Influencer Marketing: Channel Deep Dive

In 2021, Influencer Marketing was the #2 channel at Winc, a $50M online wine subscription business I used to run.

Since then, its efficacy has gone down, but it can still be an incredibly valuable channel for brands—if used correctly.

What is influencer marketing, when should you apply it to your business, and how should you measure results?

Everything you need to know about influencer marketing in 1 post ⬇️

At its core, influencer marketing is about leveraging individuals with a significant online presence to generate demand for your brand’s products. These influencers can be thought leaders, rising social media stars, or even celebrities who have the power to influence their followers' buying decisions.

There are 2 primary ways to work with influencers:

1. Work with influencers for their content

You work with an influencer to create short and/or long-form content for your brand. This content is then either used organically or in paid marketing. Typically these agreements include very specific usage rights that are either based on fixed (flat fee) or variable (% of media spend) costs.

Using influencers for just content is typically significantly more affordable than using them for distribution; however, in many cases, it still might not be worth the cost. Since influencers are typically more recognizable and have a large following, they charge large amounts for content creation. More and more brands have been pivoting to using content creators (more on this later) for content vs. influencers.

To determine ROI, you need to compare the incremental cost of working with an influencer for content (vs. another method, like working with non-influencer content creators) relative to the incremental benefit that influencer’s content provides. That incremental benefit can be determined by working through the following:

- Does this influencer’s content help your brand access a new and previously untapped audience?

- Does this influencer’s content drive a lower CPA than other content in your ads platform?

- Does working with this influencer provide any strategic “halo effect” for your business? (e.g., does it become a primary selling point for retail distribution?)

2. Work with influencers for their content AND distribution

You can work with influencers to leverage their following on platforms like Instagram and TikTok and have them post content promoting your brand. This can be across stories, in-feed posts, reels, or a combination of all of those.

Pricing typically varies by influencers and can range from a flat fee to an affiliate-like commission, or a combination of both.

Figuring out flat fees to pay influencers is incredibly difficult, especially if you don’t have prior data to extrapolate off of. Every influencer likely has a rate card they can share with you, but those rates are almost always negotiable. For smaller influencers who are just getting started, you might even be able to get away with just gifting product (more on this later).

It’s best to start an influencer relationship on an affiliate commission model— in other words, pay them a % of revenue or flat CPA for each customer their post brings in (use unique links and/or promo codes to track this). If they don’t agree to it, chances are it won’t be worth the risk of working with them. Alternatively, you can back into a flat fee that makes sense for you based on assumptions around impressions, CTR, CVR, and AOV, but there’s a lot of room for error in this approach.

Other key things to know about influencer marketing:

How to find influencers: Create a new TikTok account & only engage with posts that are relevant to your product’s industry or niche. Your feed will quickly become super curated and start to surface a ton of influencers you could work with. Search social platforms via relevant keywords Use an influencer search platform like Aspire or GRIN .

Influencer Seeding: You can try to use influencer seeding as a low-cost way to generate both influencer content and distribution.

1. Start by creating a list of relevant influencers in your space

2. DM them, ask if you can send them product (some brands prefer to make it explicit that they need a social post in return, others prefer a “no strings attached” comms strategy)

3. Send product in specialized packaging (to make it insta-worthy) and include a personalized note (to increase chances of getting a nice post)

4. Be on the lookout for posts and tags (can use a tool like Refunnel to monitor this)

5. If/when they post, save the content, thank them, and ask for paid usage rights

I recommend following Cody Wittick to learn more about influencer seeding.

Final tips before you start your first influencer marketing campaign:

- Before paying a flat fee to work with an influencer, check for fake followers via a tool like Upfluence

- Try to make unique landing pages for each influencer to increase ad-to-page relevancy and ultimately improve conversion rate (can increase conversion by 20%+ if you mention the influencer on the landing page). You can use a tool like Superfiliate for this or do it manually if your volume is low.

- Define the goal and KPIs of your influencer campaign beforehand, and keep strict measures of success. In most cases, this should be sales. In others, like when using influencers for content only, it should be incremental paid ad benefit. Be careful to not just look at last-click attribution when measuring sales; large influencers who post tend to have a halo effect across other channels as well. Use regressions to help you understand the impact of a post across channels

If you want to learn more about influencer marketing and/or work with influencer marketing experts from brands like Cuts, Ruggable, GoPuff, and more, check out The Starters, a vetted community of the best talent & thought leaders in e-commerce.