How To Promote Your Product With Influencers

Whether you are a veteran and an experienced business professional or an up-and-comer entrepreneur, your business needs strong online presence to survive the competitive market’s ecosystem. Brilliant entrepreneurs fail because they have almost no idea how to properly advertise their products. Let’s solve that with this article.

The Premises

Whatever your role in the business world, if you’re in charge of selling a product, you’ll want to boost your sales and build brand recognition with an intelligent, well-balanced promotional effort. In general, people make a purchasing decision when the offer is (i) interesting, (ii) relevant and (iii) timely. Think about the last time you bought a pair shoes. Is it more likely that you just entered in a store and bought a pair out of the blue? Or was it because you wanted to treat yourself for Christmas and your friend was just telling you about this interesting deal for this new hype brand that everybody is wearing ?

In fact, there are 4 key elements you should always consider when advertising your product, especially with social media influencers :

• Who should advertise
• What they are going to say
• How are they going to advertise
• When should they advertise

Who Should Advertise Your Product?

If you don’t understand the benefit of realizing the true geniuses of today’s era, you will be left behind. There are three elemental factors before choosing an influencer to promote your product:

• The Size of the Influencers: Depending upon your financial constraints, intended audience, we would recommend going with a micro influencer.

• The Audience of the Influencers: If you are unaware of your user demographics, you can find different influencers who work with different types of audiences and widen your horizon. For example, some influencer will target more teenage girls, while other will target more young professionals. Get more influencers in the mix to get better results.

• The Authenticity of the Influencer: Here you just need to make sure that the audience and the engagement of the influencer has been gathered in an authentic way. This means quickly checking their followers but also the comments that are left on their posts. Beware some influencers are using engagement pods to boost their comment and likes. There are multiple tools that can be used to audit the influencer profile, this is typically the type of result that are displayed on the influencer Snikpic profile

What Are They Going To Say ?

Once you have decided on the influencers, the next step is to decide the type of content they will be using to entice the audience. There are three basic ways to approach the audience and each one has its own perks, benefits and advantages.

As a business owner, it is your duty to understand the different levels of impact your strategies can have on the audience. Determine the likes and dislikes of your audience. Determine their personality and decide the best way to reach them Below are the perks of different methods of approach towards the audience.

Promote Contest And Giveaways

People love free stuff! Promoting giveaways and contests can be a good way to raise your brand awareness, find new customers and get profile traffic. Influencers love these types of partnerships because it helps them engage with followers, be more influential, while at the same time promote other brands’ accounts.

Here is a good example from Ruxandra Babici who partnered with Techir Cosmetics to promote a giveaway contest. To take a part in the contest, participants need to follow the influencer and Techir Cosmetics’ Instagram account, and tag 3 friends.

This generates interest and spice about the content and the product. People tag their friends, and their friends tag their friends. You let your audience and fans advertise for you.

• Pros: Generates a lot of traffic towards your page. Brings new fans towards your product and creates an adhesive bond between your business and your fans.
• Cons: Can be quite expensive without generating sales right away. It will take time to gather fans and generate sales, but if executed perfectly, it can be quite fruitful.
• Our recommendation : Use this method when you have the financial budget to support the contest. This will raise awareness about your product.

Provide Exclusive Offers

Promote some exclusive offers for every purchase and join hands with influencers to promote your product. You can offer a promo code, a link URL or a gift along with the purchase to entice more people. Once the influencers have promoted your product, you are bound to see more traffic on your landing page or your product page. You can manage the impact of influencers by judging the amount of traffic they generated via the promo code.

Emilie Gharbi, a fashion blogger, works with companies to promote their products. Take a look at how she published a post wearing the Daniel Wellington watch.

• Pros: Provide you with concrete measure on the effectiveness and ROI of each influencer you use, with a clear call to action for the customer. Promo codes can judge their impact. It informs of the individual effectiveness of different influencers working under your radar.
• Cons: Doesn’t work if customers are “cold” to your brand, i.e., they haven’t encountered your brand enough and costs you some of your margin. Give them a reason to interact with your business.
• Our recommendation: After building a reputable brand awareness, use this method to judge which influencers work best for you in which demographics.

Add A Clickable Link In Their Bio

Influencers can include your link in their bio and redirect the audience to drive traffic towards your website. This is a simple way to increase the visibility for your business and website engagement

Here’s an example of how a Ellen Kegels clothing brand earns traffic with the help of her instagram profile. She provides a direct link to her website

• Pros: Can drive much more traffic to your website than a single post than any other form of content based engagement. Clickable bio entices the audience without enforcing the link on their news feeds. It makes them feel valued, motivated and interested in your business. It doesn’t come off as a passive-aggressive approach towards marketing.
• Cons: Can be costly to convince influencers to do that. Make sure to have a powerful budget before starting this. You can use the budget to create interesting and engaging content for the users and this way they will be motivate to click on the links in your bio.
• Our recommendation: Use that when you confirmed which influencers works best for you. Not all influencers are equals. Some have a more active, engaging and willing fan base than the rest. Use those influencers to drive more potential customers towards your product.

How Should Your Product Be Advertised?

Should you turn your content into a permanent post or a temporary story? Both the categories have their own pros and cons, but it depends upon the kind of engagement you want. Advertising without determining the true impact of the medium is not a trait of powerful businessmen.

