Selling your products online requires several factors to make your business successful. Businesses would have to create a credible and trusted online personality to win the confidence of potential buyers. This is what influencer marketing does. Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing where social media influencers, organizations, or individuals with a high level of expertise carry out marketing for your products. These persons or organizations usually have a high level of social influence in their field or are seen as experts, they carry out advertising for a business through product placement and endorsement to influence marketing processes for the business. This type of marketing boosts the credibility and reliability in the mind of potential buyers and drives purchasing decisions of buyers.
According to influencer marketing statistics, almost all marketers believe in the credibility of influencer marketing with influence marketing offering the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
Leveraging the opportunities of influencer marketing for your e-commerce business helps dropshippers save time, reach the relevant audience needed for their business, broadens the brand reach, and drive quality traffic for their business. Influencer marketing is an affordable way to reach your target audience, however, certain important steps are required when choosing influencer marketing. This includes verifying the status of the influencer, company, or person among others.
Understanding the Concept of Social Media Influencers Marketing
Social media provides a wide variety of audiences for different kinds of businesses. It provides a platform where businesses can meet and connect with their global audience for varying purposes including advertising and marketing their products and services. One benefit of social media marketing over the traditional mode of marketing is that buyers and sellers can interact on a personal note, and this helps to build engagement with your products and services, which in turn improves sales.
Social media influencer marketing is the use of different social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and the likes in carrying out marketing processes by popular influencers on social media and other organizations. Social media influencer marketing involves the influencer creating its content and integrating the company's products alongside. Here, potential buyers may not necessarily view the products in their entirety but liken them the to choice of the influence and make purchases accordingly. Social media influencer marketing builds trust in the mind of the target audience, it reduces the mistrust audiences have about your product or any other ad or marketing tactics that affect their purchase choices. However, positive results are only guaranteed when working with the right influencer, and finding the right one may be a difficult nut to crack s there are many factors to be considered when choosing an influencer that matches the provisions of your product.
When choosing influencers for social media marketing, consider these factors;
Verify the Credibility of their followers
The social media followers play a key role in who an influencer is; this is because the higher the number of followers, the higher the number of followers the farther your ad would reach. However, businesses should be careful of fake followers. Social media users and influencers alike may purchase inorganic followers and thus your product may not get the desired reach. Ensure to properly verify the credibility of the influencer's fan base before choosing them, and ensure they have a high number of dedicated followers, loyal audiences, and credibility as brand ambassadors.
Check through their posts and gauge the level of engagement of their followers and assess the personal lifestyle of the influencer. If the followership does not correspond with the engagement on their post, the influencer might have fake followers.
Relevance and Values
Ensure to choose influencers whose lifestyle and activities correspond with your product. More often, influencers who are aligned with the provisions of your products tend to have followers that would be interested in what you have to offer. Also, check out the values of the influencer to check if it matches that of your product; it would be out of place to advertise vegan products for non-vegetarians. Also check through the likes and dislikes, their beliefs, content, and values before making a choice.
Measure the Return on Investment and Other Brand Partnership
Set goals you aim to achieve at the end of this marketing process and determine if the influencer can meet the goals set. Also, evaluate other brand partnerships made with the influencer and discover how successful it was. This would help to build a better perspective of what to expect after the process.
Frequency and Reliability
Choose influencers who are reliable, this is important to detect how they would render their services to you. You can verify this by checking through reviews of former deals done. Also, avoid influencers who are slow in communication or who are not very engaging. The frequency of their posts also tells a lot about how smooth the business would be. Choose influencers who balance their sponsored posts na post high-quality content. You should also check the comments of their followers to determine their credibility.
Macro or Micro-Influencers
Another important aspect when choosing an influencer is deciding on either micro or macro influencing. However, this depends on the objectives and budget of the marketing processes. You can opt to spread the marketing process across a small number of micro-influencers to reach diversified segments or opt to use a macro influencer. All these depend on what you hope you achieve at the end of the marketing process.
How to Start Influencer Marketing for your Dropshipping Business
Set Goals and Determine the Platform For Use
Setting goals is important in every business process. It helps you measure the success you intend to achieve and affects the choices you make. Do you intend to enhance awareness about your brands, improve sales, or enhance your reach? Setting what you hope to achieve affects the kind of influencer you would choose. You can also relate your goals to the influencer to aid a smooth process. You should also determine what platforms would be best to achieve your goals. Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook are some of the most popular platforms.
Find A Suitable Influencer
Find an influencer that can represent what your brand stands for and can achieve the goals set for this campaign. Verify their followers and their reliability. You can also use influencer tools software to find the influencer you are searching for on social media. With this, you can narrow your search based on influencers that fit into your industry segment, suit your budget and reflects the values of your brand. This influencer marketing software helps to choose the most relevant influencers across various social media platforms. Note that the costs of the services of an influencer are based on the number of followers. The higher the number of followers, the higher the costs. You can also choose between mega or nano influencers, depending on what you intend you achieve. While mega influencers bring wider reach and awareness to your products, nano influencers build better engagement for businesses.
Note that you can find influencers for your business by either using influencer marketing software, using hashtags, checking out sponsored posts, or exploring social media channels.
Inform, Recruit, and Brief Your Influencers
After choosing the influencer you intend to use, reach out to them to indicate your interest. Ensure to have a campaign brief or alternative plan for whatever response they make. You can decide to contact them using, emails, sending a direct message, or leaving a comment on a post. You can also brief them on what the campaign is all about.
Track and Measure the Campaign
Ensure to track and measure the results of the influence marketing to determine if the set goal was met. The results or success of the influencer depends on the goals earlier made. You can make use of influencer marketing software to track the progress of the marketing process ns determine whether it's a success.
Dropshipping With SaleYee
Using a reliable dropshipping platform is a great starting point in determining the success of your dropshipping business. SaleYee is a reliable global drop shipping platform that deals in various categories of products ranging from tools and equipment, health and beauty, arts and crafts, consumer electronics, cell phones and accessories, lamps and lighting, pet supplies, and homes and garden, and automotive accessories. The platform with its global reach provides an easy day for businesses to drop ship goods and earn a good income. It offers free and fast delivery services to its customers while maintaining excellent discount offers on its products. Customers stand to benefit from its professional services and wide expanse of wholesalers and suppliers. SaleYee also has affiliations with Wish, Walmart, Shopify, eBay, and Amazon.
In Summary
Influencer marketing is one of the most profitable ways to create brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, and grow your e-commerce business. Always set goals before embarking on influence marketing and ensure to adopt influencers that align with your brand value with credible followers and increased engagement.