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In this article we will dive deep into the world of influencer marketing; and how big brands as well as Dropshipping stores use influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is considered one of the best-paid media that any business owner can use right now. Studies have shown that for every $1 spent on an influencer, you can potentially make $6.50 back. No other paid media can give these consistent results. There are also cases when a brand has seen more than 1000% ROI on their influencer marketing campaign. I will be sharing some stories of incredible influencer marketing results towards the end of this article: this should be treated as a case study, not typical results. I will also be sharing lessons learned from those case studies.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where a notable figure in an industry or a niche is paid to recommend a product to its audience. Sometimes this can just be an influencer associating themselves with a brand or a business. This usually brings awareness, traffic, leads, and sales for the brand. This marketing strategy is seen as one of the most effective marketing strategies with the most ROI ever because the influencers are seen as trustworthy and authoritative figures in the eyes of the public which makes it easier for their audience to trust the brand that they recommend.
Different types of influencer marketing strategies
Different strategies of influencer marketing work well. We will go over the ones that are most effective and used by both small and big brands.
Sending over your Product to influencers
This influencer marketing strategy is common among big brands. They will contact influencers and ask for an address to send a product to them in exchange for a post on whichever platform they have an audience in. Smaller brands are already copying this strategy because it is effective. What you can do is look for influencers in your niche that have highly engaged audiences.
The reason for this is because mega influencers who have a bigger audience will likely not want just your product they will also want money upfront because brands usually pay them thousands of dollars upfront and even send the products to them before they post. Hence, you look for influencers with a few thousand followers and with highly engaged audience. These kinds of influencers usually send high-quality customers to you so don’t look down on them because of the number of followers they have look at the engagement.
Sending over products to influencers and payment
This is when a brand makes an agreement on the price the influencer will charge and also sends the product over to them to do a quick review of it. This strategy is one of the best because they will have the product on their hands to test and these kinds of review videos usually go viral. This also adds some sense of personality to it which the audience will resonate with. This is like the influencer making a recommendation to their audience about a product they use.
This strategy can work for all kinds of influencers. Usually, you will see influencers say that they don’t recommend a product without seeing it, so this makes sense since most of them will ask for the product before they review it.
Contract-based partnership [Long term]
These kinds of strategies are used by big brands to create awareness. They often time usually use big influencers that have multiple millions of followers. This is like having an official influencer(s). let's use the example of Nike partnering with athletes for many years. Sometimes they may sign a 10-year contract or even more. This strategy is used by big brands that have more money and they don’t mind if they don’t get a return on their money invested because they believe that in the long run, they will make it back. This strategy is advanced and should not be used by a small brand that is looking to make money fast.
An example of this strategy: is Ronaldo being paid about $30 million by Nike in a year. Another example was when Michael Jordan was paid to wear the red and black Nike shoes in over 83 games which were against basketball rules. This marketing strategy cost Nike over $400,000 in fines but it spikes up reactions in the news and controversies around Michael and the shoes. We all know that the media feeds off controversial news because people love it. Guess what Nike today is a global brand and they make a lot of revenue every year.
Influencer Revenue share partnership
I love this strategy because you do not have to pay influencers upfront. You just need to share your revenue with them. This is called affiliate marketing: when someone earns a commission for a product or sales generated through their unique link. The only downside is that you won’t be able to get those high-profit margin campaigns. For example, a campaign that you spend $2000 on to generate $30,000 can’t be done using revenue share. In this case, if you generate $30,000, in a revenue share campaign, and the commission to pay the influencer is a 30% commission you will have to shell out $9000 which does not include your product cost and shipping.
What I will recommend is just to have an affiliate program on your website so that you can generate extra revenue. When you also have an affiliate section on your store you can set a comfortable commission since you are not the one reaching out to the affiliate [the person that will promote the product].
Paying for a shout-out for 24 hours
This method is common amongst drop shippers and it is usually done on Instagram and TikTok. This is when you meet an influencer on Instagram or on TikTok to promote your products for just 24 hours. This will remove the risk of losing a lot of money upfront. Usually, this method has a lower risk because within 24 hours you can know an influencer that will make you money and you can start working with them.
