Influencer Marketing: The Key To Unlocking Your Full Digital Strategy

Influencer marketing, a powerful channel for brands to reach and engage broader audiences on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, has significantly evolved in recent years. 69% of customers trust recommendations from friends, family, and influencers over those provided by brands, which underscores why you should invest in collaborating with influencers. In addition, the latest stats show that 57.6% of brands working with influencers have an eCommerce store. 

If you are an eCommerce brand, it’s important to understand the key components of influencer marketing and how influencer content can help you unlock your omni-channel advertising. You can leverage your current influencer marketing efforts or start working with influencers to support your digital strategy. 

What is an Influencer, a Content Creator, and an Affiliate?

An influencer is a content creator who has built a significant and engaged audience on social media. Their followers trust their recommendations, making them capable of influencing purchase decisions and supporting your goals. While influencers vary in size, from nano to mega, their defining characteristic is their ability to shape their audience’s preferences and behaviors. At Blue Wheel, we specialize in collaborating with micro and macro influencers.

From our experience, an influencer collaboration based on a contract and upfront payment is more effective for your full omni-channel strategy. It gives you more control over the content and influencers know how to address their audience in impactful ways aligned with your objectives. 

A content creator, on the other hand, is anyone who publicly shares posts on social media to entertain or engage an audience. These individuals don’t necessarily aim to influence others or build a career out of their online presence. Many TikTok users fit this description, often gaining followers unintentionally as they share content for personal or creative expression. Over time, some creators may transition into becoming influencers.

Affiliates are creators who earn a commission from sales generated through their content. They work with brands and share affiliate links or discount codes to monetize their platforms, even if they don’t have a large following. Affiliates can range from smaller creators to more prominent figures, as the focus is on generating sales rather than audience size. Influencers can be affiliates as well. The main difference between influencers and affiliates lies in how they are compensated. Influencers are typically paid upfront for their services, while affiliates earn payment afterward, based on their performance.

Who Can Benefit from Influencer Marketing?

Most brands can benefit from influencer marketing, as long as the product appeals to a specific audience. Whether you have a niche item or a widely appealing consumer product, such as a beauty or apparel item, there’s likely an influencer who can connect with your target audience.

Regarding the size of a company, influencer marketing isn’t limited to any particular scale. Small brands can use it to gain local or niche traction, while large brands can leverage it to target global audiences.

Which Influencer Program is the Best for You? 

Choosing the right influencer marketing program requires understanding your brand’s phase and goals. If your brand is new and lacks recognition, you should focus on awareness campaigns. At this stage, you want to work with influencers to create organic reach, build visibility, and familiarize audiences with your products. Avoid affiliate strategies like discount codes early on, as conversions are less likely until people recognize your brand. Instead, prioritize reach and spread awareness through engaging content.

If you are a moderately established brand, affiliate programs can be a cost-effective way to go. Collaborate with smaller influencers who can generate content and use discount codes to drive conversions. These programs are great if you have a lower advertising budget, as they expand your reach and allow for repeat interactions with audiences. Work with the same content creators over time to build credibility and trust, and get stronger organic conversions.

Paid advertising is a powerful influencer strategy tool for well-established brands with medium to high budgets. Here, you want to focus on content variety and testing different influencer personas to identify what resonates most with specific audiences. Use influencer content for ads to experiment, gather insights, and refine your digital strategy. However, avoid combining paid ads with commission-based codes to maintain profit margins.

Key Factors for Choosing Influencers

There are several key elements to consider when selecting influencers for your brand. The first one is the aesthetic and content quality. Ensure the influencers you collaborate with produce high-quality content that aligns with your brand’s identity. You want the final results to be professional photos and videos shot with clear, uncluttered backgrounds. Good sound quality is a must for influencer videos. 

The second factor is the engagement rate. Verify that your influencers’ followers actively engage with their posts through likes, comments, and shares. An engaged audience reflects authenticity and influence, which is critical for success. Avoid influencers with purchased or inauthentic followers, and prioritize those who foster a sense of community and reply to their audience.

The third crucial aspect is controversy and reputation. Vet influencers carefully to avoid those with a history of scandals or controversy. Research their background to ensure their values align with your brand, and stay informed about any ongoing issues in the influencer space.

Finding Influencers for Your Brand 

Finding the right influencer for your brand starts with understanding what works for you. First, identify the personas that fit your brand, whether that is moms, lifestyle influencers, or experts in your niche. Use influencer discovery software to uncover the right matches and get detailed insights. If you don’t have software tools, you can ask influencers to share screenshots from their platforms showing who their followers are. Authentic influencers shouldn’t have an issue to provide this information.

