There are still businesses who do not really believe in influencer marketing.
Social media profiles can be used to lift both brand and sales – if done correctly. Because almost all e-retailers today are highly aware of SEO (search engine optimization), influencers, and especially bloggers, are very often used as off-page enhancers. Nothing wrong with that, but there is so much more to download.
Contents
“I get no answer back!”
How many businesses have not emailed 100’s of bloggers without getting any answers? Many bloggers receive a great number of emails every day with requests to bring home products for testing. It is almost impossible to answer all requests. Bloggers would rather spend time creating good content on the blog and it takes a lot of time.
When you email, you cannot send to 100 at the same time. Write unique, personalized emails relevant to the blogger. Are your products suitable for this particular blogger?
Can you imagine paying for a collaboration or providing other benefits such as more readers or long-term collaboration? Then write it. It is easy to happen that the email falls far down in the inbox in just one day so after a while, e.g. after a week, you kindly remind yourself of your email.
Action: Relevant and personalized mail. Friendly reminder. What can you offer more than products or payment?
“I was tricked! The blogger wrote nothing about my product. “
Often I hear about businesses who have sent a product to a blogger, for example, and then feel cheated when the blogger does not write anything about the product in his blog. The problem is often a communication failure and is based on poor knowledge of what is public relations and what is advertising.
You can send press kits to influencers but then you also can’t ask them to write or what to write. It’s PR!
If you partner with an influencer, you pay for the service to have your product rewritten. The advantage is that you can approve the post before publishing, decide when to publish it and so on. It’s advertising!
Keep track of what is promotional and what is advertising.
“The blogger wrote about my product but there was no sale.”
When choosing which influencers to work with, you must do your homework very carefully. Is the influencer used to have collaborations and can drive sales? Is his or her content good enough for that? How close is the influencer’s readers / followers?
Does the influencer use affiliate networks? Then ask what the conversion looks like. Be sure to get statistics and start by testing different influencers to see which ones are right for your particular e-commerce. It can also be very worthwhile to really take the time to read the blog to see what the blogger is writing about. The content controls which readers are there.
