In today’s dynamic business environment, brands and retailers are on a continuous quest for customer growth. A significant challenge in this journey is the rising cost of acquiring new customers. However, a solution lies in leveraging the power of influencer gifting and micro-influencers to help reduce your CPA.
Influencer gifting involves sending products to influencers who have an affinity with your brand, in exchange for them creating amazing content and giving you access to their audience. Developing a robust and scalable influencer program can not only help you increase your brand awareness, but it can also drive sales and significantly reduce your CPA. Also, influencer gifting is investing in your brand’s community, rather than giving the money to Google/ Meta.
What is Cost Per Acquisition?
Cost Per Acquisition Costs (CPA) refers to the total expenses incurred by a business to acquire a new customer. It includes various costs such as marketing, advertising, sales efforts, and other related expenses. This is a crucial metric for your brand, as it helps you understand the cost to acquire new customers through different channels.
What is influencer gifting?
Influencer gifting involves sending your products to carefully selected influencers, who’s followers’ demographics match your target audience. In return, these influencers create and share authentic content featuring your products, on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
Harness the power of Micro-influencers
A micro-influencer is a content creator with a smaller but highly targeted audience, typically falling within the range of 10,000 to 100,000 followers. What sets them apart is their niche interests and content, as they often focus on a particular subject, industry, or skill, enabling them to build a highly focused and engaged online community.
3 benefits of gifting to micro-influencers
- Cost effective
Micro-influencers are looking to build partnerships with brands and are generally happy to receive your gifts in return for creating some awesome content about your product, free of charge.
The only costs associated with this process are the cost of your gifted products, the distribution costs and any costs linked to the time your team spends on sourcing influencers and managing the process. Scaling this process is relatively cost effective vs the cost of scaling your digital marketing on Google or Meta. The main challenge with scaling your gifting activities is the time impact on your team, this is where tools and platforms can take on all the heavy lifting.
- Reach relevant audiences
Gifting products to micro-influencers can enable your brand to reach and engage with highly targeted audiences or niche markets effectively. By selecting influencers whose followers align with your brand’s target demographic or interests you can ensure that your products are introduced to new potential customers, who are more likely to convert.
- Reuse amazing content
By repurposing influencer content across your brand marketing channels, you can tap into the established trust, credibility and authenticity of the influencer, enhancing the overall impact of your brands marketing efforts.
When running gifting campaigns make sure you agree usage rights with each influencer. Using their authentic and relatable influencer content on your marketing channels will help improve conversion rates, as it demonstrates real-world product usage, by real people (i.e. not advertising).
How to reduce CPA using micro-influencers
Stage one – cast the net far and wide
In this initial phase it’s important to find and test a wide range of micro-influencers, to help you test and identify the best performers, the right content niches and the right social platforms and formats. Use unique discount codes and UTM links to ensure you can track all KPIs, including orders, sales and revenue.
Stage two – Identify your best performing influencers
The next step to reduce your CPA is to identify your best performing influencers by tracking their performance against your KPIs. This could be ‘reach’ to help drive brand awareness or more importantly ‘sales’ and ‘revenue’, linked to the discount codes used by their followers.
Use platforms that connect to your eCommerce store to automate this tracking process, so all social and sales data are made available in dashboards and reports.
Only select the top performing influencers to move onto the next stage. Then source new influencers who match their profiles, to feed back into the top of the funnel, at stage one.
Stage three – Build a community of micro-influencers
Once you have identified your top performing influencers, you can start to build a community of highly engaged micro-influencers who are willing to work with you and your brand.
Build a tiered rewards scheme to motivate the influencers to stay engaged and continue to create awesome content for their audience each month. Offer early access to new products, invite them to events, start paying commissions as the best influencers move up the tiers.
With the dual benefit of the brands understanding of the influencers performance combined with their genuine passion and expertise in their niche, make their endorsements more powerful and credible, fostering stronger connections between your brand and their audience.
Stage four – Pay and boost the best performing influencers and content
As your program and tracking gets more advanced, you can start to pay the best performing influencers as part of a more formal brand ambassador program. As part of this commercial relationship you can boost the best performing content via Meta or TikTok Ads Managers, offering you the ability to reach new but highly targeted audiences, with content that you know performs.
Tools to help you reduce CPA
Advanced tools and platforms such as Dyzio play a pivotal role in streamlining the process of reducing your CPA through influencer gifting programs. Dyzio, for instance, offers invaluable insights and data analytics capabilities that empower brands to make informed decisions. Its ability to provide real-time social and sales reporting is crucial for a comprehensive assessment of your influencer gifting campaigns. This feature enables you to pinpoint which influencers are delivering the most impact, based on your KPIs.
Tools can also be utilised to automate and scale your entire influencer gifting program, giving you ability to test, manage, communicate with and track 1,000s of micro-influencers at one time, which is almost impossible to do manually – without an army of marketing colleagues.
So harnessing the power of tools can help you scale, track and optimise your influencer gifting programs – from end-to-end, helping you find new customers and drive down your CPA.
Please get in touch with matt@dyzio.co or book a call below, if you want to learn more about how Dyzio can help you reduce acquisition costs.