Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-expanding marketing strategies.
In fact, it has grown so much that reports show:
- Hundreds of new influencer marketing-focused platforms and agencies have been founded.
- Marketers have a dedicated influencer marketing budget, and they plan on increasing it.
- The number of brand-sponsored influencer posts has gone from 3.5 million in 2015 to an estimated 24.2 million in 2018.
Furthermore, the interest in influencer marketing and its popularity have outgrown important marketing channels like search engines and email marketing back in 2017—and it doesn’t seem like they’ll catch up anytime soon:
Influencer marketing has a clear selling point for marketers: you get to borrow an influencer’s audience and clout. This can help you with goals such as brand awareness and reach, as well as direct sales and revenue.
Why Influencer Marketing Works
“People don’t come to their favorite social media platforms to be sold to” feels like a century-old saying, but times have definitely changed.
This phrase is proving to be less accurate than you’d think.
A survey conducted by Collective Bias revealed that:
- 70% of millennial consumers are influenced by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions
- 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger
- 60% of consumers have been influenced by a social media post or a blog review while shopping at a store
People now spend more than 2 hours on social media every day, and it’s getting harder to believe that this time doesn’t impact the way we shop and the people whose recommendations we choose to trust.
A report from Olapic showed that authenticity, personalization, relevance, and expertise are the leading reasons why people grow to trust individual influencers:
In most cases, influencers have spent years building up a strong relationship with their audience.
People who follow them on social media feel invested in their everyday life. They support them during rough times and celebrate their successful ventures, which is why influencers receive hundreds and sometimes even thousands of likes and comments.
When a brand is a part of an influencer’s journey with specific products, this audience doesn’t even feel like they’re being sold to. They feel like the product is simply part of the process.
They still engage with them.
And with social media engagement increasingly being linked to sales, influencer marketing is a must-try strategy.
The Challenges of Running Influencer Campaigns
Running an influencer campaign is tough.
If you’ve ever tried it, you likely ran into problems within the first five minutes.
Most people fall at the first hurdle, asking themselves questions like:
- How do you know if your investment into an influencer will pay off?
- What if your influencer campaign fails and you’ve wasted your money?
- How can you make sure you keep working with the most successful influencers?
If you’ve thought any of these things, you’re not alone.
In fact, a Linqia study uncovered that 76% of marketers say that the biggest influencer marketing challenge is determining their campaign return on investment (ROI).
Furthermore, there seems to be a different understanding of what makes a successful influencer campaign.
While 90% of marketers in that same Linqia study said they use engagement rates to measure the campaign success, 88% of influencers use likes to measure the success of their content.
There are some more specific problems with your influencer campaign that stem from these ROI challenges.
Challenge #1: What payment structure is the best?
Defining a fee or a payment structure is one of the trickiest parts of setting up your influencer marketing campaign, especially if this is the first one you’re running.
No matter how successfully your influencer engages their audience, there’s no guarantee of success.
Ideally, your campaign will make you more revenue compared to the influencer fee you paid. But how can you be sure you’ll increase sales?
The truth: you can’t.
Even if their audience is large and in your niche, the influencer’s personality matches your brand’s tone and voice, and they’re selling on the right social platforms, there is always a chance a campaign simply won’t have the reach and engagement you want it to.
And when that happens, it’s you that’s at a financial loss.
Challenge #2: Should you offer free products to your influencers?
Similarly to the first challenge, you can offer to give your products to the influencers for free in exchange for promotion on their part and an increase in sales.
This might not be a massive risk if you’re working with one influencer at a time, but if you want to run an influencer campaign on a larger scale, you’ll incur a loss from providing free products to a group of influencers without any way to precisely forecast a positive return on that investment.
Challenge #3: Should you pay commission based on a spike in sales?
Another issue that comes with running multiple influencer campaigns at once is tracking the effectiveness of each campaign individually.
For example, you might have 10 influencers working on the same promotion at the same time.
The campaign is running during the first two weeks of November, and you have seen a 15% increase in sales during almost the entire month compared to other months and even November of the previous year.
You’ve made it—you ran a successful influencer campaign! However, when you decide to run another one, how will you decide which influencers to go with again?
How can you make sure you work with those that have made the biggest effect on that increase in sales—and compensate them fairly?
The only way to run repeatedly successful influencer campaigns is by finding a way to track the true impact of each of your influencers on each of their platforms.
