How often have you purchased after watching your favorite influencer branding about that product?
Over the last few decades, Social media and Influencer marketing have become an integral part of marketing and a crucial way for brands to reach new audiences.
85% of people find social media channels as the quick and easy way to purchase something.
As more new users join social media platforms daily, brands can reach younger audiences with the help of nano and micro-influencers using viral and trending posts. In addition, consumers rely on influencers of all sizes to learn more about the product and purchasing decisions, and influencer marketing continues to become a popular marketing strategy.
Today’s customers expect a personalized shopping experience, and influencer marketing as a content engine fuels marketing efforts. This blog will discuss potential benefits and ways to create influence marketing that helps your social commerce.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that involves collaboration with influencers to promote your brands.
It includes collaborating with the key leaders in particular niches that drive your brand’s message to the right audience rather than directly reaching out to a broader group.
Brands use influencer marketing to promote their products/services through paid advertisement, freebies, and endorsements with influencers and generate significant brand awareness.
When people see their favorite influencers/celebrities using certain products/services, they are more likely to purchase them.
Influencer marketing aims to share valuable information and create excitement around a particular product/service using trendy posts. Influencer marketing is a key component in your marketing campaign, not because everyone is doing it but because it brings great results.
Here are some benefits-
- Huge ROI,
- Builds Authenticity to your brand,
- Increases Engagement,
- Grow your social following,
- Get leads and improve sales,
- Increase site traffic.
What is Social Commerce?
Social commerce sells your products/services directly through social media platforms using different strategies like posts, collaboration, Ads, Influencer marketing, membership platforms, and more.
Social commerce is a new way of marketing beyond traditional ones. The entire process, from finding the product, research, and checkout to payment, takes place without leaving the social platform.
On average, people spend 2.25 hours on social media daily, so social commerce is a new way to reach a new audience. Moreover, it is a much easier and more effective way than convincing customers to navigate the website.
By creating shoppable galleries and tapping on the links of product posts, brands can turn their social channels into digital stores.
Why Should Brands Drive Social Commerce?
Recent research from Bazaarvoice shows that 76% of users are influenced to shop on social media.
Most products are purchased on social media via Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and more. Let’s dive into some more benefits of social commerce-
1. Build Trust and Higher Retention Rate
Social commerce allows brands to promote their products and services to build good long-term customer relationships.
It allows brands and customers to have two-way communication opportunities brands can frequently update their feeds, and customers are open to asking questions or providing reviews.
Brands need help to achieve trust easily and know how to nurture their customers.
Influencer marketing can help you to build trust. The Influencer’s followers already trust them, so their word is easy to spread and influence decisions to buy products or services. In addition to reaching a wider audience, they can help you figure out what your audience wants.
Influencers can help provide their best customer experience and convey surveys from their followers.
Social Media Influencers have a 37% of customer retention rate.
2. Improve Sales
26.2% of users use the social platform to make a purchase. Why not provide them with a solution to their problem?
Without a doubt, social commerce is a powerful tool to convert followers into customers. Social commerce is the use of social media to drive online sales. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s quickly gaining traction as more and more businesses realize the potential of social media for driving sales.
There are many ways to use social media for social commerce. One popular method is to use social media platforms, and influencer marketing is to create and promote special deals and offers. It is a great way to boost sales and encourage customers to buy from you.
As a brand, you can leverage social media to connect with your potential customers and build relationships. By creating engaging content, brands can encourage potential customers to share it on social media. Building these relationships will make you more likely to convert leads into customers.
3. Build Authenticity and Trust
Social commerce is a new and upcoming trend in the e-commerce industry. Businesses can build authenticity and trust with potential customers by using social media platforms to sell products. This type of selling can be particularly effective for small businesses and start-ups, who may need help building these relationships through more traditional means.
If you’re considering using social commerce to sell your products, it’s important to understand how it works and what platform would be best for your business. This article will give you an overview of social commerce and how it can help you build trust and authenticity with your customers.
4. Boost Engagement and Reach
Social commerce can be a great tool for brands to reach their target audience and offer a frictionless customer experience when executed correctly.
