How Both Shopify & Afluencer Collabs Work

Before we analyze the pros and cons of each platform, here’s a bird’s eye view of the key differences when we pit Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer.

Getting started

Shopify: Go to the Shopify App Store, find the Shopify Collabs app, and install it.

Afluencer: No app installation is required. All collaborations can be managed directly from the Afluencer website—that’s one less step than Shopify!

Creating an account

Shopify: On the Settings panel in your Shopify app, click on Apps and sales channels, and select Shopify Collabs. Click on ‘Open app’ and accept all the terms and conditions.

Afluencer: Sign up on the Afluencer website, answer a few prompts, and get started right away—no additional technicalities or reading through complex documentation.

Collaborating with influencers/ Connecting and customizations

• Shopify: Shopify Collabs streamlines the influencer collaboration process, but may not offer all the capabilities necessary for merchants who want an extensively customized collaboration environment.

• Afluencer: Influencers can create custom profiles that represent their brands on Afluencer. With custom communication channels, if a mutual match is found, Afluencer introduces the brand’s decision-maker, facilitating tailored, one-on-one conversations.

Afluencer is relatively simpler than Shopify Collabs: no intermediary salespersons, no contracts, and no fees.

Pricing: Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer

Afluencer Pricing

Afluencer offers three plans at different price points, which you can choose from depending on your influencer marketing goals.

The most popular VIP plan starts at $49 per month. Some of the noteworthy features include:

• Feature your brand: Get your brand in front of thousands of Afluencer-verified influencers. Plus, get featured in a popular newsletter.
• Connect with your ideal influencers: Choose influencers from niches like beauty, wellness, lifestyle, travel, and more. Get 2x influencer invitation credits per day. (1 credit = 1 invitation)
• Get introductions to influencers: When there’s a mutual match for your brand, Afluencer makes a personal intro to your new partner.
• Promote your partner program: Afluencer feeds your partner pipeline with quality influencers, ambassadors, and/or affiliates.
• Multiple campaigns: Create simultaneous “collabs” for different products and partner tiers. Manage extra brands too.
• Premium badge for all your brands and collabs: With this badge, your brand profile will stand out to influencers.

Access the full list of VIP plan features here.

The Concierge Plan is priced at $99 per month and is designed to give your brand maximum exposure. In addition to all VIP features, it offers the following:

• 5x influencer invitation credits per day.
• 1x feature in Afluencer’s quarterly newsletter.
• 1x custom video created about your brand’s influencer program.

The Boss Plan ($199/mo) offers the ultimate exposure and customer service from Afluencer.com. In addition to all VIP and Concierge features, its key highlight is a monthly strategy call to review and offer feedback on how to improve your Collabs further.

Shopify Collabs Pricing

Merchants on the Shopify, Advanced, or Shopify Plus plans can use Shopify Collabs for free, as the cost is factored into the monthly subscription fee. Shopify’s plans are priced at $79, $299, and $2,300 per month respectively.

Additionally, all commission payments on Collabs are subject to a 2.9% payment processing fee, payable by the merchant. Additionally, foreign currency exchange fees may apply for merchants when using Shopify Collabs for international collaborations.

Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer: The Key Differences

If you’ve been considering Shopify Collabs but aren’t sure how it ranks up against competitors, we’ve got you covered. Let’s look at how it fares against Afluencer Collabs on some of the most essential parameters.

Setting up & onboarding

Signing up for a Collabs account on Shopify seems complex, even for existing users. The process involves multiple steps that require navigating the Shopify dashboard and the Shopify App Store which might not be straightforward for all.

Specifically, you need to install the Shopify Collabs App from the Shopify App Store and then log into your Shopify store to integrate it back to the dashboard. Collabs’ lengthy sign-up process is, on the whole, quite inconvenient.

To set up an account, users need to read through extensive documentation: the scope of services being offered, costs involved, such as payment processing fees, and obligations of the store owner within the app’s ecosystem.

Conversely, Afluencer’s setup is relatively hassle-free. When you visit the website, you’ll find options to sign up or sign in. New user? Sign up on the app, answer a few prompts, and you’re ready to use the platform. Creators can explore and find potential partnerships without signing up or knowing the full benefits of the platform.

User experience

Shopify Collabs has a fairly intuitive interface. A navigation panel to the left of the screen and multiple settings keep users informed about their accounts. Businesses can discover new creators, find affiliates, shortlist their ideal candidates, and track payments. They can also check which applicants are interested in working with them.

Afluencer has a clean design and a seamless, minimalistic interface. The welcome dashboard has all the essential details about brand campaigns, such as the applications, influencers you may like, your brands, and past saved searches. You can additionally explore the influencer directory to find more influencers.

Functionality

Shopify Collabs offers several features for merchants and creators:

• Merchants have access to an extensive creators’ database.
• Creators can collaborate with millions of brands on the Shopify Collab app.
• Users can track their performance and payments using a data-driven dashboard.

However, many businesses find the curated influencer lists, collaboration tools, and analytics offered by Shopify Collabs overwhelming. The multitude of features and options can be daunting. A learning curve is associated with leveraging the app fully for influencer & affiliate marketing.

Afluencer, in contrast, is a feature-rich tool packed with the essential features that brands and creators need for collaboration. The Afluencer dashboard keeps users updated with past and ongoing campaigns. There are also separate sections to track your sales and creator performance.

Creators can also check collaboration programs directly from the homepage without signing up. Once registered, they’ll get updates about new programs to participate in, making it easier for brands to identify interested creators faster.

It’s worth mentioning that the app’s huge Influencer Directory of 24,000+ creators has powerful search filters to help you always find the most relevant niche creators for your brand. Another great feature is the ability to chat with any of the creators and maintain prompt communication on the same platform.

How Shopify Collabs and Afluencer Can Be Used for Influencer Marketing

Finding brand-fit creators has always challenged marketers and independent store owners. Browsing, vetting, and shortlisting the right creators independently is time-consuming. Getting them the right exposure and building a healthy relationship is an added struggle.

Let’s take a sharper view of how Shopify Collabs and Afluencer can amplify your influencer marketing efforts.

Afluencer Collabs

Afluencer is the digital marketplace where top influencers and brands meet. It’s designed to bring your brand’s vision to life, connecting you with the perfect influencers to amplify your success. Whether you’re trying to boost brand awareness, drive sales, or expand your reach, Afluencer’s curated network of influencers can help you unlock the potential of influencer marketing for your brand. 

Let’s look at the three key benefits brands can expect from Afluencer Collabs:

1. Connect with your ideal influencers

Afluencer has A-list influencer partners creating content in 71 different interests, from beauty to wellness, lifestyle, music and dance, and beyond.

Brands can access verified influencers, micro-influencers, nano-influencers, and creators with real followers who can cater to different market segments and campaign goals. The influencer discovery feature lets you search through influencers to find your ideal partnership. You can filter, sort, and invite influencers in your niche to join your campaign.

The best part? Influencers can come directly to you. If they find your collaboration matches their interests, they can apply to see if they are a match. Influencers can search and apply for collaborations directly from their dashboard.

Working with multiple influencers? Use Afluencer to manage invitations, relationships, and more on one platform.

2. Quick Collab application process

Afluencer offers a streamlined collaboration process. Brands can apply with just the click of a button, making initiating partnerships quick and easy. Set criteria by interests, followers, channels, and more to find the perfect partnership. Set up pay-per-post or commission-based collabs where influencers can apply to join.

Review your shortlisted influencers’ profiles and social assets, and evaluate their engagement scores and other insights. When you’re ready, negotiate a deal with them. Afluencer allows you to create and manage up to 100 Collabs across your brand portfolio.

3. Influencer relationship management

Once you pick the right influencers for your marketing needs, Afluencer lets you direct message them and explore new partner opportunities in the chatroom. Brands can keep track of their partnerships, invitations, contracts, payments, and more, right from the Afluencer dashboard.

4. Promote your brand and collab

When you choose Afluencer, your brand, and Collab get to appear on the Afluencer podcast. The podcast is published on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and the Afluencer YouTube channel, ensuring it reaches a wide, captive audience. Afluencer also features your brand in its quarterly newsletter, so you can be sure your brand is visible and top-of-mind among creators and influencers in its exclusive network.

5. Performance tracking

Afluencer provides brands with tools and analytics to measure the performance of their collaborations accurately, including reach, engagement and much more. These insights enable brands to understand their ROI, iterate their strategies, and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.

Shopify Collabs

With Shopify Collabs, brands can find creators, manage their marketing campaigns effortlessly, and stay on top of expenses. The app helps streamline the process of working with creators.

Let’s look at the three key benefits brands can expect from Shopify Collabs:

1. Discover niche creators from a marketplace

Shopify Collabs’ Creator Marketplace is a database of creators from various niches and channels, picked by the Shopify team. Any brand can set up an account and create an application form for creators interested in collaborating.

Alternatively, brands can search the database to find creators that check the boxes. Merchants can filter profiles by target audience, follower size, channel, and more.  So, you only need to shortlist the most promising profiles and start a conversation.

2. Hire and manage creator relationships

With Collabs, store owners can search from thousands of candidates, and then partner with their selected creators directly from the platform.

Collabs generates customized insights so brands can optimize their campaigns for maximum impact. Use these to frame creator guidelines and set campaign metrics. Additionally, it gives you unique links and discount codes so you can work with multiple creators simultaneously and track their output.

3. Win affiliate sales and track payments

Shopify Collabs simplifies affiliate relationships. Get a comprehensive view of your affiliates’ sales; the app automatically calculates commissions for each. Additionally, you can pay affiliates directly from the platform. It generates analytics for each affiliate’s progress so you can reward high performers.

Collabs handles the essentials, so you don’t need to hire a large affiliate marketing team.

How to Decide Which Platform: Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer

While Shopify Collabs is a worthy addition to Shopify’s product portfolio, we must remember that it’s a tag-along app to what is essentially an e-commerce platform. Afluencer, on the other hand, is a feature-packed platform solely for influencer marketing. It has been conceptualized, designed, and built to address every need in the influencer-marketing ecosystem.

Additionally, you may need to consider some of the main drawbacks of Shopify Collabs:

Compatibility Concerns

While Shopify Collabs is tailored to Shopify users, businesses using a different platform (like WooCommerce or Magento) may find integration with the platform difficult. This may require you to explore alternative collaboration platforms. Unfortunately, a disjointed collaboration experience could impact your ability to achieve your desired outcomes.

Limited Customization Options

Although Shopify Collabs simplifies collaboration, it has certain limitations in terms of customization. You may need to rely on third-party tools, such as third-party CSS or HTML tools to customize the look and feel of your collaboration portal. This poses a challenge for businesses with limited resources as it’s time-consuming and may require technical expertise.

Potential for Increased Competition

While collaborations with other businesses can unlock opportunities, it could also increase competition. By partnering with businesses in your industry, you might inadvertently give them insights into your business strategies and operations.