This shout-out usually costs from $25 up to $1000 for 24 hours depending on the size of the audience and engagement. Some drop shipping gurus have been able to devise a plan to further reduce the shout-out duration to about 6 to 4 hours, especially for people who are tight on budget. Not every influencer will agree to this but you can give them a reason and a good number of them will agree to this strategy. You will be able to also save money. If you also see that the campaign is bringing in a lot of sales within the 6-hour time frame you can contact the influencer to pay to extend the campaign.
Example.
If an influencer with a million followers charges 500 for a 24-hour feed post. Let us do the math.
If $500 = 24 hours then,
$125 = 6 hours. boom! You just saved yourself some money.
Make sure that you tell them to post when their audience is most engaged. Usually, 8:00 am – 12:00 pm PST is the best time to post. you will also be able to reach most of their audience this way.
Permanent influencer post
This strategy brings really good results too. I will recommend that you make a permanent post probably when you have tested with a 24-hour post because permanent posts are always expensive and you don’t want to pay a lot of money upfront and not make anything back. For platforms like YouTube permanent posts are the best because they can keep getting you traffic even for years to come because of the SEO benefit[people searching for your niche and your products on Google]. These videos can stay up on Google for years to come bringing you consistent traffic.
Influencer marketing on top powerful platforms and results to expect
Now I will be going over what influencer marketing looks like on different platforms and also the results that you should be expecting from those campaigns.
Influencer marketing on Instagram
Instagram is one of the best influencer marketing platforms because of the audience demographics. Instagram has more older folks, who have purchasing power on the platform. Instagram also added reels to their platform [vertical video format] and these have been going viral lately. Customers usually find Instagram as the best place to connect with their favorite brands. This makes Instagram the go-to platform for promoting your brand using influencer marketing. In the case study section below I will be sharing some interesting case studies that are mind-blowing.
Influencer marketing on TikTok
TikTok was originally seen as a platform for kids because there were many videos of people going viral for just dancing and doing childish stuff until brands and also the older demographics started coming to the platform. A lot of brands have been using TikTok to create multimillion-dollar brands because of the crazy reach they get.
The famous marketing method amongst drop shippers also sprung up from the Tiktok platform “Tiktok organic” where you order products to your house and keep posting free content in hopes that it goes viral and you make a lot of sales. As with everything these methods still work but they are changing so you need to stay updated with the changes that are happening on the TikTok platform.
Influencer marketing on TikTok is very powerful because of the reach you can get with TikTok. When you have the right hook, the right product, and engaging content you can reach millions of views on a video that an influencer posts. This can get you thousands of dollars in sales. Influencers on TikTok are not very expensive unlike Instagram so you can get a really good deal on the platform.
Influencer marketing on YouTube
Now, if you are talking about longevity this is it because YouTube is a search engine and also a social media platform. Search engine traffic is known for its consistency while social media traffic is known for its virality. What if you can add both to one platform? That is YouTube.
You get 2 waves of traffic with YouTube; influencer marketing when the video goes viral and also when people are randomly searching for your products in that niche. The YouTube video posted by the influencer can also rank on Google and bring in additional traffic which will bring in consistent sales depending on how big the industry is on Google. The first is getting traffic from the influencers' audiences, and the second, is getting traffic from people searching actively on both YouTube and Google. The only why I choose YouTube as the best influencer marketing platform is the consistency. On other platforms, you can get a lot of sales and after 24 hours or max 1 week the sales die down but, with YouTube, it is a different result. You can be getting traffic for 4 years.
Mind you these are just the top influencer marketing platforms there are other influencer marketing methods on different platforms that work very well. You can try them and let me know your results. As long as there is someone with an audience on a platform and you pay to run an influencer marketing promotion. You can do it on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook groups, and even someone’s email newsletter. They all work the same, as long as there is an engaged audience you are good to go.
What do you need to know before starting your first influencer marketing campaign?