But a lot can be accomplished by searching manually. Exploring directly on social media platforms like TikTok and using its powerful algorithm can help you discover influencers who align with your vision. If you’ve worked with influencers before, tap into that experience by organizing and referencing your past collaborators. 

Think about how niche your product is when considering influencers who’ve worked with your competitors. In broader industries like beauty, it’s normal for influencers to promote multiple brands, but in more specialized spaces, exclusivity is often key. For example, if you want to promote a coffee maker, it doesn't make sense to partner with an influencer who recently talked about their favorite coffee maker from another brand.

How to Select a Channel and Prepare for Influencer Marketing

While we typically collaborate with influencers present on Meta and TikTok, where you want them to promote your products ultimately depends on where their audience is. For example, if someone has a larger audience on TikTok than Instagram, and it matches your target audience, you will want to work with them on the TikTok platform. When working with our clients, we focus on where selected influencers have the most influence.

Influencer marketing is an afterthought for many brands as they prioritize other aspects of their full digital marketing strategy. But, you can achieve greater results if you carefully plan your influencer strategy on time. For example, if you want an influencer marketing campaign ready for Q4 start planning at the beginning of August. 

Consider your goals, brand size, influencer contracts, and content usage rights. Your planning will be affected by what you want to accomplish, whether you want to get content, increase brand awareness, or drive conversions. For brand awareness, you will want to work with influencers on platforms where they have the biggest impact and can spread the word about your brand to potential customers.

If your goal is to focus on conversions, platforms like Meta typically offer higher conversion rates than TikTok. It’s important to prioritize channels that support partnership codes, as they allow you to repurpose influencer content and whitelist it for targeted ads. This influencer marketing approach is different from focusing solely on organic awareness, where reach takes precedence. 

Going back to preparation, if you want to start an influencer collaboration, expect at least eight weeks of planning. While some influencers can get everything done in 6-7 weeks, the usual time to find influencers, discuss goals and usage rights, prepare and sign contracts, create content, provide feedback, make edits, and go live with influencer content is around 8 weeks. 

What You Can Expect from Influencer Marketing 

Working with influencers provides social proof beyond what you can accomplish through regular brand marketing. After all, customers trust influencers as they are real people showcasing and recommending products. As they already follow influencers on social media, they have a built-in trust that can drive more awareness and engagement for your brand, ultimately helping you attract new customers.

Influencer marketing plays a significant role in driving user-generated content (UGC). However, there are certain restrictions around reposting influencer content. TikTok classifies reposted influencer content as "unoriginal content," which can be flagged by its algorithm, potentially reducing its reach. 

While Meta doesn’t have similar restrictions, this is something to remember when planning your influencer campaigns. You can ask influencers to create two types of content—one they will post on their profile and another piece of exclusive UGC for your brand to share on your channel. 

As social platforms grow, so does the connection between social commerce and awareness. Platforms like TikTok Shop pave the way for more streamlined shopping experiences. More and more customers use social media to search for products and make purchases, while influencers now hold greater power to drive awareness and revenue for brands.

TikTok Shop, as well as the TikTok app in general, is another great source for researching and finding suitable influencers. For example, if you have a specific product niche that you're looking for, you can use TikTok Shop to discover different videos and content that surround it and find influencers that would work for you. 

The Impact of Influencer Content on Your Advertising

A major advantage of working with influencers is content creation. They provide you with content that can be used for social media, ads, and landing pages. The evolution of social media platforms in recent years has significantly influenced this aspect. In the past, you would create an advertising campaign on Meta for every audience that you want to target. Each campaign would have different targets, creative, and budget. 

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Now Meta and other social media platforms lean towards algorithmic broad search advertising. If your goal is to drive conversions, these algorithms target audiences who engage with your content and make purchases. To support these campaigns, you need pillar content that is high-quality, evergreen material that resonates with your audience. However, creating this in-house can be costly.

This is where influencers come in. By partnering with influencers, you can create authentic content that aligns with your brand at a fraction of the cost. Influencer content can be used across multiple campaigns, helping you exit the "learning phase" faster and improving the efficiency of your ads.

But the benefits don’t stop at advertising. Influencer content can also boost conversion rates on your landing pages (product detail pages, website pages, marketplace sites). Studies show that including user-generated content can increase conversion rates by 8.5%, particularly with younger audiences who expect authenticity.  

To Conclude 

To succeed with influencer marketing, you should integrate influencer content into all parts of your digital strategy, from social media to paid ads and landing pages. This will help you drive more brand awareness and engagement, boost sales, and unlock the full potential of your omni-channel marketing.

We recommend watching our latest webinar to learn more about influencer marketing from Blue Wheel experts. Contact us today for more information about our omni-channel solutions.