For brands that sell physical products, influencer gifting is one of the easiest and most budget friendly ways to start or scale an influencer marketing program, that can boost both brand awareness and increase sales.
Influencer gifting involves sending your products to a selected group of influencers, for free.
Influencer gifting is also one of the best ways to build brand loyalty amongst your influencers by allowing them to learn about your brand, try your product and become fans of both. However, the process of gifting products to influencers can be time-consuming and inefficient, requiring brands to switch between different tools to find and engage with influencers, compile lists of discount codes, manage product distribution and communicate with them
Here are 4 ways to improve the effectiveness of your influencer gifting program:
1. Engaging with the right influencers
Finding the right influencers to include in your gifting program can make all the difference. Making the most of your gifting program starts by uncovering the most relevant content creators for your brand.
Working with the wrong Influencers can result in failure to post about the gifted product, which is a waste of time, money and effort.
Surprisingly, many brands make the mistake of working with the wrong influencers and discover that finding high performing influencers who are a fit for their brand is a big challenge.
To find the right influencers for your influencer gifting program, you should:
Evaluate data that matters
Look beyond the follower count and examine an influencer’s engagement rate, reach and overall performance on social media. High-quality engagement and genuine interactions with their followers are crucial indicators of an influencer’s effectiveness.
Ensuring alignment and authenticity
Before partnering with an influencer, carefully review their content to ensure it aligns with your brand’s aesthetic and values. Look for high-quality, authentic content that resonates with their audience and fits your brand image.
The right influencers possess a relevant and engaged audience that aligns with your brand’s target audience. By collaborating with them, your gifting program’s message reaches the right people, maximising the impact of your efforts.
Additionally, it’s important to examine whether the influencer has mentioned other brands’ gifted items in their content. Analysing the performance of these posts compared to their other content can provide insight into the effectiveness of their collaborations. This data can help you assess how well their audience responds to gifted items.
Foster long-term relationships
Product waste can occur when influencers do not post their gifted product on social media due to not having a genuine interest in the product. To avoid this, focus on building long-term relationships with influencers who have demonstrated positive results and a genuine interest in your brand. Then begin filtering out the influencers who do not post content of their gifted products.
When influencers feel connected to your brand, they are more likely to invest time and effort into creating high-quality content. Authenticity and passion for your products will shine through in their posts, resonating better with their followers.
Remember that building meaningful relationships with influencers is crucial for successful partnerships. Treat influencers as partners rather than just marketing tools, and foster long-term collaborations that benefit both parties.
2. Streamline influencer communication
Managing communication with multiple influencers individually can be extremely time-consuming. Composing and sending emails, tracking responses, and following up can take a significant amount of time and lack personalisation especially if you are working with a large number of influencers.
It can become overwhelming handling a large number of influencers individually which could potentially hinder the scalability of your influencer gifting efforts.
Here are a few ways to improve communication efforts with your influencers:
Automation
Automation improves communication with influencers by simplifying and streamlining the entire process. Automated tools enable brands to send emails to influencers at scale, saving time and effort.
Automated communication ensures that emails are sent at the right time to influencers who haven’t responded to the initial outreach. Timely communications can gently remind influencers to purchase products and to post their content online, increasing the chances of a response. This is crucial, especially when planning time-sensitive campaigns or product launches.
Personalisation
Automation allows for personalised communication with influencers, ensuring timely deliveries and easy follow-ups. By automating repetitive tasks, brands can focus on building meaningful relationships with their influencers.
This personalised approach ensures that your influencers stay engaged and motivated, resulting in higher-quality content and stronger relationships with the influencers, ultimately leading to better results in your influencer marketing efforts.
Brand consistency and credibility
Automation ensures that the brand remains consistent across all communications. By presenting a unified and professional image, your brand gains recognition and establishes itself as reliable and trustworthy in the eyes of influencers.
3. Automate the distribution of discount codes
Manually distributing unique influencer discount codes can be challenging due to several factors:
- The time-consuming nature of the process
- The potential for human error and delays
- The difficulty in accurately analysing the performance of each influencer as the program scales
Dealing with a large number of influencers enhances the issue, making it harder to track individual codes and leading to scalability issues. Particularly when coordinating with influencers through various channels introduces inefficiencies and delays.
However, by integrating your eCommerce store with an automated influencer marketing platform, you can significantly improve the mass distribution of unique influencer discount codes.
By automating the distribution, you can save time, reduce errors, and maximise the overall effectiveness of the program helping you track how many sales and orders each influencer has generated, ROI (rate of investment) and which influencer has performed the best to optimise future campaign strategies.
4. Centralise real-time tracking
Real-time tracking plays a pivotal role in improving the success of influencer gifting campaigns by providing timely insights and actionable data. It’s standard for influencer gifting campaigns to go live over a period of several weeks or longer. During this time it’s important to have a good system set up so you can understand:
- Did the influencer post once or more (or at all)?
- What type of content did the influencer post? Did it seem genuine?
- Did the post receive good engagement?
Centralising your tracking helps improve data accuracy by reducing the risk of errors and discrepancies that can occur when tracking data that is scattered across different platforms. This ensures that your analysis is based on accurate and consistent information.
When all the data is in one place, you can analyse trends and patterns across multiple campaigns and influencers. This provides a holistic view of your influencer program’s performance and helps identify what strategies are working best.
Here are three different ways to centralise and improve tracking across your influencer gifting program:
Social content data
Real-time tracking allows you to monitor influencers’ social content as soon as it goes live. This immediate visibility enables you to stay on top of influencer activities, where you can quickly assess the quality and authenticity of the content created by influencers. If any issues arise, you can address them promptly, ensuring that the content aligns with your band message and guidelines.
Website user behaviour
By connecting your brand’s Google Analytics account to an automated platform, it enables you to track the behaviour of users who click on links in your influencers’ content, linked to your products.
eCommerce data
By connecting your brand’s eCommerce store to an automated platform, you’ll be able to generate discount codes, to track when influencers have purchased their free gift and to track any associated orders and revenue associated with each influencer and their followers.So, you can see which influencers are driving sales and look to collaborate with them on a deeper partnership.
Dyzio Shopfluence
If you’re tracking your influencer gifting campaigns manually, this is where an influencer marketing platform can help! Influencer marketing platforms like Dyzio Shopfleunce can help you easily track posts from your influencer campaign and also gather data on how your influencers and campaigns are performing. By using Dyzio Shopfluence you can automate, track and rapidly scale your influencer gifting campaigns all on one platform. Check out Dyzio’s FREE guide on how to scale your influencer gifting program using Dyzio Shopfluence