There are some things you should take note of when you are doing influencer marketing and I will list
some of them here.
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1. Send over a contract to be signed: If you are dealing with an influencer and you have agreed on the campaign it is always safe to send over a short contract that will go over everything you agreed to look at it again and sign. This is in case of a legal issue or when you run into a problem. This is a must for brands that are running huge promotions that cost a lot of money.
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Don’t forget to negotiate: when an influencer calls a price, you can always negotiate even though you have the money. You can also look at their audience size and engagement to tell how much they are worth. Well, make sure you are not ridiculous in your negotiation.
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Don’t be stuck with one influencer: Don’t always message or reach out to one influencer because they are the only person who replied, reach out to as many of them as possible and get different replies, then choose the best. Don’t be obligated because an influencer replied you must always work with them. If their price is not the best and their engagement is not the best you can always tell them politely that you will not be working with them. This is from experience so that you won’t lose your money.
4. Make payment using secured platforms: Make payment using PayPal simply. Especially if you are not a high-end brand that pays influencers a lot of money and you see the influencers before they run the campaign. Make payment using PayPal goods and services to be protected in case the influencer does not follow the agreed contract.
5. Check the influencers’ engagement: there are different tools that you can always use to check an Instagram influencer engagement. Tools like modash engagement calculator. You can also go to their page and look at the audience followers to like and comment ratio. You can also look at the profile of their engaged audience if they are real people or bot followers and engagement. This will tell you the quality of the page. There is nothing wrong with spending a lot of time on each influencer's page this will help you build lists of high-quality influencers.
6. Build an audience on the platform you are running the campaign on: you must always do this when you are shelling out money on influencers use that to tag your page and build it so that you can also post about your brands and get organic reach from your own page. This is a good practice. Check the big brands they usually have a lot of following on social media platforms.
7. Look at the data, analytics, and even language: the data don’t lie. Tell the influencer to send over their analytics a screen record, not a screenshot that is what I usually tell them. When they send over the video review it with your team check the country, the engagement per post, the city, the audience gender, and also the page follower growth in the past 30 days. You can also check the number of people who unfollowed in the past 30 days. Data don’t lie, once you notice something very weird in the analytics make sure that you review it because this can be a sign that the page is not high quality. This advice can save you a lot of money.
Influencer marketing case studies to learn from.
I will just give you a very short snippet of case studies that will show you the power of influencer marketing.
Fanuel kebede is a dropshipper from youtube. He actually started another brand in 2020 during the pandemic and he said when they were done with the website creation and also the backend with the suppliers and shipping. He took to TikTok to create a video and the went viral the first day making him thousands of dollars. He then found a TikTok creator in that niche with millions of followers who was willing to do a permanent video with the product. The TikTok charged $1200 and he said they sent the product to him from Amazon and it got to him within 24 hours.
The TikTok creator filmed the video and he published it the video went viral the first day making them $100,000 in revenue in 24 hours. He said over the course of 3 days they already made a quarter of a million dollars which is $250,000 with just $1200 investment is very impressive.
Another case study of the owner of an agency called Foundr. She helps brands contact influencers that have high engagement and negotiates with them. She contacted small creators with highly engaged audiences for the promotion of a baby product. All she did was send the product to them. No upfront payment. She said the brand made over $250,000 in a week with about 92 influencers' posts.
Let’s do the math. If the product cost $20 to send to each influencer that means she spent $2000 and made back $250,000 in return.
The last case study is a mom influencer on TikTok who did a promotion for a brand. She just made a video showcasing how she used the product and she made the brand $225,000 in revenue from that campaign. The campaign cost was not disclosed but I am suggesting it can not be more than $1000 which is still an incredible result.
In conclusion: finding the right influencer is the superpower here. You can pay a lot of money to influencers and still lose it that is why it is important to be picky with influencers because this can save you a lot of money. Other strategies can help increase your conversion on your own end. This can be as little as running a giveaway, a contest, a challenge, or a discount. All these can increase your sales growth and you'll be surprised what result you can get with just a little investment.
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