Co-founder and CEO of SocialPubli, an award-winning influencer marketing platform with 200,000+ opt-in influencers across 35 countries.
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Online shopping has been on the rise for years. The pandemic then accelerated its adoption, pushing total U.S. online shoppers to a projected 291 million by 2025.
Social media platforms understand social commerce’s potential to drive their own visibility and traffic, and they’ve begun investing heavily in tools that enable social promotion and selling, such as Instagram’s product tagging features and checkout functionality and TikTok’s shopping links.
The growth that social selling is experiencing creates a golden opportunity for brands to tap into these platforms, grow their audiences and deepen relationships with customers and potential customers. To fast-track your success, though, you can use a highly effective secret weapon: influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing Will Drive Social Commerce Forward
Think back to your last purchase. Where and how did you make it? There’s a huge probability that you made your purchase online.
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Even if you bought the actual item in the store, you probably spent time researching online, reading reviews, crowdsourcing and observing its use by influencers.
The top social media networks are driving tremendous visibility for products and brands:
• Eighty-one percent of the Instagram users surveyed said they use the platform as a tool for researching products before buying.
• The #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag has been used almost 11 billion times (and is still growing).
• According to a 2021 survey our company conducted, almost 70% of content creators have made a purchase after seeing someone they know post about it.
No other marketing channel has this same level of power and connectivity, if you use it right.
How To Leverage Influencers For Your Brand’s Social Commerce
Consumers don’t always trust traditional advertising. After all, as the brand, it’s your job to position your product in the best light, and they’re aware of that bias.
They do trust online experts and testimonials, though. In fact, many consumers say they trust online reviews and feedback as much as they trust product feedback from their own family and friends.
When you combine trust in influencers with the increased ease of social commerce, you have a goldmine of relationships and loyalty-building just waiting for you to tap into it.
The question is—how do you do it?
1. Find The Right Influencers For Your Brand
To tap into the vast power of influencer marketing, you don’t have to start big. It’s more important to understand your audience and what they need to know.
The majority of consumers don’t care how big an influencer’s audience is—the size isn’t a prerequisite for creating credibility.
That means working with nano- and micro-influencers can give you a bigger bang for your brand buck. They generally garner higher engagement, and their content is very specifically designed with their niche and audience in mind. They’re not trying to reach everyone; they’re trying to reach the people who really care about what they’re offering.
Smaller content creators are also often very active in connecting with their audiences and consuming their media, which boosts their engagement and continues to build trust between influencer and consumer.
2. Understand Your Platforms
Social selling shouldn’t have the same value proposition and content across the board. Instead, line up with the platforms and influencers who are the best fit for your brand.
Depending on your product and your target audience, you may choose different platforms for different campaigns. B2B brands may focus on LinkedIn and YouTube, while B2C brands use Instagram and TikTok.
Even if you’re creating content across multiple platforms, your approach should be different for each. If you’re selling resume writing services, for example, you could partner with influencers on both LinkedIn and TikTok, but the way you’ll work with them to present and promote your offering should be quite different, as your sales funnel will be different on each platform.
3. Create Seamless Processes
The social commerce sales funnel can be shorter with influencer marketing because your customers are getting their information from their favorite influencers, a source they already trust.
When you factor in the tools social platforms have added (and the short attention span of your potential customers), you’ll have the best opportunity of converting if you give them all the information they need and the opportunity to check out all in one fell swoop and with minimal disruption. For example, a new Shopify integration with TikTok is making it easier to buy influencer-promoted products directly from their posts. Instagram has also taken steps to improve the buying process by expanding product tagging and thus cutting friction when buyers show interest.
4. Create Long-Term Relationships
Long-term influencer partnerships just make sense for three reasons:
• They give consumers the chance to get to know your product from a trusted authority and give you an opportunity for ongoing customer loyalty. The consistency lets your audience know what to expect and lets you position your influencer partner as a credible authority on your product.
• They allow for greater creative freedom, so your influencers can experiment and really determine what resonates with your audience. The longer investment allows more opportunity for exploration than a one-off project or campaign.
• They can provide you with a wealth of user-generated content that your brand can later repurpose and boost with advertising dollars across social media.
When approaching influencers to work with, focus on creating a mutually beneficial relationship from day one because this will pave the way for long-term collaborations. One way to do this is by showing an understanding of the influencers’ audience and their online persona and being open to giving them creative freedom throughout the collaboration process while being loyal to your own brand’s vision and personality. This shows an appreciation for what they bring to the table and starts off the relationship-building process on a positive note.
As you focus on growing your social selling presence, strive for a cohesive experience across platforms. Consumers tend to browse and read from multiple sources as they make purchases, so consistency creates additional credibility for your product and your brand. This may not mean using the same influencer across TikTok, Instagram and Twitch, but it does mean ensuring that your strategy and brand messaging are consistent and persuasive across all your chosen platforms so you can get the sale easily and seamlessly.
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Author: Ismael El Qudsi, Forbes Councils Member