For example, collaborating to launch a new product means your competitor might gain insights into your customer base, pricing strategies, and marketing tactics. This would give them a competitive advantage and make it more challenging for your business to stand out in the crowded marketplace.

Why Afluencer Wins vs Shopify Collabs

Signing up for a Shopify Collabs account is complex. It involves a multi-step process with various settings and terms to navigate, and sophisticated tools to master. Some of the platform’s shortcomings also include the absence of email customization and no multi-language feature. Users on the app store report frequent glitches related to poor loading times,  integrations with social platforms, and others.

Afluencer wins on multiple attributes: quick setup and ease of use, a large database of active influencers, and a dedicated support team. Another key advantage is that where Shopify Collabs only allows you to connect with micro-influencers directly, Afluencer lets you connect with any influencer via direct messaging.

The clincher, for us, is that Afluencer is a dedicated platform for influencer marketing. It has been thoughtfully designed around the needs of influencers and brands and effortlessly facilitates interactions between both sides.

Install the Afluencer app for Shopify here.

The post Shopify Collabs vs. Afluencer Collabs  appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/collaborate-your-way-to-success-with-influencers-creators/ Thu, 23 Feb 2023 10:35:00 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=21400 Imagine the frustration of having an incredible product but no way to get it into the hands of potential customers. That happened to Vela’s Raphael Velazquez during the shutdowns in 2020-2021. With businesses closed and people stuck at home, Raphael struggled to find a way to get his exercise resistance bands into the hands of […]

The post Collaborate Your Way To Success With Influencers And Creators appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> Imagine the frustration of having an incredible product but no way to get it into the hands of potential customers. That happened to Vela’s Raphael Velazquez during the shutdowns in 2020-2021. With businesses closed and people stuck at home, Raphael struggled to find a way to get his exercise resistance bands into the hands of people who needed them.

Fortunately, he discovered Afluencer, a Shopify influencer marketing app that connects merchants with influencers who have followers that fit their target customers. Through Afluencer, Raphael recruited over 100 influencers to help him promote and sell his products.

Raphael represents a brand’s determination to overcome obstacles by utilizing every tool at their disposal. In this article, Brett Owens, Founder, and Chief Matchmaker at Afluencer, shares how to achieve your business goals through successful Shopify collaborations.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST: Brett Owens talks about Collabs on the eCommerce Fastlane Podcast

5 Reasons Why Partnering with Micro-Influencers Outweighs Mega-Influencers

Amidst the challenges of high CAC and disappointing return on ad spend, merchants are refusing to give up. They seek ways to be more efficient and cost-effective in acquiring new customers, recognizing influencers’ critical role in the creator economy.

Micro-influencers have emerged as a compelling alternative to mega-influencers. Here are some key benefits of partnering with micro-influencers over their larger counterparts:

1. Targeted audience: Micro-influencers have a smaller but more targeted audience. This audience distribution is better for companies with niche products or services that may not appeal to wider audiences.

2. High engagement: Micro-influencers typically have an engaged audience that values their opinions and recommendations. As a result, their content can carry more weight compared to mega-influencers, who may have a larger but less engaged audience.

3. Cost-effectiveness: Partnering with micro-influencers is a low-cost alternative to expensive mega-influencers, making micro-influencers a more accessible option for small and medium-sized businesses with limited budgets.

4. Better authenticity: Many people view micro-influencers as more authentic and relatable than mega-influencers, who may have a more curated image. This perception can build trust with the audience and lead to higher conversion rates.

5. Work ethic: Micro-influencers are eager to work with brands and ensure their campaigns are successful. They are more likely to create high-quality content than mega-influencers, who may produce generic content.

“You want to collab with someone who’s laser-focused on their interest and aligns with your product.” – Brett Owens

Using Afluencer to Find Shopify Influencers

After deciding to invest in micro-influencers, it is essential to know how to use the Afluencer app to find them:

• Add the app: Don’t be afraid to converse with an Afluencer representative to get help navigating the app.

• Post a collab: A collab serves as a job description and platform for influencers to connect with brands, outlining the partnership expectations. If there are many product lines, it is acceptable to establish more than one collab opportunity.

• Define requirements: Set a price range and use filters to narrow down preferred demographic characteristics.

• Review applications: Eligible influencers can apply after meeting the criteria to collab. Merchants will use metrics such as influencer engagement rates to find the best match.

Hire each influencer as a one-time opportunity, with the potential to continue working together if the partnership is successful. However, if the collab is not successful, move on.

“The goal is to establish a reliable group of partners who can be collaborated with regularly.” – Brett Owens

Managing User-Generated Content Rights

Demand for user-generated content (UGC) is high, as consumers prefer content created by fellow users. However, brands must navigate the issue of content ownership, as the content is, by nature, owned by the influencers who make it.

To get ownership of UGC, merchants should establish clear guidelines and compensation structures with Shopify creators from the outset. Offering additional payment to influencers for content ownership is recommended.

Here are two considerations for brands seeking UGC rights:

1. Clarify with influencers upfront the intent to repurpose the content they create. This discussion ensures that both parties are clear on content ownership and repurposing rights.

2. Give proper attribution to the influencer when using their UGC. It acknowledges their work and reinforces the authenticity of the content.

Picking the Right Way to Pay Influencers and Creators

Afluencer recommends merchants view payments from an affiliate marketing recruitment standpoint. By splitting up pay for recruitment and performance, merchants ensure that they are only paying for the actual results of the influencers rather than for their potential reach.

Here’s how it can be done:

• Afluencer is easy to use in tandem with any current affiliate app, with no extra tech set-up needed. Brands can use Afluencer to find their micro-influencer affiliates. The affiliates will then sign up with the brand’s preferred Shopify influencer tracking software. The influencer will receive their commission payment through the tracking app.

• Brands can also pay their influencers via product seeding; in return, they may receive a commission.

• Pay-per-post agreements can be paid via PayPal. Brands can opt to ship the product they want the influencer to review but hold off on payment until the influencer posts. This is because the product represents an upfront cost and effort. It’s also possible to negotiate a one-off price point based on the influencer’s size and the campaign conducted.

It’s advisable to have a basic agreement or template outlining how these payments will be structured. Having a clear structure can help to build trust and transparency.

“Affiliate marketing offers a guaranteed return on investment, as payment is based on commission or success.” – Brett Owens

Start Your Shopify Influencer Marketing Strategy

For those looking to get ahead, now is the time to invest in micro-influencers. Afluencer takes a unique approach to affiliate marketing by tapping into the up-and-coming micro-influencers. They often produce higher-quality content, making them great affiliates for merchants. It’s still an emerging field, so there are plenty of opportunities to grow and succeed.

The post Collaborate Your Way To Success With Influencers And Creators appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/shopify-influencer-marketing-things-to-know/ Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:50:57 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=21154 When Lena Sarsour and Akram Abdallah started Nominal, their Shopify jewelry brand, they didn’t have enough money to pay influencers. Instead, they gifted their jewelry to a few influencers and found visibility when these influencers posted positive reviews of their products. And guess what? It paid off. Today, Nominal is a seven-figure business and is […]

The post Influencer Marketing for Shopify: 5 Things You Need to Know appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> When Lena Sarsour and Akram Abdallah started Nominal, their Shopify jewelry brand, they didn’t have enough money to pay influencers. Instead, they gifted their jewelry to a few influencers and found visibility when these influencers posted positive reviews of their products.

And guess what? It paid off. Today, Nominal is a seven-figure business and is growing with influencer marketing as one of its three core avenues for success.

Influencer marketing is more than just a buzzword for ecommerce brands. The market was valued at an incredible $16.4 billion in 2022 with limitless possibilities for brands with Shopify stores. In this article, we’ll share the five most crucial things to know about influencer marketing for Shopify to help you kickstart your efforts today.

5 Reasons Shopify Influencer Marketing Should Be A Top Priority

Influencer marketing can be a time-consuming and effort-intensive channel, but those efforts will eventually materialize into worthwhile ROI. That’s why 54% of all businesses investing in influencers are ecommerce brands, many of them operating on Shopify.

Let’s look at five ways influencer marketing can prove valuable when working to promote your online business.

1. Connect with a niche audience and drive conversions

If you run a niche brand on Shopify with a small target audience, you know how difficult it can be to get in front of the right people and convert them into customers. This is one of the biggest reasons Shopify brands run influencer marketing campaigns: the opportunity to build a stronger rapport with a niche audience. Research confirms that educational influencers—those who aim to inform their audience rather than entertain—can bring warm leads and sales by endorsing a brand online.

Here’s one example: The niche superfood-focused brand Blume was able to reach the right audience in a single influencer collaboration with Healthillie, a creator in the fitness space. With this festive marketing campaign, the brand positioned itself as a great option for healthy cooking at home by having the influencer share a recipe that included their product. Not only did this validate the product with social proof, but it also gave a use case that showed the product in action.

2. Refresh your content strategy with quality content

Another advantage for Shopify brands working with influencers relates to content strategy and production. Organic content produced in-house can only get you so far; you need some social proof and user-generated content to mix things up. Research by Aspire indicates brands that prioritize influencer content over professional photo shoots and repurpose this content across social channels perform better than those that don’t.

The good news: you can level up your content strategy with a mix of paid partnerships and product seeding.

Here’s a great example from Nature Made. The brand actively features influencers on its Instagram feed to showcase the different benefits of its health products. You’ll notice these influencer posts are mixed in with product photos and informational content to break things up.

3. Get more bang for your buck with a higher ROI

One study concluded that businesses make as much as $6.50 for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing. Not bad, right?

That’s not all. HBR’s latest study on influencer marketing revealed that a 1% increase in your influencer marketing spend can increase engagement by 0.46%, indicating a positive ROI. These numbers can be a lot higher depending on your choice of influencers. The same study identified seven factors as the main determinants of your influencer marketing success.

Once you have a solid influencer marketing strategy (more on that shortly), you’re on the path to multiplying your sales and hitting those revenue targets thanks to higher engagement and greater visibility on social media.

4. Create a halo effect to increase your credibility

Shopify brands working with influencers bring the benefit of the “halo effect.” What is it? When an influencer talks passionately about your brand and vouches for you, their followers trust you simply because they trust the influencer.

This works well for brands new to a market or vertical looking to build a good reputation. Partnering with the right influencers can establish trust and inspire their followers to buy from you: Data shows 37% of buyers trust influencers over brands to make their shopping decisions.

5. Scale your following and traffic

The most obvious benefit of running influencer marketing campaigns for Shopify is the massive reach you get from featuring on an influencer’s profile. Social media is a goldmine for Shopify brands and working with influencers will give you that extra boost to gain new followers and maximize awareness. In fact, one study concluded that if brands spent just 1% more on influencers, they’d gain a meaningful increase in engagement.

You can also optimize these campaigns with a Shopify influencer app to increase traffic to your website or landing page, redirect new followers to your website, and enhance your SEO performance.

