Want to boost short-term revenue quickly? Then you might want to consider working with influencers for your next sales promotion. The very simple, yet effective concept is to have influencers spread discount codes for your store.
Sounds easy enough but there are a couple of hints worth knowing:
Conversion
Influencer Marketing, without a doubt, is a great channel to foster brand awareness, establish social proof, source authentic branded content, etc. However, your target for this specific type of influencer campaigning is to increase short-term sales figures. So you’ll need to integrate a trigger for people to purchase NOW instead of leaving them with a choice to eventually come back in a few days.
What works great is to limit discount codes to a very short timeframe – typically a day or two. That not only creates a sense of urgency with potential buyers but is also well aligned with consumption of influencer postings spreading the codes on most platforms. On Facebook, for example, a post receives 50% of its engagement in the first 80 minutes. Instagram is similar.
Tracking
While the ultimate metric to track the performance of the overall campaign is sales transactions, there a few other things you might want to track to increase transparency and pull relevant intel for improvement of future campaigns.
Visitors: One important thing to know is which influencer sent the most traffic to your site. You can create individual tracking links for each influencer you are working with to get to that extra layer of information. Google Campaign URLs or Bitly links are ways of doing this manually. If you run a campaign on linkr, the linkr platform will automatically distribute individual, product-specific tracking links to each influencer you’re working with.
Conversions: In order to capture wich influencer sent you the most buyers (not just site visitors) you can issue separate discount codes for each influencer you work with. There are plugins for most e-commerce solutions that will allow you to easily set those up. A nice side effect to this is that influencers will appreciate the ability to share something exclusive with their followers.
With that additional data at hand, it will be easier to decide which influencers were a good fit to achieve your goals and which ones are better to be replaced by new candidates.
What to avoid
A common mistake to avoid is showing a general discount code on your site while influencers are sending potential buyers to your site. Buyers feel tricked when they are guided to your store, believing they can get a great deal (e.g 10% off) because an influencer they’re following just provided them with an exclusive, time-limited discount code, only to learn that everyone landing on the page will get a 10% discount anyhow. Also, you will dilute all of that tracking you did set up for the campaign.
How to do it?
- Choose a set of influencers to work with for the campaign. Create tracking links for each influencer. Note: when using linkr, those will be created and distributed to influencers automatically.
- Create a separate discount code for each influencer you work with. Limit validity of the discount codes to a short period of time and make sure the influencer communicates the time limit. Don’t run general discount code campaigns in parallel.
- Analyse campaign performance. Pick the influencers that delivered the best results and replace the remainder with a fresh set of promising candidates. Re-iterate and improve.
