Using Influencer Content For Ecommerce Advertising

A few months ago I was on call with the CMO of a $25M+ brand. They had just wrapped up a 100 person influencer campaign. Guess how many were ROI positive? Seven. Just seven. This wasn't a failure of the other 93 creators. This was a clear indication something was fundamentally broken in how they did influencer marketing. We went through a simple 5-step checklist to that could be applied immediately. If you're a brand in a similar situation, here's how to go from "influencer marketing doesn't work" to "we need more creators!" 1. Introduce New Data Most brands model off of CPMs, never looking at actual performance. Use social commerce platforms to include actual conversion performance. Display it all against rates to sort by projections we actually care about: CPA, CPC, etc... 2. Measure Alignment Use this data to now measure actual alignment with your brand. Things like AOV, content relevance, messaging... The surface level connection is not enough. 3. Focus on Audience A creator's demographic matters less than their audience demographics. Look at the age, gender, geography of their audience. Plenty of creators that fit your demographic but have an entirely different audience demographic and vice versa. 4. Generate Creative Outlines from Creators Bring creators into the planning stages, letting them shape your creative outline. The right messaging and style is more likely to come from them than you. Then turn this into a content brief that provides direction but is not a script. Let creators do what they do best. 5. Treat Content as the Asset The reach you get from a creator is valuable, but the content they've created is far more valuable when used correctly. Setup whitelisting, repurposing to your own socials - get the most utilization out of every single video. -- Creator marketing works. But it's not 2017 anymore - sending product and seeing what happens is not a strategy. Dig in. Build the right strategy. Find the right creators. Let them do their thing. Maximize their content.

Here’s an influencer marketing secret (don’t tell anyone). The real ‘ROI’ isn’t made when the influencer posts your product. Sure. The initial posting will earn you some traffic, and a decent amount of sales. Most marketers think ‘that’s it’ — but really, that’s just the start. What happens next is where you make the real dollars: → Secure usage rights to the content (for free or reduced cost in certain cases) → Now you’ll have an influx unique pieces of influencer-generated content (at scale, this can result in 200+ unique pieces of content per month) This is some of the most real, authentic content you can get. Why? If you did your research correctly when deciding who to send product to, you got your product in the hands of people who truly LOVE it—oh, and they’re pros at video content. So you have that 1-2 punch of skill on-camera + authentic support of what you’re selling. This is GOLD for your ad account. Load the IGC (influencer-generated content) into the ad account and test every single piece of creative, using Cost Caps. This way, you’re able to test everything, and you won’t miss out on a winner that you didn’t expect. Time and time again, we see influencer-generated content outperform other types of ads in client accounts. The difference is usually ~15% lower CAC, on average. You would miss out on all of this if you thought your job was over after the influencer posted.

Seed Health generated $100M+ dollars in revenue through influencers, and 5X’d their return on investment in the channel. And I spoke to the woman behind the program. Here are 4 influencer marketing lessons every marketer should understand: 1) The metric that Lily Comba and her team were assessed on wasn’t impressions or likes—it was CPA (cost per acquisition). Generally, she was looking to achieve a CPA lower than $100. This is incredibly dependent on your product and unit economics, but the idea of basing the success of influencer marketing on tangible sales is something I love. To track performance, Lily and her team used codes with a 15% off discount code assigned to each influencer. Simple. 2) Early on, the team focused on Instagram stories and YouTube, versus in-feed and Reels content. Why? Simple. Both IG stories and YouTube content allows you to have easily clickable links in the content. Trying to drive sales from a post with nowhere to click adds extra friction to the process. 3) The influencer marketing team worked cross-functionally with the paid social team. The influencer team at Seed worked hand in hand with the paid social team to feed them influencer creatives to us as ads. Lily told us that at one point, 70% of their ads in their accounts were influencer content. (Side note: we continually see this approach crush for Kynship clients—often slashing CPAs by ~15%, because influencer content is just more engaging) 4) If you’re working with influencers on a pay-per-post model, you’ll want to base payment off of engagement (not follower count!). Often times, influencers with a lower follower count have better engagement and a more relevant audience for your brand (and it’ll usually do better in the ad account too). Huge thank you to Lily for taking the time to stop by the show. The episode was full of influencer marketing strategies for marketers to take note of — I’ll drop the episode in the comments for you to check out.