Influencer marketing has completely changed how marketers connect with consumers, and online brands, Shopify and WooCommerce store owners are in a unique position to take advantage of this expanding trend.
Influencers now have a significant impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions because millions of people watch their promotions every day.
If your online store wants to leverage influencer marketing, you’re on the right track! It’s one of the best ways to boost your brand’s reach, make more returns and build customer loyalty.
But here’s the thing – it only works if you do it the right way.
As more and more people follow their favorite influencers, businesses have a golden opportunity to tap into this trend. Pairing influencer marketing with an influencer affiliate program is a great idea. It’s the perfect combo for expanding your audience and skyrocketing your sales.
The key? All your online store needs is a smart affiliate program, like Affiliate for WooCommerce, and the right affiliate marketing influencers to partner with.
Let’s find out how to use influencers for affiliate marketing and achieve the most coveted goal – increase conversions and get 10x returns.
Affiliate marketing vs Influencer marketing: Strategy explained
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing refers to affiliates promoting your brand or products and earning a commission on a successful purchase.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing refers to an influential person on a social media platform promoting products or services by charging specific fees for doing so.
For example, celebrity influencers can charge a hefty amount. Such celebrities promoting your brand can be a good example of influencer marketing.
Be it Robert Downey Jr. promoting OnePlus phones or Taylor Swift sipping a Diet Coke.
However, anyone can achieve an influencer status and drive customers to your brand today. All you have to do is to reach out to the relevant influencer whose target audience matches yours.
Courtesy – Instagram and YouTube.
While both strategies use a word-of-mouth approach, there are differences in how they are executed.
People
- Affiliates are generally deal sites, your customers, friends, bloggers and others.
- Influencers are celebrities, renowned bloggers and marketers, media personalities, or industry leaders.
Channel
- In affiliate marketing, affiliates use links or coupons to bring audiences directly to your website. So, lead generation and conversion are the focus here.
- Comparatively, influencer marketing focuses more on brand exposure. It can include social media promotion, TV commercials, or newspaper ads.
Pay model
- You only pay for the actual results produced in affiliate marketing. This makes it a low-risk investment.
- On the other hand, influencer marketing tends to require an up-front fee. Along with that, it also requires transparency, clear communication and negotiations between brands and the influencer.
Influencers as affiliates
As mentioned earlier, with the growing competition and the saturation of influencers, affiliate marketing can be an excellent way for successful online personalities to make a passive income.
In theory, any influencer – big or small can be an affiliate marketer. All they have to do is to sign up for the program, promote products and earn commissions. The cost to get started and the risk is low.
Being a win-win for both sides, influencers make such good affiliate marketers.
Why should you opt for influencers for affiliate marketing?
A prominent way for affiliate marketing to work is to work with the right influencers. Besides website clicks, brands are also aiming to cultivate leads from social media platforms and that’s where influencers spread their magic.
Since the influencers have humongous followers, they can encourage conversions significantly. Hence, the posts shared with such a large audience will likely go viral quickly.
And that’s why influencer marketing works wonders for audiences who scroll through social media regularly.!
Influencers have a huge following
Influencers can introduce your brand to a larger audience with just a post. People learn from them and follow what they say and hence can get your audience’s eyes on your brand.
That’s the power of influencers!
Excellent copywriting
If you write a good copy, with the right and powerful words and emotions, there are higher chances of influencers’ prospects to convert.
Besides that, excellent copies can also describe your product or service concisely, along with proper detail.
Influencers’ network
Imagine an influencer recommending your product to his or her friend, who also is an influencer. That would be an excellent example of a snowball effect.
As word-of-mouth spreads, a higher volume of audiences are likely to gravitate to your website.
Providing value
While there are influencers who might collaborate solely for money, it is vital to join hands with an influencer whose values revolve around providing value.
Moreover, reputation and value matter too, as that is what their audiences expect from them.
Ensuring these qualities in influencers makes them ideal affiliates.
How to combine influencers for affiliate marketing?
Here are a few ways you can incorporate influencers into your affiliate marketing strategy:
Use coupon codes
Most social media posts aren’t designed to share links like Instagram.
A great practice could be using captions or descriptions that can be accompanied by coupon codes.
An Instagram post could show your brand in their post, with a caption that includes a coupon code, or a code in a caption in a YouTube product demo video. Keep the coupon code short, simple & easy to remember.
Good news for WooCommerce users! You can create and share coupon codes for affiliates using the Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin.
Showcase products or services to influencers
Consider giving your affiliate previews of new products or services that are being launched, providing great “insider” content. This is especially useful in the holiday season for content like wish lists or holiday guides.
Content such as “how-to” or “product reviews” are very popular for YouTube videos or Instagram stories.
Collaborate with powerful micro-influencers
Micro-influencers are social media influencers who have 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They often tend to be niche-focused and are still growing.
This gives you a higher level of engagement. High engagement rates can mean high conversion rates. This also means that they easily sign up for your affiliate program compared to big influencers.
Create co-branded landing pages
Extend ownership to influencers by providing them with landing pages that are co-branded to represent your products. Since it is a collaboration, it will also include the influencer’s name and/or image.
Provide creatives
Consider making creatives in formats that the influencer uses regularly. This can include graphics designed for Instagram posts and stories, or to be used in YouTube videos.
Posting familiar content buckets can help create more resonance among the audience.
Showcase product reviews on landing pages
In today’s digital age, we don’t even go to a restaurant or movie without reviews. In terms of products, people would certainly gravitate towards reviews before purchasing.
But influencers’ reviews have their own merits. People get encouraged to buy your product if they see an influencer’s review.
Hence, an influencer’s review is like the cherry on the cake when trying to make sales.