Instagram is the most valuable tool in your arsenal for precise and effective advertising and marketing. However, you have to understand that not everyone likes to see products and advertisements on their newsfeeds. You have to collect data, understand your targeted audience, weigh the pros and cons of Instagram posts and stories before moving forward with a solution.

Instagram stories are quick, effective and feel natural. However, Instagram posts are permanent are ubiquitous and of higher quality. Let’s break it down.

Instagram Stories

Naturally, Instagram Stories have become an invaluable resource for influencer marketing campaigns. Not only do influencers love it, but audiences do, too. Compared to the glossy, polished images in the regular Instagram feed, Stories open up opportunities to publish more authentic, off-the-cuff content.

In fact, one-third of the most viewed Stories are from businesses and 39% of global users have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it on Instagram Stories. This gives power to stories more than the posts. More visibility translates into more traffic.

Stories are also incredibly interactive, like Major League Soccer created a flipbook or how the New York Public Library makes classic novels more accessible.

Contrary to post, stories can also provide good measure on the amount of traffic send to website thanks to the “Swipe Up” feature. Like when Michael Kors created Instagram Stories featuring fashion influencers in the latest looks and invited viewers to “Swipe Up” to see the looks on the brand website.

Stories are also unaffected by the in-feed algorithm, as they just show up chronologically on top of followers feeds

• Pros: are both interactive and more authentic as well as providing actionable direct link to your website
• Cons: feels cheaper (because of a lower production quality) and are not permanent
• Our recommendation: Use that when you want to first engage with your audience to create brand awareness and afterwards complimentarily to post to have trackable link to your website

Instagram Posts

Posts are also quite special when it comes to advertising and can take permanent place on the application to generate long-lasting traffic towards your website.

They are bound to be of higher quality as they are “permanent” on the influencer feed. Influencers have to make a great first impression. Their Instagram theme is their visual personality, their selling point. And they generally take special care of that by putting much more work on their posts, which means that you can easily reuse that for your own feed. See here the strategy of SPI watch, who basically leveraged all the content made by their influencer by reposting it on their feed

Post are also more cost effective, adespresso published an experiment comparing posts vs. stories. They created two ads, one that would be distributed in-feed and another in story. Results where interesting. While CPC was much lower with stories, the cost per conversion was much lower for an in-feed post with text

And while post are indeed affected by the instagram algorithm, they are also ubiquitous. They can literally be found on more than 30 different places on Instagram (the Explore page, the Hashtage place, the Location page, etc.)

• Pros: are both of higher quality and more cost effective when measuring the lead quality
• Cons: are less authentic and less interactive
• Our recommendation: Use that when you already built a little bit of brand awareness and are ready to start measuring conversion

When Should The Influencer Post

Instead of posting when everyone else is busy around the clock, the influencers should post the most effective content on special occasion. Below is a list of holidays to take advantage of;

• 21st January (The Blue Monday): The third Monday in January, nicknamed ‘Blue Monday’, is commonly known as the most depressing day of the year when many consumers seek solace in a bit of online retail therapy or go hunting for their summer holiday
• 14^th February (Valentine’s Day)
• February (New York and London Fashion Week): Running twice a year in February and September is London Fashion Week. It is increasingly one of the most important events on anyone’s fashion calendar and big news for anyone with an interest in the trade.
• 31^st March / 12^th May (Mother’s Day)
• 19^th April – 22^nd April (Easter Weekend)
• May to July (Wedding Season): Ebay recently reported that searches for ‘wedding presents’ skyrocketed last June, as many guests turned to online shopping to help them find the perfect gift for upcoming nuptials.
• 16^th June (Father’s Day)
• June to September (Festival Season): 153,000 people attend the annual music festivals in UK during the summer festival seasons. People tend to stock up for the events. It makes sense to cash in on that and highlight your product on the main pages of social media platforms
• 31^st October (Halloween): According to the NRF, $9 billion was spent on Halloween in the US in 2018. People spend a fortune on food, costumes and parties. It would make sense to offer Halloween themed products on this day and generate a handsome profit. Get influencers to use their power to generate traffic towards your business during this time of the year.
• 29^th November (Black Friday): Black Friday was originally an American shopping holiday, though as the practice of e-commerce has risen in recent years, the phenomenon has spread to become an international event. People from all over the world participate and organize black Friday and sales go up by leaps and bounds. This is the perfect time to get influencers to motivate more fans towards your products. Get the best of black Friday with influencers, offers and marketing campaigns.
• 25^th December (Christmas): E-commerce sales saw a giant leap of 11% last year and consumer spent 91 billion dollars during Christmas holidays. Christmas is one of the busiest times for business owners and it makes sense to advertise heavily and carefully to get more profits during this time.

The Bottom Line

In today’s world, success comes from familiarizing yourself with all the aspects of your business, including marketing and advertising. Get in touch with the influencers, understand the different types of engaging posts, control the timeline of the posts and manage an impact sheet or heuristics to determine the demographics and the types of influencers that work best for you.

Influencers drive the modern era businesses with the right tools. An influencer can engage with the local audiences and create a more personal, in-depth and relatable relationship with the audience. Consumers feel connected, valued and influencers come off as naturals.