5 Things to Know About Influencer Marketing for Your Shopify Store

Launching and scaling an influencer marketing campaign isn’t easy. However, if you do it the right way, it can help you build social proof, generate awareness, and create a community of buyers. Here are five essential things to remember when planning your influencer marketing strategy:

1. Start by defining strategic goals and channels

Not establishing your goals and channels for your influencer marketing strategy is like running blindfolded through a minefield. You’re setting yourself up for destruction. Without the right goals, your influencer marketing campaigns are a gamble wherein you might win or lose all your investments. Instead of leaving it all to chance, brainstorm with your team to identify what you want to achieve through a campaign and set benchmarks that indicate success.

Your influencer marketing goals can be:

• Winning new followers
• Getting more conversions
• Increasing brand awareness
• Improving audience engagement
• Building credibility and confidence
• Attracting a new segment of the audience

With goals in place, you can start to build your strategy. Look where your buyers hang out the most and study different channels to identify the ones that will help you hit your goals.

2. Create an ideal influencer persona

Once you’ve outlined your goals and channels, it’s time to visualize who you want to work with—the ideal influencers to fulfill these goals for your Shopify influencer marketing efforts.

This is tricky if you’re running a campaign for the first time since you might not have enough performance data yet to identify the key qualities of your ideal influencers. Regardless of whether you have this data or not, here are a few factors to consider when defining your brand-fit influencer persona:

Audience demographics

The success of your campaign ultimately boils down to the kind of audience you’re reaching. Prepare yourself to hit the jackpot with a list of the demographic characteristics of your target buyers, like age, gender, income, and more. Use this data as one of the criteria for filtering influencers.

Engagement rate

A large or small following isn’t a genuine indicator of an influencer’s potential. Sometimes a micro-influencer with 10,000 followers can bring you more clicks or sales than a mega-influencer with thousands of followers. Check their engagement rate to understand how well each influencer’s content resonates with their audience.

Content type

The content you want to promote depends on your choice of channels. If you focus on Facebook and Instagram, you likely need influencers to post short-form videos and stories more than feed posts. This is because short, snackable videos are easy to consume for your buyers, and short-form video is the top lead generation and engagement tactic today. Identify the top-performing content formats for your chosen channels and shortlist influencers accordingly.

Personality

A less objective factor to consider for your ideal influencer persona is their personality. This should closely align with your brand values to add a more authentic appeal to your campaign. For example, if you’re a millennial-friendly brand with an outspoken brand personality, work with millennial influencers known for their unabashed honesty.

Type

You need to know what type of influencers will best suit your campaign goals and fit within your budget. Here are the four main types of influencers and their rates:

• Mega-Influencers: These are stars with celebrity status and a massive following. They charge above $10,000 for a single post on Instagram.
• Macro-Influencers: These are influencers with a follower size between 500,000 and 1 million. They are more professional than micro-influencers but not as expensive as mega-influencers. Their charges are $5,000-$10,000 per post.
• Micro-Influencers: These influencers have just over 10,000 followers and work at a smaller scale. They can charge anywhere between $100 and $500 for a post.
• Nano-Influencers: These are the smallest scale influencers with low follower counts but high engagement rates. They charge $10-$100 per post.

With these considerations, you can profile your ideal influencers and move on to the next step of vetting and hiring from the talent pool.

3. Design a vetting, hiring, and onboarding workflow

The most important part of developing your influencer marketing strategy for Shopify is finding the right candidates. It’s not as simple as searching a few keywords on TikTok, finding decent candidates, and sending them a pitch. Doing this will, at best, get you some high-budget influencers on every competitor’s radar.

Instead, try multiple methods to build a solid list of potential candidates. Here are a few methods to try for expanding your influencer search:

Use an influencer database tool

Afluencer is the perfect place to start your search for brand-fit influencers. The tool gives you access to a massive influencer database of 16,000 influencers with powerful filters to source only the most relevant talent for your campaigns.

The best part? You can save your search setting to avoid the hassle of creating a new search every time you start shortlisting influencers. Once you’ve found the right candidates, chat with them immediately and take the conversation forward.

Perform hashtag research

You can manually look through the hundreds of influencers on different platforms by searching relevant hashtags. This method is time-consuming, but you can hit the jackpot by closely reviewing every influencer’s profile yourself.

Check your customer roster

There’s nothing better than turning your existing customers into advocates. Go through your list of followers to see if there are already creators with a network you can tap into. If not, see if any of your followers stand out regarding content creation. Since they already use your products and follow your brand, they’re more likely to accept your pitch.

Look at your competitors’ talent

A quick way of finding brand-fit influencers is by studying your competition and reaching out to the influencers they work with. This can work well if you want to work with nano-influencers and micro-influencers since they sometimes don’t have restrictive contracts. However, if you’re going to poach talent from a competitor, be sure the content they create for you is original and very different so it doesn’t seem copied. Also, check to see if the influencer has any standing non-compete agreements!

Browse through creator marketplaces

Creator marketplaces on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok will also give you a great group of candidates to pursue. These are designed to connect brands with creators and build mutually beneficial relationships for stakeholders.

Finding influencers can be challenging. However, once you’ve shortlisted your top candidates, go back to your ideal influencer persona to find the best-suited influencers from your shortlists. When you’re ready, it’s time to onboard them to your influencer marketing program. The onboarding process should give them clear guidelines on:

• Your brand vision
• Campaign goals
• Your expectations
• Their deliverables
• Timelines
• Payments

Remember to lay out your workflows and guidelines as part of the onboarding process, as this will minimize friction in their experience working with you and your team.

4. Decide how you want to collaborate with influencers

You can collaborate with influencers in many ways. But the trick is in choosing the right ways that suit your goals, budget, and target audience. Here are a few of the most common techniques Shopify brands use when it comes to influencer marketing:

Giveaways

Host a contest with the influencers to win more followers and get more traction on your page. Here’s a straightforward example of how this could work from Sunset Snuggles.

Collaborations

Song of Style’s social media Collabs with owner and influencer Aimee Song is the perfect example of an influencer-branded collection. By leveraging her audience and influence, these products get in front of an engaged audience.

Product seeding

Send your products as gifts that influencers can post on their profile. It’s not a paid partnership but focuses on word-of-mouth marketing instead.

Briogeo sent its hair mark to beauty influencer Mikayla Jane as a gift, and her post garnered close to 80,000 likes on Instagram. That’s the power of product seeding, where brands don’t pay influencers and only send a gift instead.

Account takeovers

Let influencers take over your social accounts and interact with your followers. They’ll also invite their audience to jump to your page to increase engagement.

This is an example of when Full Psycle invited Peach, a micro-influencer, to take over their Instagram account and go behind the scenes with her day.

Whitelisted content

Whitelist influencers’ content for your brand and run it as ads from your business account. Here’s an example by Factor Meals:

Affiliate partnerships

Share discounts or promo codes with influencers and encourage them to get sales through an affiliate partnership. Decide on a commission structure and pay for only what you earn.

As part of this, be sure to set up all the necessary workflows to offer them a seamless experience.

5. Create a system for tracking and attributing ROI

Your influencer marketing efforts are difficult to measure if you don’t measure the impact of your strategy and optimize it. To track performance, select high-level KPIs to assess your campaign’s results and decide on ways to review individual influencers’ contributions.

Track page views, likes, comments, unique visitors, and other such metrics to calculate the earned media value you’ve won. This will help you identify the monetary value of the reach you could buy through these influencers.

Here are a few tried-and-tested methods to track individual performance:

• Review post-performance through in-platform analytics.
• Create and track personalized promo codes‍ for every influencer.
• Use UTMs to track sessions and sales coming from every influencer.
• Create unique landing pages to measure the traffic generated by different candidates.

Attributing ROI to the right influencers is important to separate the best performers from the low performers. You can focus on retaining these candidates for long-term partnerships.

5 Examples of Influencer Marketing for Shopify

Now that you’re all set to design and execute a failproof influencer marketing strategy for your Shopify store, take a look at these five brands doing everything right to win with influencers:

100% Pure

100% Pure is an organic cosmetics brand with a sizable audience on social media.

Most influencer content showcases how to use different products, like this one in collaboration with Nikki Rodri. The beauty influencer uses various 100% Pure products to show her makeup routine and tells viewers how these products look on her face.

Other influencer collaborations also talk about the benefits of their products in different contexts, like self-care, routine skincare, and more.

Tula

Tula is a probiotic skincare brand competing in a saturated market. The brand places influencers at the core of its content strategy and proactively partners with them to create impactful content. They run product-focused campaigns, spotlighting only one product per campaign.

For example, the brand has been pushing its new launch, 24-7 Moisture Cream with the help of influencers. These influencers have complete creative freedom to promote Tula products in their own style, without making them look too artificial.

Vitruvi

Vitruvi produces diffusers and blends to make your space more fragrant. Since they’re a niche brand with a specific target audience, they collaborate with lifestyle influencers to spread the word about its products.

To buy a fragrance-related product without actually smelling it, buyers would definitely need a recommendation from a person they trust. This collaboration with a home decor blogger, Wendy proves just how it’s done.

Brands like Virtuvi can partner with influencers to create social proof and gain their prospects’ trust.

Vuori Clothing

Vuori, an athletic apparel brand, consistently features influencers on its social profiles. With over 500k followers on Instagram, the Shopify brand showcases customer photos paired with influencer content for maximum reach.

Here’s one such post by a fitness influencer, Paul Wright where he gives viewers a tour of the Vuori Clothing store in LA. It’s a complete look at the brand’s catalog along with Paul’s take on the products he likes.

WLO Wood

WLO Wood sells crates for pets and they collaborated with dog influencers to cater to their target audience. In fact, their entire Instagram profile features happy customers standing next to their crates—combining customer advocacy and influencer marketing.

Here’s a giveaway contest they hosted with Scout to get more people to know about the brand and maximize the festive shopping sprees.

Plan Your Shopify Influencer Marketing Campaigns Effortlessly

With that, you’re all set to experiment with influencer marketing and take your Shopify store to new heights. But remember: this guide is only the tip of the iceberg!

The next step is about making sense of all the moving parts—managing partnerships, processing payments, reviewing deliverables, and more. Create an airtight plan to figure out these details and learn as you go along. Start by searching for the right influencers on Afluencer—sign up today!

The post Influencer Marketing for Shopify: 5 Things You Need to Know appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/shopify-creator-economy/ Thu, 18 Aug 2022 09:36:30 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=19437 A YouTube creator dips a straw in milk, holds it in, then inserts the contraption into the middle of an Oreo cookie. The result? A milky countertop. It was a failure. The contraption was supposed to double the size of the cookie’s center cream. Yet the video “Trying Dumb Life Hacks” has over 30 million […]

The post Shopify & The Creator Economy: What You Need to Know appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> A YouTube creator dips a straw in milk, holds it in, then inserts the contraption into the middle of an Oreo cookie. The result? A milky countertop. It was a failure. The contraption was supposed to double the size of the cookie’s center cream. Yet the video “Trying Dumb Life Hacks” has over 30 million views on SSSniperWolf’s YouTube channel.

