#1 Use micro influencers
When it comes to influencer marketing, I always focus on the three R’s to find the right influencer for your brand:
– Reach
The first R is reach. The reason we’re focusing on micro influencers is because they have very powerful, engaged, niche communities that are often a lot more focused than just a general, broader community, which is often the case with macro influences. The ideal reach will be around 5,000-50,000 followers in size, because they’re also the most likely to be willing to post your product simply in return for a gift.
– Relevancy
The next R is relevancy, we want to find influencers who are within your niche or category and are relevant to your brand. Some places that you can look at are other brands within your category. It doesn’t have to be a competitive brand, bit it has to be relevant to you. For instance, if you’re in the fitness or healthcare niche, the influencer audience has to be people who are looking to improve their health and well-being. You can easily go through, make a list of brands within your category and check out some of the influences that they’re working with – that’s a really easy starting point.
– Relationships
The third R is relationships, you want to make sure that the influencer has as strong a relationship with their followers as possible. On Instagram that will probably mean that they do quite a bit of video content as well or they might have a YouTube presence, so YouTube influences have a very strong relationship with their community and if that community has now gone across and followed them on Instagram, it means that they’re superfans. They’re the people that we’ve really want to target.
A good indicator of a strong relationship will be a lot of comments and probably like a two-way dialogue between the influencer and their audience, so they might reply to comments often people might ask their advice on things, they might ask them where they got certain things they’re all really good signs that there’s trust within that community. Basically, with influencer marketing the main thing that you’re leveraging is the trust that influencer has with their audience, otherwise you may as well just be marketing to cold traffic.
#2 Tip is content marketing
You might just think that’s things like blogging, but that can also include things like user-generated content, which I’m going to touch on a little later. So, blogging is a great place to start and what you want to do is begin with keyword research, you want to find the terms that people are searching for the most and write about those( ie what shopify theme is that?)
This is how it helps to improve your SEO which is your search engine optimization, because when people are searching for those certain terms, we want to be coming up or ranking for those terms
Blogging is something that you really shouldn’t ignore, it’s another easy way to get free traffic to your site.
#3 Tip is utilizing customer reviews and user-generated content
We use “Loox”, which is just an easy plugin Shopify app, so customers are able to leave photo and captioned reviews.
This really helps with social proof. The photo reviews are actually far more powerful than just having a text-based review, because your customers are able to see your product in action, so it’s a lot more realistic, because a lot of the time in e-commerce you’re not just selling a product, you’re selling an experience and this way your customers are able to experience your product through other people, through their peers who are also purchasing your product, so that is amazing social proof.
Social proof again, just helps to build trust in the same sort of way that influencers do. Influences are more so word-of-mouth or social proof at scale, because they’ve got a larger audience, but a lot of the time the trust is even stronger when it comes to utilizing your own customers, so make sure you collect as many reviews as possible you might want to have an email sequence that is a post purchase sequence that asks after they’ve purchased your product a certain amount of time after, say, they’ve purchased our 28 day detox – we’ll ask them about five weeks after the purchase, so we’ll ask them for their review, they’ll upload that, hopefully it’s positive and we’re in our way.
#4 Tip: Viral Giveaways
These are a really great way to grow without needing to put too much budget in. So with “the fifth” we ran a giveaway with a platform called “Gleam” – a powerful giveaway app and we gave away 14 watches over the space of 14 days – best sellers aliexpress.
One of the really important things when it comes to viral giveaways is baking virality or shareability into your competition as well, so you don’t just want to be like: “okay enter sign up with your email” because that’s private. What you want to do is be encouraging each person that signs up to then share your competition on. That might be on social media, it might be directly via email you just want them to be getting more and more people to be entering as well, that’s often referred to as their viral coefficient.
For each person that enters imagine you’re getting one other person to enter and then that one other person gets one other person, you can see how it propagates itself.
Another platform that you can use for these giveaways is called “Viper”, which we did for our early drop bottle giveaway. With “the fifth” we were able to generate 80,000 new emails in just 14 days and this was really a case of being able to convert a lot of our organic social following into our email subscribers, so this is a way to kind of bring all of that together and be able to leverage that to grow your brand exponentially.