One key way to build brand awareness is by influencing marketing.
Further, it helps the brand boost awareness and drives sales without needing any physical store or online marketplace.
When Influencers share a brand’s posts on their feed, it helps create powerful brand opportunities, and people are likelier to recommend that brand to others. It encourages people to connect with the brand, creating more reach.
Moreover, posting at the right time in front of the right audience can create better brand engagement and boost reach.
But how can brands leverage social commerce?
5 Easy Ways to Leverage Influence Marketing in Social Commerce
If you’re planning for influencer marketing, plenty of options are available. Influencers help brands create high-quality, valuable, trendy content to increase engagement and improve brand credibility.
But how can brands collaborate with influencers to build a solid influencer marketing strategy? Let’s get started.
1. Use Influencers Promo Codes to Improve Sales
Using promo codes and coupons is one of the best tactics in influencer marketing. A great way to convert followers to leads is by providing discount offers and coupon codes.
How about creating a promo code for influencers?
Influencers and promo codes often go hand in hand when a brand discusses influencer marketing. Influencers also make money through influencer marketing, sponsored posts, discount coupons, and promo codes effectively improve brand sales.
Sharing promo codes with their followers by using content and stories can influence followers to grab that opportunity. Nevertheless, the audience is willing to try out the product recommended by their favorite influencers.
Creating an effective influencer code strategy needs planning. You must set up a system to track relevant data, including code usage, and keep it simple.
Influencers can share promo code on their feeds, live sessions, stories, or DMs. Using coupon codes is one of the effective tactics in influencer marketing.
2. Buzz with Influencer Generated Content
What if a celebrity like Shahrukh Khan shares a post using your brand’s product?
Or what if a social media influencer talks about a great experience shopping with your brand?
Influencer marketing isn’t less than a magic wand for creating a buzz around your brand.
Once you’ve picked the best influencer that matches your ideal audience, start influencer marketing. The first thing is to select the top pieces of their content, and you should allow them all the room for creative content creation. They can influence followers with their content as they already know about them.
One thing that applies is to remember to refrain from posting the same content on all platforms; instead, convert the content into text and visual format to post on different social platforms.
They might love to recommend your brand on their social channels or show how one of their products helps them ease their work in their daily routine. Or you can ask them to review their products with an unboxing experience.
3. Long-Term Collaboration with Influencers
61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations. The growth of influencer marketing has led to brands competing to collaborate with high-quality influencers.
When it comes to long-term collaboration, it usually brings more value compared to short-term. The rewards of long-term partnerships may be time-consuming and require extra effort, but they are well worth it in the long run.
For a long-term collaboration, you will need to put extra effort into finding an influencer whose value aligns with your brand. You will also need a way to contact your target influencers; in case they do not provide any contact information, an email finder tool should be useful in that regard. Making them brand ambassadors and posting content over some time creates stronger brand recognition and gain customer loyalty.
With long-term collaboration, influencers can share more about the brand organically within their feed time rather than just mentioning it in one of their post or stories.
4. Brands and Influencers Co-creating products
Brands and influencers are launching more products or collections with their brand ambassadors.
Such collaborations work as a great tactic to boost your influencer marketing strategy. It tells the influencer’s audience that there is a real connection between the influencer and the brand.
This influencer marketing trend means higher sales numbers for the brand as followers get converted into customers.
So far, the trend has helped a lot of fashion brands. For example, GymShark launched three collection collaborations with their ambassador Whitney Simmons.
5. Video-based Content
The rise of Instagram reels offers a new way to create sponsored content between influencers and brands. Many influencers love to express themselves by creating entertaining content that’s easy to make relevant.
In addition, video-based content is easier to share and attach emotionally with the audience. For example, Firebolt has started video-based influencer marketing by making collab reels with influencers to promote their brand and reach more audiences.
Must Read: 20 Examples of E-commerce Product Video Marketing in 2023
To Wrap Up
Social commerce is a new way a brand can reach a wider audience and grow its brand.
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate a good ROI and brand exposure. As long as you work closely with influencers, it can add a new ingredient to your marketing campaigns.
Is your brand working on Influencer marketing?