SSsniperWolf is one of many creators responsible for some $8 billion in sponsored product sales. How do “failures” like these lead to ecommerce success?

Welcome to the upside-down world of the creator economy.

Increasingly, this economy is where brands approach individuals, not the other way around. Want engagement with modern ecommerce shoppers? Then you may have to go through creators and influencers first.

This article will get more specific than the creator economy, however. There is a new trend emerging amongst digital creators: owning your own brand. This shift has the potential to change the landscape of this economy. More and more, creators are turning to Shopify as their medium of choice. Here’s why that will matter.

What is the creator economy?

The creator economy refers to the businesses built by influencers, community-builders, and content creators. If you’re in ecommerce and you have an Internet following, you’re a creator.

The creator economy usually refers to creators’ own communities and brands. But it also refers to the products they move on behalf of larger brands.

The term is older than its popularity suggests. According to The Atlantic, the creator economy was originally a YouTube invention. Back in 2011, people used it as an alternative to phrases like “YouTube star”. 

Since then, it’s become an estimated $100 billion industry. (For reference, the entire grocery industry in the U.S. is only about seven times that number).

Why “creator economy” over a phrase like “YouTube star”? A lot of people have earned a living on platforms like YouTube. Why not just call these people stars of their respective platforms?

Simple: creators are everywhere.

After all, the creator economy now hosts about 425,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Of the estimated 50 million creators worldwide, four million already do it full-time.

But there’s a reason YouTube star as a catch-all phrase is out of fashion. The creator economy has no central hub. Instead, it centers around a plethora of platforms

Creator economy platforms:

• YouTube: The video-hosting site is resident to billions of users. About one billion hours of videos play on YouTube every day. The sheer numbers make it ideal for creators of any type to find an audience, from home cooks with vegan risotto recipes to makeup tutorials.
• Patreon: Home to micro-influencers who build their own communities, Patreon lets mini-celebs exchange Patreon-exclusive content in exchange for subscription fees. Like most platforms, Patreon takes a bit of a cut. In exchange, it provides the digital infrastructure to make hosting a community easy.
• Twitch: This video-streaming-and-chatting platform is a favorite for everyone from gaming influencers to “just chatting” creators. Users can buy subscriptions to individual channels, trade “bits,” and more.
• Social media: You’ve heard of Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. They’re all favorite platforms among influencers and are increasingly shopper-friendly. Oftentimes, creators will use social media as a top-of-funnel strategy to bring in subscriptions to paid channels, like Patreon.
• Podcasts and blogging: The spoken and written word haven’t gone anywhere. Blogger influencers, for example, still earn a stellar following—even if the tradition of blogger-as-celebrity might seem outdated in the era of live streaming.

What is the Shopify creator economy?

Where is the room for Shopify in all this? Shopify fulfills a critical role that can make all the difference to creators: ownership.

How? Simple. With Shopify, you can sell your own products.

After all, creators have seen the campaign numbers. They know how many products they sell. That success naturally leads to another question: what if I sold those products instead?

Enter Shopify, an eCommerce-store-in-a-box. In short, it makes it easier for creators to start their own brands. This is good news for creators, who sometimes rely on brand deals to bring in cash. Yes, creators can make money from ad revenue or community subscriptions.

But check the stats, and you’ll see brands dominating the cash flow. There isn’t even a close second when it comes to where creators get their money.

The leap from “creator economy” to “Shopify creator economy” isn’t exactly a secret, either. Lots of celebrities are already using Shopify. LMFAO’s Party Rock Clothing, for example, or Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics.

But just like the creator economy itself, this platform isn’t limited to mega-influencers.

Take the example of Fragrance One. The story: brothers Jeremy and Kamil Blanc built a perfume review following on YouTube. Their reviews became so popular they eventually found themselves with millions of subscribers.

But rather than continue posting content on YouTube and accepting sponsored details with perfume brands, they had another idea. They’d sell their own perfume. It’s now an eight-figure fragrance company—and better yet, they don’t have to share the profits of their sales with anybody.

Building the Shopify creator economy

This isn’t to say that every creator has to follow the path of Fragrance One. Launching on YouTube, building an audience, and founding a brand? It’s easier said than done.

But the speed at which Fragrance One launched should make you pause. How is it possible?

The Shopify creator economy is how. Shopify’s ecommerce platform is more robust every year.

Just this year, for example, Shopify partnered with YouTube to introduce YouTube Shopping on Shopify. This integrates a Shopify store with YouTube in a few ways:

• Using YouTube Live to tag and pin products during a live stream. This also offers picture-in-picture playback, letting customers continue to watch the live stream while checking out. The entire buying process can go through without having to hit pause.
• On-demand videos: Shopify merchants and creators can create a curated product list and present them as a “shelf” during their videos.
• The “store tab” feature can add to the creator’s channel on YouTube to make it easy to browse through a selection of products on offer.

In essence, the platforms are blurring the lines between creators and sellers. For a creator’s audience, it’s never been more seamless to transition from viewer to buyer.

🢂 Learn How to Leverage Influencers in Your Live Shopping Efforts

Integrating Shopify with TikTok

Another example of this increased integration is what creators can do with TikTok and Shopify. Last year, Shopify became the first shopping platform to offer organic product discovery and shopping tabs to TikTok users.

TikTok tasked Shopify with building shopping tabs for TikTok. This put the shops next to essential tabs like TikTok’s “For You” feeds.

It’s also easier than ever to integrate shoppable buttons within TikTok posts, sending interested customers straight to a specific product on a Shopify store. And since that integration with Shopify already works, that means just-as-easy integrations with Instagram and Meta. All of this digital infrastructure adds up to one thing. For creators, it’s never been easier to become a seller.

Shopify creator economy trends to watch

It’s easier than ever for creators to own their own shops. By extension, it’s easier than ever for creators to own their own brands.

But what are creators doing within the Shopify creator economy to stand out, capture their customers, and build up their presence online?

Here are some of the most popular Shopify creator economy trends to watch:

The rise of micro-influencers

When Sperry was gearing up to launch a wet weather campaign—a seasonal offering—they didn’t look for a mega-influencer. Instead, they wanted something short-lived, yet high-engagement.

They turned to micro-influencers—and got themselves nominated for a Shorty Award in the process.

The target wasn’t too big. Sperry wasn’t looking to sell to every person on Earth who needs to buy wet-weather shoes. Instead, Sperry focused on “fashion-savvy female style enthusiasts.”

Yet even by limiting the time and demographics of its campaign, Sperry achieved success: 4.7 million impressions for the campaign and 66% more clickthroughs from Instagram.

Or take a recent micro-influencer success story, when Coca-Cola worked with 300 micro-influencers and achieved a campaign engagement rate of 7.5%.

Why focus on micro-influencers when mega-influencers have more reach? It’s certainly not that Coca-Cola didn’t have the budget to hire celebrities. They did, after all, opt for 300 micro-influencers instead.

What brands seek is that engagement rate. Generally speaking, the smaller the influencer’s audience, the more passionate they’re going to be about engaging:

Nano-influencers drive the most engagement, with the caveat that their audiences can be as little as a twentieth the size of a micro-influencer. But of those influencers with tens of thousands of followers, micro-influencers drive the highest engagement—1.7% in 2020.

Of those with larger audiences, only mega-influencers and celebrities came close.

And for brands like Sperry who wanted only a seasonal, limited, budget-friendly boost to the bottom line, mega-influencers were out of the question.

“With the rise of TikTok and authenticity being valued more than ever, the people who create a genuine connection with an engaged audience will come out on top,” said Julia Bobak, Content Creator at Home Grounds.

For brands with limited budgets, micro-influencers offer the best mix of budget-friendly with high engagement rates.

Ecommerce platforms investing in the creator economy

For ecommerce platforms like Shopify, you might figure that the best opportunity to grow is to engage big-time brands with huge audiences. More buyers, more growth, more revenue.

But that’s not exactly who they’re targeting.

Instead, Shopify is trying to reach both brands and creators. Consider Shopify’s recent acquisition of Dovetale. Dovetale is a platform to help brands engage with creators, potentially bringing both parties to Shopify.

(You’re reading this piece on Afluencer.com, a platform with 13,000+ opt-in micro-influencers and creators. Connect with them via the Afluencer App for Shopify.)

In short, Shopify is adding features that make it more creator-friendly. Take Linkpop, a shoppable Linktree alternative for creators who want to create a single link for their entire online presence.

Linkpop easily syncs with platforms like TikTok and Instagram to create shoppable links to a Shopify checkout page. Additionally, creators can sign up for the Shopify starter plan to make their Linkpop shoppable.

The impact of Generation Z

A big shift happened in 1996 and 1997—one you may not remember. It was when new babies stopped being millennials and started belonging to a new demographic: Generation Z.

The distinction may seem small at first. But if millennials were the first generation weaned on the web, Generation Z was the first to grow up with smartphones and social media.

That means a completely different way of looking at the world of ecommerce—which, to Gen Z, might as well be another word for “commerce.” Just under 30% of Gen Z kids grew up wanting to be YouTube stars rather than astronauts.

This is less of a trend than a series of trends. Here are a few of the Gen Z preferences that will likely shape the Shopify creator economy:

Gen Z Prefers Platforms

And, as Forbes notes, Gen Z has some very different ideas for running a business.

“The way Gen Z creators today are building these businesses is fundamentally different,” Jennifer Neundorfer, co-founder of January Ventures, told Forbes.

“These fundamental changes make much of the traditional small and medium-sized business (SMB) software solutions obsolete. In the year ahead, I believe we’ll see the rise of new tooling native to the Gen Z creators.”

Gen Z’s are more accustomed to platforms like Shopify, Etsy, or even Roblox—a game development engine—making it easier to build an online presence. In other words, Gen Z expects software solutions like those they can find in Shopify’s creator economy. They want more speed to market, and they want it now.

Gen Z Prefers Video

When Patreon ran a survey of its creators, what they found wasn’t surprising. Gen Z likes video, and that’s reflected in where creators are shifting their focus:

It’s not just the love of video that defines Gen Z’s new habits, either. Over half of Gen Z doesn’t watch any traditional ad-supported TV, for example. And as Patreon found, those creators who primarily publish videos said they found 50% of their audience from YouTube alone.

Some third-party apps on Shopify like Vimotia have already jumped on this trend, turning videos shoppable.

What does this mean for the Shopify creator economy? Especially given Gen Z’s love of single-platform solutions to complicated tech integrations?

More apps like VideoWise unite TikTok, Instagram, and Shopify into a single function.

More power to brands who want to bring creators back

If creators can own their own brands in the Shopify creator economy, it adds competition. The best creators are incentivized to build their own shops. That’s good news for everyone… except maybe the brands.