Luckily, we have the exact way to help you do that.
How to Easily Run Successful Influencer Campaigns With jumper
There are many challenges when it comes to selling on social media, from a fragmented shopping experience through to tracking the source of your sales.
Influencer marketing is a huge part of these challenges, which is why we created jumper.
With jumper, it’s easy to turn social media conversations and engaged followers into customers. You can build a sustainable social commerce strategy that will positively impact all your social media efforts, including influencer sales.
This happens with the use of either:
- Dedicated hashtags that kick off an automated checkout process in Facebook Messenger, or
- A uniquely generated URL that runs an automated checkout process in the browser
You’ll see what this looks like in action in the following steps.
Step 1: Choose a hashtag for each of your influencers
After you create your jumper account and add all key details such as customer service information, payment options, and shipping costs, you will be able to add your products through the products > add new option in your menu.
This is a crucial section because this is what helps you differentiate between your products, as well as the influencers promoting them.
Here’s what product setup page looks like, along with a brief explanation of how product hashtags work:
In this step, all you need to do is define hashtags for each product/influencer combination that you want to include in your campaign.
For example, let’s say your shop sells running equipment, and you want to run an influencer marketing campaign for one specific model of Asics running shoes.
You’re working with two influencers—Emma and Ryan—so you have to create one hashtag for each of them. In this case, you decide to go with #runwithemma and #runwithryan.
Step 2: Set up a product hashtag for each of your influencers
Now, you have to take the product you’ve decided to promote and add them to you jumper account as two separate products—one for each of your influencers.
Key information for you to input are the product name, the hashtag you chose earlier, as well as product variations like size and color.
Finally, you add the product’s price, stock, and weight. When you hit save, your product is already good to go!
Repeat the process for all other influencers. Then, you’re ready to get the promotion started!
Step 3: Provide your influencers with their unique product links
Your next step is to head to products > manage products in your menu and select Click to share #everywhere next to the product you want your influencer to promote.
The pop up you’ll see offers several options to start promoting this product.
Facebook, YouTube and Line will at first be unavailable. To share through these networks, you just have to link jumper to those channels through the integrations option in the menu.
But since you’re working with others on promoting this product—and you have created their dedicated product entries and hashtags—your aim here is to generate a link that you can share with your influencers.
You can easily achieve this by selecting the Twitter, Instagram, or WhatsApp option in this popup, after which you can copy the direct product link unique to your influencer.
That link is the one your influencers need to include in their promotion.
They just need to create the promotion as normal, but instead of offering a normal link to your store or product page, they drop in the share anywhere link you generated for them.
When they start sharing that link the end user will be taken directly to a checkout.
Here’s what it looks like for shoppers after they click it:
It takes about 5 minutes to set up these influencer hashtags and automated checkouts.
However, the effects are incredible.
By cutting out the on-site purchase journey you’re removing ~66% of the friction, which leads to much higher sales numbers.
Step 4: Analyze each influencer’s success in your jumper sales report
Once your campaign is over it’s time to analyze which influencer brought you the most sales.
This is a key stage. You want to figure out who your best promoters are so you can continue to work with them for further successful campaigns and partnerships.
You’ll be able to get a good overview of your marketing campaigns as a whole by going to the analytics tab. You’ll see something like the below.
To generate a sales report by hashtag, head to orders > product in your jumper menu. You can select each of the hashtags to generate a report for each of the influencers, as well as limit your report to a specific timeframe.
In your report, you’ll get a breakdown of every sale that hashtag has made. Which means, you’ll be able to see exactly how many successful sales each influencer is responsible for.
Based on this report, you can analyze the return on investment each of your influencers brought you, as well as analyze their actions with them to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Start Successfully Selling With Influencers
Influencer marketing is here to stay, but it will only be effective for your online store if you implement it in a way that gives you full insight into the performance of each of your campaigns and influencers.
That’s the best thing about jumper: because of influencer-specific product hashtags, you’ll never have to play a game of guessing who brought you the most sales.
By diligently tracking where sales are coming from with jumper, you’ll be able to invest your budget in a smart way and always see a positive outcome of your influencer campaigns.
Make sure to create your free jumper account and test it with your next campaign. Psssst: the first 10 sales are on us, so there’s literally no risk. Start getting your influencers on board and never fear for your influencer marketing budget again.
Didn’t know we can use Jumper.ai for influencer marketing. This is an amazing guide.