This marketing comes with bundles. Maybe a few years back, our influencer might feel happy with a few boxes of products or voucher. But now? some demands hundreds, if not thousands per hour. Well, that totally depends on your budget. But it seems to be worth spending if your brand gonna seen by 40,000 to 50,000 potential customers.

But if the question is whether your eCommerce brand should be in on this, then the answer is most definitely — YES.

So how do you do it? How do you get involved? By the end of this article, you’ll know:

How to choose an influencer?
How to choose the right platform for your product?
How real eCommerce brands have used influencers to fuel growth?
Let’s start with the basics:

How to Choose an Influencer/ With whom to partner?

Partnering with someone who isn’t relevant to your brand or product is just a waste of time and money. Choosing the right influencer to partner with is crucial.

That seems pretty obvious, right? But remember, an influencer with 10,000 followers, who are relevant to what you sell is far more valuable than one with 100,000 followers, who has nothing to do with what you sell.

You need to find someone whose content you like, and who is engaging (we’ll come to that in a minute). There are two simple ways to do that:

Search hashtag or keywords on social media for terms related to your product. Then check out the top accounts associated with those results.
Use a tool where you can enter a single keyword and see all of the most influential people associated with it. Some tools will also show you:

Follower count
Domain authority
Average comments
Retweets
Tip: Individual influencers are the best, but if you find a brand with a great following, a collaboration with them can also pay off big time.

For ex: Bhuvan Bam (Top You Tuber, Social Influencer, Singer) is an Individual Influencer.

Many brands have collaborated with him, and he portrayed their each and every product in so interesting way.

MiVi: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxB5_aWHcl2/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwUBdeCHnsu/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bushq8un3Ms/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Br-gCoqH4R1/

Beardo: https://www.instagram.com/p/BwzNa2YnHgs/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqJf423H0_-/

Lenskart: https://www.instagram.com/p/B0s6zI5n_6q/

When choosing influencers, remember that a gigantic following means nothing if the influencer you pick doesn’t effectively engage with their audience.

So relevance is important, but there are other things to consider when picking the right influencer, including:

Compensation
Pitching
Ground rules for content
Whether or not you’ll be offering discounts to their followers
So the next question comes, which platform should you use?

Major Players in Influencer Marketing Are YouTube and Instagram

Every social media channel has its advantages depending on your audience. How much you have to spend, and what your product is.

Below are four of the most effective platforms for Influence Marketing. Instagram and YouTube play a crucial role.
Why?

Every single day 95 million photos are shared on Instagram
On YouTube daily, 1,300,000,000 videos are watched

Snapchat — It is the best platform for creating buzz around product launches and live events, especially ones aimed at younger people (think gummy bears).

Instagram — It is especially effective if you have a visually striking product, and are looking to increase your own social media following. Great when paired with Instagram ads.

Twitter — Useful if you’re ready and willing to engage in further conversation.

YouTube — Effective at every stage of the funnel. See a brand dropped in your favorite influencer’s video? Paid for. YouTube can also provide attributable website traffic.

Start Small with Brand Ambassadors/Influencers If You Need

Okay, but what if you don’t have thousands of dollars to drop on YouTube and Instagram stars?

Don’t worry. Influencer marketing is basically word-of-mouth marketing on a tremendous scale.

You can do it with one person, or you can do it with a network of dozens, or even hundreds of people. You can call them your brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors usually don’t need to be paid, and will happily promote your brand to friends and followers in exchange for free products.

Your own followers are a great place to start to find brand ambassadors. And if you’re just starting out, the tips we outlined above will work great too. That is, keyword and hashtag research, or using a tool and reaching out to the right people.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing requires a strategy like any sort of marketing effort. But in the end, it comes down to finding the right people to partner with and working with them to create the kind of content you want to be known for.

Have you partnered with influencers as part of your marketing strategy? Are you an influencer who’s been approached about a partnership?

What advice do you have for people looking to combine their efforts with the popularity of others?