How can brands win back creators when creators are planting their flags on Shopify?

Like creators, brands can turn to platforms for help. For example, TikTok has made it possible for brands to use organic, “creator”-like content in their advertising campaigns.

Consider TikTok’s Spark Ads, which use native ads so brands can incorporate organic TikTok content from creators. Creators, in turn, have the power to authorize the use of their organic posts.

This gives creators a new way to monetize their organic content beyond making their posts shoppable or adding a link to Linkpop.

In some cases, Spark Ads can work directly with creators on limited, one-time campaigns that benefit both brands and creators.

One digital bank did exactly that with creator @TashInvests—TashInvests supplied the content, the digital bank supplied the funding, and the native ad saw 1.5 million impressions on TikTok.

@tashinvests

Is this the best Australian bank?! #greenscreensticker @upbanking #upyear2020 #ausfinance #upbank #ad

♬ Hello – OMFG

While Spark Ads is ostensibly a tool for brands, it works for both brands and creators, elevating the visibility of each.

Creators boost their profiles thanks to the massive impressions possible through these campaigns. Brands get the engagement of working with a creator with an established audience.

In short…

Platforms like Shopify (through its purchase of Dovetale) and TikTok (through its Spark Ads) bring creators and brands even closer.

But some of the best matches come through platforms like Afluencer. On Afluencer, creators build profiles and brands seek out the best matches on creator voice and social media following.

And recent additions like the Shopify subscriptions and features help ensure that this arrangement works smoothly in the Shopify creator economy.

“It’s a really great app”, said Courtney Williamson of Abilife. “There are so many apps and agencies out there that are total rip-offs ($24,000 a month…no way!) But this app brings high-quality influencers who are friendly, professional, and care deeply about their work and image. I would highly recommend this app”.

Navigating the Shopify creator economy

Power is shifting to creators. But it doesn’t have to mean brands get left out in the lurch.

Given the shifting demographics of Generation Z entering the fold and the rising power of influencer marketing, more and more online shopping will come not through traditional mass media advertising, but through the recommendations of creators people trust.

Brands will need to watch the trends—like the emerging Shopify creator economy—to ensure that they can find influencers who are happy to engage their following. Doing so will require making full use of the available platforms.

For creators, these platforms can mean more control, more ownership, and the ability to be pickier when choosing which brands to work with.

To get started, install the Afluencer app for Shopify here—and find the platform where more and more creators and brands are meeting.

The post Shopify & The Creator Economy: What You Need to Know appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/ultimate-guide-shopify-influencer-apps/ Sun, 07 Aug 2022 05:54:06 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=19311 After spending thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads for your Shopify store, if you’re still not getting meaningful results, the reality is that your strategy needs to change. Enter influencer marketing. Last year, spending on influencer marketing was over $3 billion, a 33.6% rise from 2020. The total spending on influencer marketing is […]

The post The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Apps for Your Shopify Store appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> After spending thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads for your Shopify store, if you’re still not getting meaningful results, the reality is that your strategy needs to change.

Enter influencer marketing.

Last year, spending on influencer marketing was over $3 billion, a 33.6% rise from 2020. The total spending on influencer marketing is projected to reach over $4.6 billion in 2023 in the US alone. This spending continues to rise, showing rising confidence in influencer marketing.

Beyond the proven ROI of influencer marketing, it also often offers higher engagement rates, warmer leads, and improved brand loyalty.

The question is: How do you get started with it? And how do you do it at scale?

Over 60% of Instagram accounts have more than 10,000 followers. If you’re thinking of sorting through the sea of influencers out there, it can take up a lot of your time. Reaching out to them, getting them on board, and planning the campaigns will also take time.

Instead of manually building an influencer marketing campaign from scratch, it makes sense to leverage Shopify influencer apps. These are designed to help you find influencers and create a campaign, so you can focus on the creative and the business side of things instead of spending hours on a spreadsheet.

What are Shopify influencer marketing apps?

Influencer marketing apps for Shopify stores are software that helps build influencer marketing campaigns from scratch by streamlining your workflow. This includes tools that help simplify communication with influencers, find potential influencers, and track campaigns, as well.

Some influencer marketing apps work by matching you with the best-fit influencers and helping you kickstart conversations. For example, these tools can have multiple filters (such as demographics, follower count, and industry) to help you find ideal influencer partners quickly.

Other influencer marketing apps help you turn your existing customers into influencers with the power of affiliate marketing, referral marketing, and more.

The difference between influencer marketing agencies and influencer marketing apps

Influencer marketing apps are entirely different from influencer marketing agencies. Influencer marketing agencies have creatives working behind the scenes to find suitable influencers for you to design campaigns and track sales—based on their deliverables.

With influencer marketing apps, you can choose the influencers you want to work with, create campaigns and brainstorm content ideas (like for the holidays or Valentine’s Day), track ROI, and more.

So why should you choose an influencer marketing app over an agency?

While it completely depends on your bandwidth and budget, remember that more than 68% of influencers prefer to work directly with brands instead of agencies. Some agencies take a cut from influencers, delay the payments of influencers, and can also delay the project.

For your brand, it can be cheaper to work with influencers directly via an influencer marketing app, as the agency will likely charge a hefty fee or take a percentage of your sales. With influencer marketing apps, you also have more creative control and can form stronger relationships with influencers (which matters in the long run).

Benefits of Shopify influencer marketing apps

If you’re still on the fence about using influencer marketing apps for your Shopify brand, here are four benefits that make them a no-brainer to use.

1. Using data to identify ideal partners

Think of your influencers as your brand representatives. The audience will associate your brand with the influencers you choose to onboard. This is why the most challenging part of influencer marketing is finding the right influencers: someone with the target audience you’re after, that’s aligned with your brand values, and who can represent your brand properly.

While the right influencer can increase brand loyalty, engagement, and revenue, the wrong one can confuse your audience and damage your brand image.

To find the right influencer, you need to check the posts they’ve been sharing, their past sponsorships, how they talk with their audience, and so much more. If you’re doing this at scale, it can take a lot of your time to review the profiles of hundreds of influencers.

With influencer marketing apps, you get matched with the right influencers almost instantly. From there, you can filter through interests, followers, and more. With an influencer marketing app like Afluencer, you’ll get to cherry-pick the perfect person for your campaigns.

INSIGHTFUL READ: Content Creator vs Influencer: How to Pick the Right One

2. Communicate directly

When building an influencer marketing campaign manually, you’ll have to reach out to influencers (after shortlisting them) individually. Even if it’s a template message, keeping track of ongoing communications in your inbox can be a pain.

However, most influencer marketing apps let you communicate through their platform, which makes keeping records much easier. You’ll save time and get definitive data on your outreach efforts without ever losing track of a conversation.

3. Let influencers approach you

Some influencer marketing platforms feature brands so influencers and creators can approach them directly if they align with their values.

For example, Afluencer features brands in its newsletter that goes out to thousands of influencers. Not only that, but brands can also showcase their needs to a growing influencer pool of more than 13,000 active influencers.

This works because influencers, like your brand, are on the lookout for a good brand to partner with. As much as you need influencers who align with your brand image, influencers and content creators want to associate with brands that represent their values, too. Influencers have spent years building and nurturing their audience, and therefore most influencers don’t want to sabotage their image with the wrong partnership.

4. Protect your brand from fake followings

With the ease of buying followers in today’s world, you can never be sure who real influencers are based on their number of followers.

Influencer marketing apps like Afluencer help you find influencers not only based on their number of followers, but also on how their past sponsorships have performed, engagement rates, and more. This helps ensure you don’t waste your money on influencers with large followings that turn out to be fake.

READ MORE: How to Recognize Fake Instagram Accounts

Top 6 Shopify influencer apps

Here are six influencer apps for your Shopify store with different features.

1. Afluencer

Whether your store has pet products or lifestyle items, you can place your Shopify brand in front of more than 13,000 influencers. With Afluencer, you’re guaranteed to find ideal influencers and creators with the same target audience as yours.

To make your search even more specific, you can place demographic filters to find the perfect influencer for your brand. For example, suppose you want to create awareness for an upcoming fashion event you’re organizing in Washington. You can set Washington as the location filter and find influencers in that area that can bring more people to your event. This becomes handier if your store currently serves a specific region as you can target local customers.

Plus, you can find influencers for your campaigns on all the social platforms—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This ensures you don’t have to switch marketing platforms if you’re running campaigns on multiple social media platforms.

The next step in the process of influencer marketing—contacting the influencers—doesn’t need you to log in to your social media accounts either. You can quickly exchange messages with them in the chatroom of Afluencer and strike deals easily.

If, on the other hand, you want influencers to reach out to you directly, all you need to do is post your project requirements in a collab showcasing your interests, channels, products, and values. You’ll be able to get a feature in the exclusive newsletter, putting you in front of thousands of influencers. This saves time for you in the long run as you don’t need to be on the lookout for the best-fit influencers—those who align with your values and products will reach out to you independently.

Afluencer is your all-in-one influencer tool that can not only find the right influencers for your Shopify brand and facilitate conversations but also get your brand noticed.

The best part? You get these features at only $49/month with a 30-day free trial.

2. UpPromote

Existing customers can be the best brand advocates if they like your product or service. UpPromote helps you turn your customers into influencers for your brand with the help of affiliate marketing. You can not only reach a wider audience through these affiliates, but you can also drive repeat sales to your Shopify store with referral rewards.

With this tool, you can easily create affiliate links, customize campaigns, and communicate with affiliates through email or chat. If you’re worried about generating coupon codes and offers manually, the tool does that too. The tool has several automatic functions you can enable like auto-tier commission, auto-discount, and auto-generate coupon.

The tool also takes care of the analytics and reporting part for you. Whether you want to check which customers have brought in the most referrals or the most popular products that were being referred in the last marketing campaign, you can know it all.

While this tool takes care of everything from start to finish when turning customers into brand advocates, it is not a full-fledged influencer tool that will help you find the top influencers in your niche.

3. ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy, as the name suggests, is yet another tool that helps you grow your Shopify store sales by turning customers into brand advocates.

Every time a customer purchases something, you can send automated invites asking them to join your referral program. Once they join your program and make successful referrals, you can send multiple reward options in the form of store discounts, cash rewards, and custom gifts.

It does not stop here. You even get access to insights and key metrics such as referred traffic to your website, revenue from referrals, number of customers who joined your referral program so that you can gauge the success of your referral program.

One unique aspect of this tool is that you can even identify and ban suspicious transactions — such as referral codes that are leaked on coupon sites, a high volume of referrals in a short period, and so on.

4. Linkr

Linkr helps you reach out to influencers and creators in your niche. While they don’t have a large pool of influencers you can choose from, they provide you with filters and key metrics to narrow down the pool of influencers.

You can then reach out to these influencers through their chat system and discuss the details of your campaign. This makes sure you don’t have to go through the back-and-forth email communication that takes days on end.

