on the outcome you want.
We know we should work with influencers. We know these people have a following that may not be following us, and we hope that they will. We trade products with them or giving them a little bit of money, in hopes that they will bring people to our store and raise awareness for our business.
And the problem with that is we can not measure that.
We might be disappointed because we didn’t get any sales. (That’s always our goal.)
But, that may not always be the outcome we want.
Here are three possible outcomes when working with influencers:
Outcome #1: Content
This is the one that we have used the most at Sock Doggo, so far.
We have been working with influencers for content, so I haven’t paid them any money but we have a lot of images. Really good images that we can use on our website, social media, and email programs. Not just in our email campaigns, but in our email funnels.
It’s content that we couldn’t get otherwise because we’re a really new business.
One of the challenges I had was to get reviews on my website. Because we had worked with so many influencers, we were able to get reviews.
The second challenge I had was that I was struggling with time on site because basically it’s a one-product store. My average time on site was about 30 seconds.
What we were able to do was use this content from these influencers to create a longer product page with more content that people might consume with links to bring them around to the site.
This content has already increased our time on site. That page has gone from 30 seconds to a minute. That’s hugely valuable.
When you are starting out when you need to build assets. I know so many of the people we work with are at the stage where photography’s a problem, and they don’t have a lot of depth. They don’t have stories to tell.
If I had measured the success by my sales, I would have considered that a failure. So decide what outcome you want. And it’s okay that the outcome is content.
Outcome #2: Email Addresses
I know that if I can get an email address, I increase my chance of that person buying from me by at least three times.
So say I have, presently less than 1% chance of somebody buying from me if they’re not on my email list. If I can get them to my site via an email that goes up to a 5% Conversion Rate. And so it’s really important to me to collect email addresses.
In my next phase of influencer marketing, the outcome I want is email addresses. Right now, 55% of my sales are coming from the last click on an email.
So again, if I set up a Giveaway with an Influencer and I was looking for sales and growing my Instagram account and I didn’t get sales, I would say that event wasn’t successful.
But the outcome I’m looking for is email addresses — for me.
I know that I can take that pool of email addresses and convert them over time. And so, I think that’s a really good outcome for working with an influencer.
Outcome #3: Sales
When I think of influencers that you could work with to get sales, I think the biggest mistake people make is they partner with somebody who has a big audience, but not necessarily an audience of buyers.
When you’re looking for sales as your outcome, you need to find people who have an audience of buyers.
When we did our proof of concept event with American Doxie, we knew they had an audience of buyers, so it worked very well for us.
Edith Minne, who owns Renaissance Ribbons, has done a lot of influencer collaborations in the last year that have added tens of thousands of dollars to her revenue. The difference between that and just finding somebody on Instagram is that she’s specifically working with influencers who have an audience of people who are used to buying.
Influencer Marketing is huge, but what’s the outcome?
Content, email sales.
When you work with an influencer with an audience of buyers on an event and you’re looking for sales —expect to pay for that based on results, like a percentage of the sales, because there has to be something in it for them too.
It’s something that I will be doing later on this fall. And I think it’s a great way to build your business.
But, you need to be clear about your desired outcome hen you decide to work with an influencer. Keep in mind what you want to happen and build your promotion and choose your influencers based on that.
Many of our Inner Circle Members have used this training to build their own successful Influencer programs. It’s available to our members at no extra cost. Want to learn more about the Inner Circle? Click here.
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