Social commerce is on the rise. The pandemic has accelerated the industry’s evolution towards online retail, and objectives once held primarily by nimble DTC brands are becoming the norm for most. Influencer marketing is a key emerging channel being used to drive e-commerce goals.
But traditionally, influencer marketing campaigns have been executed with awareness marketing goals in mind, and measured accordingly. As a result, the industry is largely still set up this way.
If you’re a brand responding to an increased imperative to drive sales, sign-ups, or other conversion events through your influencer marketing efforts, integrating your influencer marketing with your e-commerce operation is crucial.
If you’ve never run a creator campaign focused on driving revenue, where do you start? And if you’re already attempting this, maybe it’s proving a challenge to streamline your workflow and measure success effectively and without straining bandwidth and resources.
Your organization likely already has a legacy e-commerce platform like Shopify, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce, or WooCommerce, and whether you’re in the market for your first influencer marketing solution or shopping for one to better serve your needs, CreatorIQ’s solution is designed to seamlessly integrate with and work with your existing e-commerce system.
Owning your influencer e-commerce marketing from end-to-end isn’t always easy, but comprehensive conversion analytics and transparently measurable ROI are always rewarding.
Here are five best practices to help you navigate integrating your e-commerce and influencer strategies for success:
1. Strive for full transparency
Because e-commerce capabilities are somewhat new to influencer marketing solutions, you may consider a third party to help execute your sales objectives, though many may keep useful information behind closed doors until you’ve met a certain spend threshold. You may see your end result sales, but not which creators are performing well or why. A fully integrated solution like CreatorIQ lets you choose your own creators, track performance, and optimize for future campaigns with granular insights that you own.
2. Look for an integrated solution
Are you manually copying promo codes and product links and texting them to your creators? Are you ordering products for them and fielding endless fulfillment and tracking questions? Then, are you pulling sales data from Shopify or another platform and manually reporting on campaign success? There’s a better way. By eliminating the need to constantly switch back and forth between your influencer and e-commerce platforms, manually aggregate metrics, and act as a go-between for creators, you can unlock more potential from your programs with half the effort.
Speaking of...let’s expand upon that in these next three tips.
3. Don’t become a personal shopper
If you’re working on an activation with creators who require a specific product, you should have a solution that lets them easily select and order on their own; controlled by you. Without the ability to surface curated options for them, you could get stuck handling the ordering process for them. Your time is valuable, plus an automated system can reduce the likelihood of ordering errors or oversights and increase your ability to greatly scale your product promotion campaigns.
4. Choose a platform that keeps you and your creators in the loop when it comes to fulfillment and tracking
You deserve to know what products you or your creators have ordered, where they are, and how much inventory is left. You shouldn’t need to look up this info to relay to creators with questions about their shipment either.
5. Don’t scrape together disparate data
At the end of the day, you need to showcase the success of your campaign by aggregating direct sales, profit, and conversions. Without an integrated solution, you’ll be stuck in spreadsheets reconciling influencer performance data with conversion and sales data. Comprehensive conversion analytics passed in directly to your influencer marketing platform helps you seamlessly track unique conversions from coupon codes or tracking links at the creator, campaign, or post level, so you can effectively measure ROI and glean instant insights to help you optimize for future campaigns.
There’s no one size fits all solution when it comes to developing and executing an influencer e-commerce strategy. Every organization is different operationally and strategically, which is why it’s important to look for a solution that’s robust enough to solve for the problems above and flexible enough to meet your specific needs.
Want to learn more about CreatorIQ’s e-commerce integrations and capabilities, including Shopify? Contact sales@creatoriq.com today or use the button below to schedule a demo!
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