Other than that, you can choose from various compensation options such as sales commission, barter deals, bidding, or performance-based rewards.

All in all, Linkr is a great tool, albeit with a lesser pool of influencers to pick from.

5. Refersion

Refersion helps you create influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish. You can plan an entire campaign with a series of posts and see which ones are bringing the most conversions. You can even test different ideas and post formats with Refersion.

For example, you can create a series of reels, posts, and stories with a beauty influencer on the subject of “How to choose the best skin products according to your skin?”

You can even track these campaigns with Refersion. If you’re collaborating with 50 or 100 influencers at a time, the tool’s tracking and reporting features come in handy. Based on these analytics, you can pinpoint campaigns you need to expand and those you should cut back on.

Along with these features, the tool makes it easy to approve conversions and pay your influencers.

6. Gatsby

Gatsby helps you turn your community into ambassadors for your Shopify brand. They have unique features such as each time a customer with more than 1,000 followers publishes UGC, the customers are given a discount code.

This not only turns your community into loyal fans but also encourages repeat purchases.

You can even automate certain processes of influencer marketing by making use of automation features in Klaviyo. Other than that, they also have integrations with LoyaltyLion, Attentive, Stamped, and more.

For your affiliate marketing campaigns, you can collect Instagram and TikTok handles from these ambassadors and you have in-store various social insights on your target audience.

Gatsby is thus the perfect platform for your brand if you’re looking to run a referral marketing campaign.

How to select the best Shopify influencer marketing app for your brand

We have listed the best influencer marketing apps for your Shopify store above. But how do you select the right one for your brand?

The priority can always be budget if you’re on a strict marketing budget. But most of the listed platforms will fall within your budget with the pricing being less than $100 per month. Once you have the budget out of the way, ask yourself the following questions to find the best platform for your brand specifically:

1. Define your goals with influencer marketing

Different influencer platforms are available for different needs. Before you start your search for the platform, make sure you have your marketing needs laid out:

• The platforms you’ll be targeting
• Expected KPIs
• Measurement of ROI
• Type of influencers needed

If your target goal is to increase sales for a newly launched product, an app with a built-in link tracker might be suitable. If your goal is to form long-lasting relationships with influencers who align with you, an app with a wide range of influencers and creators can be the right fit.

2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Lay down the resources you already have, the team members you have, and what their responsibilities are. Based on what you’re missing, the choice can be easier.

Once you have identified what you need and don’t you’ll be able to understand the features better.

3. Vet the platform based on your target influencer type

Some influencer marketing platforms might cater to a particular platform or a niche type. If you’re a wellness brand, you don’t want to subscribe to a platform specializing in the beverages niche. Or if you want to target YouTube creators, you want to check if the platform hosts such creators.

Next, check the quality of influencers the platform hosts and the relationship between the platform and the influencers. You need to associate with real influencers with a proven track record of sponsorships, and if you have a pool of unverified influencers, you risk ending up with a failed campaign.

4. Check the relationship management tools

While the quality of influencers on the platform matters a lot, you also need to check the quality of the platform itself. Does it provide the features you need?

As the listed platforms above show, every platform is different with its unique set of features. Here are some features you can check:

• Communication tools: A huge part of influencer marketing is communication with influencers. A platform with in-app communication features will keep your communication records in one place and be easy to fetch.
• Back-end tools: Some platforms help you create contracts, pay the influencers, and track the results. This can be helpful if you want to automate the entire process. Else, you can manage these aspects with your finance team, if you have one.

5. Ease of use

The influencer marketing platform will add to your existing tech stack that you use frequently. From finding influencers to designing campaigns and tracking results, the platform will be your go-to.

For this reason, you need to ensure that the platform is fairly easy to use by all your team members and doesn’t take hours to learn. Otherwise, you might end up spending a lot of your (and your team’s time) on getting used to the platform.

Make sure it’s intuitive and doesn’t need a lot of technical understanding to use. If you have any questions, take a demo or the free trial before investing.

Increase your ROI with Shopify influencer marketing apps

The ROI of social media and Google ads continues to fall. On the other hand, the investment in influencer marketing and the returns generated by them is still on the rise.

If you’re worried about the time commitment, with influencer marketing apps like Afluencer, one of the biggest hurdles of finding and contacting influencers is also taken care of. It’s high time to reach a wider audience, increase your brand awareness, and boost revenue with influencer marketing.

Install the Afluencer app for Shopify here and avail a free 30-day trial to get started.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Apps for Your Shopify Store appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/what-why-how-influencer-marketing-shopify-stores/ Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:29:27 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=14265 Influencer marketing is one of the most receptive forms of digital advertising. Why? Because it’s not intrusive. Businesses have finally realized what Tom Fishburne, the founder of Marketoonist, said years ago: “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” As a result, influencer marketing is now a part of most marketing budgets. However, finding the right […]

The post The What, Why, and How of Influencer Marketing for Shopify Stores appeared first on AFLUENCER.

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Influencer marketing is one of the most receptive forms of digital advertising. Why? Because it’s not intrusive.

Businesses have finally realized what Tom Fishburne, the founder of Marketoonist, said years ago:

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”

As a result, influencer marketing is now a part of most marketing budgets.

However, finding the right influencer partner can feel intimidating. Should you aim for big names with blue checkmarks or focus on micro-influencers? Should you pay, send a free product, or both?

If you’re not sure how to start with influencer marketing, here’s everything you need to know to discover the best creators for your Shopify store.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a collaboration with influencers (also known as creators) to leverage their credibility and audiences to promote a brand’s products and services. It’s a form of social media marketing that relies on endorsements and recommendations from influencers and content creators to reach the target audience.

What started as a tool for raising brand awareness has evolved into a well-oiled revenue machine. According to The Drum, the influencer marketing business was worth $9.7 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $22.2 billion by 2025. We’re in the midst of an influencer marketing boom, and the numbers are mind-blowing. Data from Influencer Marketing Hub shows that the number of marketers who dedicated a budget for influencer marketing grew from 37% in 2017 to 75% in 2021.

The reason? It works. Ninety percent of marketers believe influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing, and customers back this up. As reported by Salesforce, Gen Z shoppers prefer marketing that shows real, diverse customers that are not overly polished.

Enter influencers and creators.

Why do you need influencers?

Wondering why all the buzz regarding influencer marketing for Shopify stores? Let’s look at the five key benefits that working with influencers can bring to your brand.

1. Increase brand awareness

Standing out in a crowded retail landscape can be challenging, but marketers have found a tried and true formula for success with influencer marketing. As reported by Influencer Marketing Hub, raising awareness is the main objective for running an influencer campaign for one-third of marketers. The two other reasons (with an almost equal split of respondents) are: increasing sales and building a library of user-generated content (UGC).

By working with influencers and creators, brands are able to reach new, relevant audiences at scale.

2. Reach your target audience

Marketing is all about delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. But that’s easier said than done. The good news: Influencers offer a rare chance to reach a highly niche audience, and according to 72% of marketers, influencer marketing campaigns yield better quality customers than other types of marketing.

Micro-influencers often have smaller but more niche audiences. So in most cases, they are perceived as subject matter experts. This is why it’s no surprise that brands partner with micro-influencers 10x more than mega-influencers. (See also: it’s more affordable)

The chance to collaborate with a creator that has a specific set of interests (similar to that of your target persona’s) is a way to laser focus on your ideal customers. What’s more: Data from the Digital Marketing Institute shows that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations. So instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, you can focus your efforts and maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

3. Build trust

Back in the day, customers knew only what brands told them. Today, the customers are the ones in charge. Today, endless access to information gives customers the power to select a brand based on everything from price to ship times to their values and beliefs.

Earning the trust of your customers is a prerequisite for business growth. As stated in the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, 61% of respondents are prepared to advocate if they fully trust a brand, 57% are ready to purchase a new product or service, and 31% are willing to share personal data or participate in activities sponsored by the brand.

Unlike other forms of Shopify advertising, influencer marketing is built on the trust customers have in the creators they follow on social media. Google found that 4 in 10 Millennials say their favorite influencer understands them better than their friends.

4. Boost engagement

One of the most obvious benefits of working with influencers is more engagement. Likes, comments, mentions, new followers, impressions — influencer marketing can bring you closer to your target audience.

Impressive engagement happens with influencers because their followers feel more comfortable chatting, asking questions, and commenting on their posts because the relationship feels close and intimate. This is especially true for creators with a smaller audience. Micro-influencers have 22.2 times more conversations weekly about recommendations on what to buy when compared to an average consumer.

It works, too: For every dollar spent on influencer marketing, brands generate over five times as many impressions and engagements as paid advertising. To top it off, posts that get traction are even more favored by social media algorithms, ultimately increasing the reach and spreading your brand’s message.

5. Get more sales

According to Statista, 54% of Gen Z shoppers and 58% of Millenials think social platforms are a better place to find out about new products than online searches, while a Yotpo study found 89% of respondents said they bought something they first discovered on Instagram. 56% said seeing Instagram photos of a product increases their chances of buying it.

The rise of social commerce and features such as Facebook Shops, Instagram Checkout, and the Pinterest Shop tab has changed the way people shop online. Recently, Shopify even partnered with TikTok to bring organic product discovery and shopping tabs to the social network. Helping creators and merchants deepen their relationships with consumers.

As a result, influencer marketing is even more popular, creating a seamless journey for Shopify customers interested in purchasing. The ability to buy a product without leaving the social media app paves the way to the “add to cart” button.

How to find influencers for your Shopify store

Finding the right influencers can be challenging. But don’t worry — here’s a step-by-step guide for finding the creators who will meet your business needs.

1. Set goals

The only way to reach your destination is to know where you want to go. Before launching a campaign or investing in any influencer marketing efforts, make sure to have a clear, documented projection of the results you want to achieve.

One of the main reasons you need goals before launching a campaign or implementing an initiative is to have benchmarks to measure against. Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success. Setting up a circular process flow means you always come back to the goals. Which then allows you to optimize for better results and take a data-driven approach.

As stated in Advertiser Perceptions’ Branded Content and Influencer Marketing Report, 41% of respondents think influencer marketing will be more important for achieving marketing goals compared to the past.

2. Study your target audience

In a recent Ipsos study, 47% of U.S. consumers ages 18 to 24 said they feel a personal connection to a brand when it’s used by a creator they like.

The question is: how to find influencers that align with your target audience?

The short answer: get to know your audience.

You can’t convey the right message or choose influencers if you don’t understand your target audience. Is your target persona a male or a female? What are their interests, hobbies, and consumption habits? What influencers do they look to for recommendations?

Creating a behavior pattern with information about loyalty, engagement, usage, and social media interactions gives you a deeper dive into customers’ purchasing habits. You can gather this information through customer surveys.

Another great way to understand what resonates with your target audience is to analyze competitors’ approaches to influencer marketing. And to then see what seems to be resonating within their approach.