Focus on quality affiliates
Join hands with fewer affiliates but who make a big impact. Quality matters, not quantity.
Relevant and quality affiliates would also lead to less management and better results.
How to find and contact influencers?
Now comes the tricky part. Finding the right influencers and getting them on board is a bit difficult but can work wonders if successful.
We tried it twice and were successful.
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Here are a few tactics that will make it easy for you to identify influencers.
Identify influencers
Based on your industry and the products you sell, you must identify the influencers that are well-known in that domain.
You may even find blog posts that list top influencers in a particular space. Identify some top and micro-influencers and make a list of them.
Engage with influencers
Networking can work wonders. Reaching out to your audience will help you eventually find the right match for your brand. This is the step in building relationships with influencers.
Pitch
Here is one of the most important parts. What you pitch is what will convey the influencers to do. It should be valuable and useful to them and their audiences.
- If you want to contact them for a roundup, you need to be precise about what you want exactly and how that will help your audience.
- If doing a podcast, webinar, or product review, be specific about the topic, time, T&Cs, payment and other important prerequisites.
- For an affiliate partnership, you should acquaint them with your brand first. How long you have been in business, what you sell, how the business is performing, whether the influencer has a friend or contact who uses your product and more.
Contact
Getting an influencer’s email can get tedious. If they are a well-known influencer with a large following, you might have to reach out to their managers, via a separate email address.
Another way is to reach out to their website to get in touch with them.
A well-drafted, short and to-the-point email will work well. You can also follow-up with them if and when required.
You can also try to contact these influencers via direct message through social media.
Which influencers should you not work with?
Not everyone is an influencer and they might not be a good match for your brand.
Here are the signs of a few influencers that you should not work with:
Influencers who baselessly charge hefty amounts
An influencer’s charges are often the deal-makers or deal-breakers.
If an influencer charges a huge amount without much engagement, followers or results, then that could be a red flag.
As mentioned above, quality over quantity.
Influencers who promote based on money
Some influencers would simply promote anything for the sake of money, without knowing more about the product.
You’ll also find people who are just promoting for the sake of money. They are not interested in the product or the value offered. It’s a no again.
Don’t pick an influencer by the number of their followers
A person may have a huge number of followers. The point is these may not be genuine ones. This might signal towards paid services to gain followers.
However, look at that influencer’s other work – posts, social profiles, their network and other influential people who follow them. This will lead you to think of them as potential affiliate partners.
Celebrity influencers
Generally, celebrities won’t become affiliates, but they may promote your brand if you pay them up-front.
For example, Kim Kardashian won’t be interested in promoting a digital product.
You have to approach a celebrity based on their lifestyle. Social media will give you great insights as to whom to select and whom you should refrain from connecting.
Consider your budget
This should be the major factor for all the above. Don’t go for big shots directly in hopes for instant results. Consider the above-mentioned points in-depth to conclude.
You’ll spend more than earn. Do it slowly, steadily. Affiliate is for everyone to earn.
How does affiliate marketing help brands?
Affiliate marketing offers a plethora of benefits. Here they are:
High-end exposure and greater promotion
Needless to say, affiliate marketing can bring a high volume of traffic to your business. While you implement these techniques, a dedicated landing page can work wonders.
Here’s our affiliate program landing page. Clear and simple. Join it and start minting money today!
Lower costs
In other affiliate networks, along with monthly fees, you must pay a membership fee along with a transaction fee for every successful referral. So, no such third-party involvement in your affiliate program.
Complete control
Other affiliate programs come with a series of baffling features and clutter. But with your program, you do not have to go through such complexities. You can customize the program as per your needs.
Straightforward and dependable
Unlike earlier times, you won’t have to depend on any specific program to issue payments or meet conditions. Some plugins and tools have made the job easier, faster and streamlined.
Consistent marketing
With your affiliate program, you can get people from across the globe 24/7. Moreover, affiliate marketing allows you to market the product even while you are asleep or simply away from work.
Using WooCommerce? Here’s a popular plugin to set up your affiliate program
Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin makes it a super-simple process to set up your influencer affiliate program.
It’s simple and jargon-free unlike other plugins. It offers a user-friendly interface, unlimited affiliates, automated payouts, and flexible commissions. Affiliates manage their own links and track earnings seamlessly. So, you can run your affiliate program like a pro.
How to hire influencers and assist them for your affiliate program?
Setting up an affiliate program in WooCommerce may sound daunting, but with the assistance of the right tool, the process simply gets easier.
- Install and activate the plugin. Navigate to the
WordPress Admin panel > WooCommerce > Settings > Affiliates. - Approve affiliates manually via registration forms. These forms can be customized as per the niche of your affiliate program. So, you know which influencer request to accept. For instance, if you sell luxury skincare items, then your affiliate program should have influencers as affiliates who have an experience of creating high quality content focused on skincare.
- Provide them customizable referral links, coupons or landing pages for promotion.
- Group your affiliates using ‘tags’ and set a higher commission rates only for these influencers.
- You can also set lifetime commissions for these influencers.
- Set up campaigns with images, videos, products manuals etc. that only these influencers can access. They can then promote these in relevant platforms.
- Set up automated commission payouts or make manual payouts to affiliates on a timely basis.
- Track individual influencer performance and monitor how well your affiliate program is performing.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing offers a powerful way to reach new audiences and build trust. By collaborating with affiliate marketing influencers in your niche, you can introduce your brand to potential customers and encourage them to make purchases.
Affiliate for WooCommerce simplifies influencer marketing or affiliate program management, making it easy to track performance, pay commissions, and create personalized influencer marketing campaigns.
Don’t miss out on the opportunities that influencer marketing can offer. Start using Affiliate for WooCommerce today to connect with influencers and achieve your marketing goals.