Influencer marketing is a great marketing strategy that you can use to get more traffic and sales for your eCommerce business especially if you have a free affiliate software. An influencer is an individual who has a big audience and following. Their audience loves them and trusts them. So, when an influencer makes a product recommendation, their audience listens and buys said product. For example, have you heard of the Oprah effect? Or what about Ellen?
Many big brands flock and pay a lot of money to get Oprah and Ellen to promote their products. Why? Because Oprah and Ellen can reach audiences around the world. Their audience loves them and trusts them. So, when Oprah and Ellen make a recommendation, traffic and sales will go to that business. So, what does this have to do with your business and online marketing efforts?
Influencers make great advocates and partners for your business. You can approach them and get them to promote your business. In this article, we are going to show you how you can work with influencers to drive more referral sales to your business. You already know what an influencer is, it is now time to explain what influencer marketing is.
Influencer marketing is when you get popular individuals to promote you to their audience. What are some examples of influencers? Bloggers, vloggers/YouTubers, celebrities, podcasters, popular instagram accounts, popular twitter accounts, and many more.
The key is getting the right influencer for your business. It has to be someone who has your audience and they are willing to promote you.
What you’ll need
Here are the tools you will need to set up a successful influencer marketing campaign to drive more referral sales.
1- A referral marketing platform – You need a platform that will help you keep track and reward influencers for all the sales they refer to you. Additionally, rewarding influencers will be a great motivator to have them promote you. In this article, we use OSI Affiliate Software.
2- Influencer and Blogger Outreach Software – You need a platform that will help you do outreach to influencers. A tool that will make it easier to find influencers in your industry. We recommend Ninja Outreach for this.
Those are the main tools you’ll need to run a successful influencer marketing campaign.
How can you do influencer marketing?
The main objective with influencer marketing is getting promoted to a big audience. Using the tools above, we will step you through how to make this happen.
Things to note
- When an influencer mentions your brand, they need to be able to direct traffic somewhere. For example, they can direct traffic to your website, app, or store.
- You need to come up with an agreement of what and how you are going to reward them for the shoutout and mention.
- You can reward influencers with free products, commissions, gift cards, points, prizes, etc.
- You need to create a page on your website where they can send you traffic. This page needs to be customized for their audience. So, you need a welcome message that is addressed to that audience. For example, if you get the Ellen Degeneres Show to promote you, you can get a page on your website just for her audience. When they visit the page, there is going to be a message for her audience. Additionally, the offer she promoted will be on the page. This page will be unique to the influencer. This is the page that will have embedded a tracking code that you will use to track all the traffic the influencer sends. When someone signs up from the page, you will reward the influencer for sending you the sale.
Now, let’s jump into this.
How to set up a landing page for influencer
As mentioned earlier. In this article, we will be using OSI Affiliate Software in showing you how to work with influencers to get referral sales. The directions below show the process starting from the admin dashboard of OSI Affiliate Software.
Click on Manage Users.
Click on Edit to open influencers profile (You have already created and added influencer profile).
Click on Create a page for this user.
From the dropdown select the referral program you want influencer to promote.
Copy the unique referral code provided that you will add to Influencer’s page.
The code will be in a format like this
““
Now you can embed this code to the page you created for the influencer. When you embed the code, we recommend that you add the code right above the closing body tag that looks like this: “”.
Here’s an example of a page we created for one of our influencer blogger. This page has the tracking code embedded. So, when customers come to this page from the influencer, we reward the influencer for all the successful sales.
You can see below how we customized a message for the audience coming from that influencer. We also tell them the discount/offer they are getting.
That’s it. That’s all you need from the referral end of this process.
1- You only need to create a page that is unique to the influencer.
2- You need to add tracking code to that page.
3- You need a referral marketing platform to keep track and reward influencers for successful sales.
Doing outreach and getting influencers
As mentioned earlier, you will need to get influencers to promote you. You need to find influencers who are in your niche. The tool we recommend for influencer and blogger outreach is Ninja Outreach.
You can check out their guide on how to do influencer outreach here.
Now you have all the tools to make this strategy work for you. Your business will benefit working with influencers and you will make new friends and generate traffic for your eCommerce business. Please follow the steps provided to increase referral sales from influencers.
Let us know in the comments below what you think of this strategy. Are there things we’ve left out that you use?
I see that it is very important to target influencers as well as customers. The influencers are really the main ones that will be bringing traffic.
Major Key Alert indeed! I think the main thing I need to know is how to find and target influencers. Most of them I’m sure get approached all the time. How can I stand out?
Most of the influencers I have set this up with really appreciate that I create a unique landing page just for them.
Great post Robert! By the way, is using Ninja Outreach that much more efficient than scraping the contacts by yourself?
Great article Robert. Those methods are very promising. It created mutual benefits both for the influencer ad the brand. However, I would like to know which method do you think drives more influencers to partner with your brand? Referral program or perhaps giving freebies?