3. Do your research

You defined your goals, you have the ideal customer profile — Now what? Here comes the tricky part: doing the research and building a shortlist of viable partners.

Almost every research starts with Google. But in this case, the number of search results you will get can be overwhelming. That’s why a good rule of thumb is to see who is already talking about your brand. Go to your social media accounts and check the mentions and tags.

“To find your first influencers, look at who’s organically sharing/talking about your product.” — Nik Sharma, CEO of Sharma Brands

It works, too: The personalized map prints and gifts business Grafomap managed to make $1.5M in revenue largely via influencer marketing.

How? They focused on building an Instagram audience, and whenever they noticed a relevant account, they would follow it. Next, they would follow similar accounts based on Instagram suggestions. This way, they were able to curate a list of highly relevant influencers that they could reach out to.

Over the years, they managed to build relationships with dozens of influencers and grow both our revenue and social media following. Founder Rihards Piks is now building new businesses, and he’s using the same tactic.

4. Start outreach to your ideal partners

Once you’re ready to start doing outreach to influencers for your Shopify store, you’ll need to have an influencer marketing budget and a basic proposal that serves as guidelines and a scope of work for these efforts.

Keep in mind that over time, as you increase your influencer marketing budget, you’ll need a more streamlined process for this work.

That’s where influencer marketing platforms come in handy. Using these go-to directories, you can find influencers, see the number of followers they have, examine their engagement rates, study the number of likes they receive on average, and so much more.

Using Afluencer, it’s easier than ever to go through influencer profiles, compare engagement rates against the average, and see a snippet of the performance of their latest posts (including likes, comments, saved posts, impressions, and engagement information).

As you scale your business, the manual process of engaging with influencers can become daunting. Luckily, now you can define criteria based on interests, followers, and channels, and get personalized suggestions for influencers that best fit your needs.

Advanced influencer marketing platforms let you post collaboration with defined criteria and get applications from creators that want to work with you.

Brands on Afluencer

The clean skincare and makeup brand Berla Beauty leverages Afluencer for influencer marketing to reach its target customers. On the platform, influencers can check the brand’s profile to find more information, see a product feed, and find a direct link to the Berla Beauty Shopify store.

Berla Beauty also posts collaborations on the platform, where influencers can see the criteria/perks and apply if they’re interested. Using influencer marketing platforms like Afluencer, Shopify brands can define criteria such as location, interests, channels, minimum followers, age group, and gender. This way, brands can promote their program as a pay-per-post opportunity, an affiliate program, or a combination of the two.

Recently, Berla Beauty posted a collaboration looking for ambassadors who are into skincare and beauty. In the collaboration details, they explained what is expected from influencers, what type of content they are looking for, and what the benefits are for influencers.

The collaboration gives creators the freedom for the creative part but they expect a plug to follow them on Instagram, a mention or link to drive website traffic, and to use the hashtag #berlabeautyme.

5. Test, measure, repeat

Influencer marketing should be results-driven. Always remember to measure results. Compare with the goals you had in the first place. Then test and optimize again for the best possible results.

You might be surprised, but one-third of marketers don’t measure the ROI of influencer marketing. For those who measure success, the conversion rate is the most favorable measure — 38.5% of marketers believe that an influencer marketing campaign should be measured by the conversion/sales it drives.

While measuring the ROI can be challenging using tracking links, coupon codes, and affiliate programs can help you get quantitative data.

You should also monitor engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and saved posts. As well as website traffic, as they provide valuable insight into your campaign’s reach.

If you decide to use an influencer marketing platform, access to performance data should be one of your top priorities.

“The real secret sauce is finding a partner (tool or agency) that has data and information for how successful historical partnerships have been”. — David Hoos, B2B Performance Marketing Manager at The Outloud Group

According to eMarketer, measurement is the number one challenge with influencer marketing. To overcome this issue, Shopify merchants should focus on partnering with a data-driven solution that will deliver performance reports. The bottom line is that if you want influencer marketing to become a credible channel within your Shopify marketing mix, then you have to measure results and ROI.

How Vela recruited more than 100 fitness influencers in just a few months

After developing and producing high-quality fitness resistance bands, Vela founder Raphael Velazquez was looking for a way to help spread the word. As a result, the fitness accessories brand Vela was on the lookout for fitness influencers to promote its products.

Using Afluencer, Vela was able to find more than 100 fitness influencers in just a few months. The access to influencers made it easy to accept potential collaborations and build partnerships.

“Afluencer has helped with attracting influencers from many walks of life. It’s been a great way to bridge the gap and connect people to the brand and product.” — Raphael Velazquez, CEO of VELA fitness accessories

Afluencer helped Vela build the influencer team and generate revenue from this marketing channel.

What’s next?

There you have it — everything you need to know to find the ideal creators for your Shopify store’s influencer marketing campaign. And guess what? We’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to influencer marketing. In 2024, US brands are expected to invest in over $7 billion in influencer marketing.

Ready to jump on the bandwagon? Now you can unlock the power of influencers without the heavy lifting. Get the Afluencer app for Shopify.

The post The What, Why, and How of Influencer Marketing for Shopify Stores appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/get-started-influencer-marketing-for-shopify-merchants/ Wed, 13 Jan 2021 22:46:24 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=10275 You made it. Like other tactical Shopify merchants, you’re about to unlock doors of opportunity for the growth of your business through influencer marketing. Bubbling content creators.  Lively audiences.  And a pretty nifty way to get hearts, eyeballs, and add-to-carts to your Shopify store. If there’s an auspicious new-age sales and marketing strategy for your […]

The post GET STARTED: Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> You made it.

Like other tactical Shopify merchants, you’re about to unlock doors of opportunity for the growth of your business through influencer marketing.

Bubbling content creators.  Lively audiences.  And a pretty nifty way to get hearts, eyeballs, and add-to-carts to your Shopify store.

If there’s an auspicious new-age sales and marketing strategy for your store, it’s through collaborating with influencers.

So lean in and let’s walk through what influencer marketing means for your Shopify business and how you can get started with influencers today.

Welcome to the influencer universe!

What Influencer Marketing Means For Your Shopify Business

Eagerly checking out all the cool buttons in the dashboard of your new ride—let’s give all the cool influencer marketing features a spin.

Social Proof is King of Sales

Sitting on the throne of online sales is the superpower of social proof.

Just to show you its power, all it took was a casual two-word tweet by Elon Musk that confused investors and sent the wrong stock up by 438%.

Studies show:

• 75% of consumers rely on social media to guide their purchasing decisions.
• 90% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family.
• 84% of consumers will take a purchasing action following the opinion of others.

Customers are influenced by others.

But why is social proof so powerful?  And why do your conversions depend on it?

Because an empty restaurant doesn’t sell.

It all comes down to trust, credibility, and confidence as well as perceived self-identity associated with the brand or product.

So what is social proof?

Positive comments, reviews, endorsements, and recommendations.

Social proof shows that people are having good experiences with your store.  And prospective customers will, therefore, have confidence in making a purchase.

People attract more people.

Whereas, the lack of social proof will only create hesitations.

Influencer marketing, folks, will turn on your social proof and get your audience ripe and ready to “add to cart” with ease.

Hack Your FB Advertising Strategy

The thing that keeps you up late at night.

And makes your bank balance hyperventilate.

It also comes with those overwhelming adsets that make you question your life decisions.

Facebook Ads will either stress you or stress you—unless you have a generous marketing budget and a whole lot of patience.

In the paid ad space, the customer acquisition cost is relatively high.  Never mind the $13-$14 CPM and the average cost per click as high as $3.77.  Oh and let’s not forget that your Facebook pixel still needs “more data” to get cranked up.

Gulping for air between each pay-per-click is stressful.

So if you can hack your advertising strategy with influencer marketing, then why not?

Right, roll up your sleeves for this one.

Influencer marketing can be very cost effective, compared to paid ads—especially when you consider all the various methods of rewarding influencers which can be as low as $10 per post.

And if you’d like to stretch your dollar even further, you could offer influencers commission on sales plus free products.

(We’ll cover all the details of rewarding influencers later in this post.)

In the hands of an influencer with the right following, your Shopify store could make encouraging initial tractions that won’t cost you too much and you won’t have to depend on expensive Facebook ads to hopefully reach your audiences.

And here’s where the hack is.

Work with influencers to drive initial traffic to your website and then have your Facebook retargeting campaigns running—which, as you may know, are so much cheaper.

This approach will cut costs in your advertising strategy and may get sales rolling in sooner.

Whip-Smart Store Pre-Launch

Overnight, your store is up and running.

And your customers?  Followers?

Crickets.

That’s always the challenge with new stores.  Having zero trace of your existence besides your domain name is a recipe for a souffle of consumer doubts (remember social proof?).

When your Instagram account has a glorious number of zero followers, who do you call?  You call an influencer to bail you out.

Because it helps to have some kind of a following before you launch your store out into the world.

An easy way to achieve this is to run a pre-launch giveaway or contest powered by influencers that will drive new followers to your social media accounts as criteria for entry.

This sweet influencer marketing tactic will get your social media up from the dust in no time.

And when you do launch your Shopify store, you won’t look like a fly-by-night operation—phew!

Cheap & Cheerful Product Content

Influencer marketing is the most creative way to outsource product content.

And the best part?  It’s simple and inexpensive.

No need to brainstorm with creative agencies or hire fancy photographers and videographers to build an outstanding gallery of media when influencers can do the job for you.

Send influencers samples of your products and a clever collaboration will get you hooked up with a beautiful catalog of multiple content formats such as:

• Product Images – fill your social media and your product pages with awesome influencer snaps of your products.
• Blog Product Reviews – good PR through blog reviews is a bonus for your store’s credibility.  How about throwing in an “as featured in” highlight on your product pages for those vital trust indicators?
• Video Product Tutorials – when product help and inspiration are needed, an influencer video product tutorial will come to the rescue.  Again, drop videos on your product page and watch your conversions fly.

And depending on the experience level and skill of the influencer, your “cheap and cheerful” content can actually be pretty professional and of high quality.

Influencer-driven product content is the spice needed to spruce up your store and your social media—and really set you apart from other ordinary Shopify businesses that don’t step up their marketing content.

Trails of Traffic

Think of influencers as base stations that are spread across various locations—out there giving their network connectivity to your Shopify store.

Driving multiple channels of traffic and eyeballs to your website.

That Instagram story, Facebook post, TikTok skit, YouTube video, blog post, and even that podcast all become valuable trails of traffic that linger on the internet.

How exactly does this benefit your Shopify store?

• More traffic means more sales.  As you know, it’s a numbers game.  Therefore, the more people you can get to your store, the more you’ll convert to customers.
• Inbound traffic boosts your SEO.  When you have valuable sources linking to your Shopify store, Google begins to prioritize your ranking as it recognizes that you are recommended by other relevant sites in your niche.  So getting those quality reviews up on influencer blogs is a clever way to add some SEO points to your website to get you ranking for organic search terms.
• Rich traffic sources provide valuable data points.  The more diverse traffic you have coming in, the more data points you have access to in order to inform audience behavior as well as identify potential opportunities to expand further.  It’s a test-and-learn game.  So the more you have access to tests, the more you’ll learn.

As you can see, influencer marketing provides an extensive source of traffic options that your typical Facebook ads wouldn’t be able to cover.

Stay On Top of The Algorithm

Based on Instagram’s latest algorithm update, posts are no longer displayed in chronological order.

Instead, content is displayed to users based on top-performing posts, and accounts they’re active with, as well as the user’s interest.

This means that post engagement and follower loyalty are deal breakers when it comes to getting a piece of real estate on a social media feed.

Folks, this is what influencers do best.

So let’s turn to the pros.

Instead of burning your ad budget or breaking your back in an attempt to drive visibility on your own, get an influencer to hook you up with a coverage that will get your store seen.

How to Get Started with Influencers

Now that you know what this influencer marketing machine can do for your Shopify store, let’s gear you up.

How to Find Influencers

You could be tempted to begin your influencer search manually on social media platforms, but it won’t be before long till you realize what a tedious exercise it is.

Finding influencers based on location, content interests, follower numbers, engagement rates, and follower demographics is a rigorous process.

So save yourself the trouble, and say hello Afluencer, phew!

All you need to do is input your criteria and search through the database of influencers that match your brand.

And the best part is that you can view the social media insights of influencer profiles.  Follower numbers, engagement rate, media count, audience locations, and more.

This feature really cuts your work for you and makes the influencer selection process effortless.

Create a Hot Collaboration Offer

The goal here is to attract the right influencers and get them interested and excited to collaborate with your Shopify store.

When you sign up on Afluencer as a brand, you’ll be able to create a brand profile and post a collab.

What to include in your collab offer:

1. Provide information about your store and the kind of products you sell.  This should be appealing to influencers and it should inspire them to promote your brand to their followers.
2. Set influencer criteria.  Decide what requirements to set in order to match up with the right influencers.  Influencer interests, follower numbers, location, social media platforms, etc.  You want to set your criteria just right to filter out non-matches but keep them open enough for your best fits.
3. Describe your ideal influencer.  Besides setting the influencer criteria, prospective influencers should be able to identify themselves as a fit for your brand through a short description of “who we’re looking for”.
4. Highlight details of what you expect your influencers to do.  To set expectations from the start but also determine the viability, you need to briefly describe what you expect your influencer to create.  For example, if you require video stories uploaded onto Instagram, that may not be suitable for non-video creators.  Or if you require a blog review written, that automatically filters out non-bloggers.

And then, of course, your collab offer wouldn’t be complete without influencer rewards—which brings us to our next point.

How to Reward Influencers

Often, your influencer rewards are the collaboration deal breaker.

An influencer should feel compensated well enough for the work they put into marketing your Shopify store.  And your rewards should give them an incentive to max out on their influence for your benefit.

Here are the top three ways to reward influencers:

1. Pay-per-post.  The pay-per-post rate highly depends on the type of influencer you’re dealing with and the size of their influence.  Rates generally start at $10 per 1,000 followers.  So naturally, collaboration with nano and micro-influencers will be much more affordable than with macro-influencers.  
2. Commission on sales.  This option works great for Shopify stores starting out with a minimal budget.  Offer influencers a commission on sales made through their promotions.  However, the only catch is that this rewards system is usually only acceptable to smaller influencers.  Larger influencers are in higher demand and require more attractive collaboration commitments to say yes to the offer.
3. Free products.  Giving away free products to your influencers comes with many content creation benefits (as discussed earlier in this article).  This would make an attractive incentive combo with the other reward methods—especially if influencers can’t wait to get their hands on your products themselves.

Another factor to consider when setting your rewards is accounting for the value of the deliverables.  Resource and skill-demanding things like creating videos will come at an extra cost.  So, the more you need, the more you’ll have to pay.

In summary, you get what you pay for.

Attractive rewards will attract the right influencers.

Creating The Influencer Agreement

To keep all parties happy and expectations in check, it’s important to define your collaboration agreement.

This should include:

1. Outputs / Deliverables.  What exactly is the influencer required to do?
2. Timelines.  When should the outputs be completed?
3. Dos & Don’ts.  If applicable, what are the brand guidelines that should be adhered to?
4. Rights / Usage.  Who owns the rights to the content created and how can it be used?
5. Payments.  What is the influencer compensation and when and how will it be paid?

These details protect your interests and are an important reference to ensure the success of your influencer collaboration.

Start Collaborating Today

Build social proof, drive sales, produce content, boost traffic, and more.

And getting started with influencer marketing is a breeze with Afluencer—link your Shopify store, find influencers and post your collab with ease today.

Your Shopify store is an influencer away from an awesome collaboration, so get started with Afluencer today.

The post GET STARTED: Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/influencer-marketing-for-shopify-merchants-tips-to-increase-sales-through-instagram/ Sat, 30 May 2020 15:59:22 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=4162 With over a million active websites, Shopify is one of the biggest names in the world of eCommerce. It enjoys a huge market share (about 20%) and is most popular in English-speaking countries. Hence, it doesn’t come as a surprise that influencer marketing on Instagram for Shopify merchants is a hot topic. We’re going to […]

The post Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants: Tips to Increase Sales Through Instagram appeared first on AFLUENCER.

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With over a million active websites, Shopify is one of the biggest names in the world of eCommerce. It enjoys a huge market share (about 20%) and is most popular in English-speaking countries. Hence, it doesn’t come as a surprise that influencer marketing on Instagram for Shopify merchants is a hot topic.

We’re going to concentrate on Instagram marketing tips for Shopify today as this photo-sharing app is different from all other social media networks due to its unique features and excellent reach.

Posts on Instagram tend to get about 23 percent more engagement than posts on Facebook. Brands including Shopify stores that use Instagram have about 10x more engagement than stores on Facebook. Hence, it doesn’t come as a surprise that more and more Shopify store owners are interested in Instagram marketing tips.

In this Instagram marketing for Shopify article, we’ll tell you how to increase sales through Instagram by gaining more followers, increasing engagement, and reaching more people.

The purpose of this Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants article is to serve as a complete guide and answer all your questions regarding Instagram marketing.

Let’s start by telling you why influencer marketing for Shopify merchants is important and what you can do to sell more on Instagram.

What is Instagram Influencer Marketing and How Does it Benefit Shopify Merchants?

When it comes to Instagram, you can market in a variety of ways.

Since the app is known for images and videos, you can improve sales by posting high-quality content with relevant hashtags and a link to your website. However, this will only work if you already have a high number of followers.

Businesses use a variety of ways to get more Instagram followers in addition to posting creative content. Some use Instagram marketing for eCommerce apps and some work with Influencer marketing, one of the best ways to market products and services on Instagram.

Instagram marketing for Shopify merchants involves working with an influencer, i.e: someone with a decent number of followers to market products and services so more people can know about what you have to offer.

This is a great way to market because about 49 percent of buyers depend on influencer recommendations to make a purchase. Influencers are popular among people of all ages. About 60% of teens listen to influencers. This is why influencer marketing is the fastest-growing online customer acquisition tool.

Every marketing dollar spent on influencer marketing gives up to $6.50 in return. The industry’s worth $10 billion and is popular all around the world.

About 90% of Shopify merchants already use influencer marketing to make more sales. However, not everyone enjoys the same results. They either don’t know the right tips to increase sales through Instagram or they end up choosing the wrong influencer.

You can find influencers on every platform but Instagram appears to be a good choice as it houses over 1 billion users. Plus, Instagram users are more likely to convert than users on other social media platforms.

The social media network is best suited for Shopify store owners who sell jewelry, shoes, clothing, and makeup.

Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants: How to Market on Instagram

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tip #1: Get Your Own Page

You cannot market on Instagram without having a profile. The platform is free to join, sign up today, complete your profile by posting a relevant bio, adding a profile picture, and making some posts. No one is going to follow your page if you do not have decent content on it.

Post videos, images, and stories to attract more users. Make sure to keep your content original, neat, and impressive.

Use relevant hashtags to make sure other users can find your content. This will help you win more followers. Here’s a small guide on the importance of hashtags and how to use them.

If you already have a decent number of followers on other social media networks then make sure to let them know you’re available on Instagram, too. However, prepare to offer something unique such as exclusive content – giving them a reason to follow you on another platform.

Lastly, place a button on your website to help visitors find you on Instagram. While you can try your luck at influencer marketing on Instagram without having a page, it may not be of much value. Hence, we suggest that you follow this step.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tip #2: Find an Influencer

Once your profile is up and running, it is time to find an influencer. Check our How to Find the Right Influencers on Instagram article for tips on identifying and working with Instagram influencers.

A few factors to consider include:

• The niche and image someone enjoys
• The cost of working with an influencer
• The kind of content they post
• Their reach, including user demographics

Make sure to pick an influencer who works in the same niche as you, i.e: work with makeup artists if you sell makeup products.

We have pointed out some important factors to consider when hiring an Instagram influencer in an earlier post – Selecting an Influencer: Is Your Social Media Influencer Really Influential?

Make sure to keep these pointers in mind so that you do not end up picking the wrong influencer to market your Shopify store.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tip #4: Create Content

Once you’ve signed on the dotted lines, it is time to create content. Some influencers require brands to create content and send captions to post but some are more independent. Also, it depends on what kind of promotion you’re looking at.

Reviews, for example, need to appear natural and not scripted. Images, on the other hand, must be provided by you.

If you have the influencer creating content on your behalf then make sure to review it before it goes live so that it does not end up on the social media influencer fails list.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tip #5: Keep an Eye on the Numbers

Once the post goes live, it’s time to measure the results and calculate the ROI. The influencer will be able to provide you numbers including engagement, likes, etc.

Check out our guide where we talk about measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign.

Compare these figures so you can know if your influencer marketing for your Shopify campaign was a success or not. A successful campaign will result in more sales and followers depending on the main purpose of your post.

It is very important to be clear about your objective before you hire an influencer. Some merchants only want more followers, some work to sell products, and some are looking to improve their virtual presence. Be clear about your requirements and communicate your needs to the influencer so that you’re both on the same page.

Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants Conclusion

We hope the Instagram marketing tips covered in this article will help you increase sales through Instagram and make more money online. With more and more people using the internet and showing faith in influencers, the demand for Instagram influencers is only increasing.

It’s a cheap and reliable way to reach a wide audience and increase your reach. The first quarter of 2020 saw a 45 percent increase in people purchasing from Shopify stores that they had never bought from before.

Now is the right time to try Influencer marketing for Shopify and increase your reach.

The post Influencer Marketing for Shopify Merchants: Tips to Increase Sales Through Instagram appeared first on AFLUENCER.

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