In 2022, small businesses and brands shelled out $16.4 billion to fund influencer marketing campaigns. A study in the Harvard Business Review reveals that this money spent effectively has the potential to increase a brand’s ROI by 16.6%.
So, how can you give your small business’s influencer marketing a boost? Influencer gifting is an innovative marketing tactic that sets your brand apart when approaching relevant influencers and enables you to cultivate long-lasting alliances. In a nutshell, influencer gifting is about sending products to a social media influencer in the hopes you can spark a fruitful partnership.
Successful influencer gifting campaign strategies
Distributing free products is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a successful influencer gifting campaign. Several critical steps are involved in selecting, packing, and sending these complimentary items to your influencer network.
To spark an authentic partnership with an influencer, you must select a gift that genuinely excites them. After all, your goal is to motivate them to make engaging content about your product. You don’t need to send a pricey gift, but you do need to give an influencer something they’ll want to feature in their social media posts.
Consider the influencer’s content creation style and interests to ensure your product is relevant. Before you select and package your gift, get to know your influencer. Follow their channel and watch their content to discover who they are and what they like.
When you find an influencer who resonates with your product, contact them, their manager, or assistant with a personalized email or direct message. Express your enthusiasm for their work, inquire whether they would enjoy a gift from your small business’s brand, and ask for a mailing address to send the gift.
If the influencer responds favorably, take time to package your gift to highlight your small business’s brand identity, and include a handwritten personal message expressing your excitement about working together. After sending the gift, follow up and inquire about the influencer’s thoughts.
Personalizing your gift, message, and follow-up to the content each influencer creates takes time but pays off in the long run, if done right. Customized gifts minimize expenditure and maximize ROI because they are far more prone to foster long-term partnerships, inspire participation, and obtain passionate influencer reviews.
How to find influencers who genuinely resonate with your products and target audience
When searching for an ideal influencer, the follower count shouldn’t be your primary consideration. Instead of thinking in terms of quantity, concentrate on finding influencers with quality content that resonates with your brand and products. Next, determine whether the influencer’s followers regularly engage with that content.
You will likely find the best influencer partnerships among micro-influencers who have follower counts between 5,000 and 20,000 and are typically open to partnerships that help them develop their portfolios. While macro-influencers have anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers, they generally are more costly to partner with and have lower engagement rates.
You can find micro-influencers in several ways, but to start, you can use the search tool on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to look for “e-commerce influencer for small businesses” or “influencers in e-commerce.” You can also check the influencers your brand’s closest competitors are following.
Next, use hashtags to search for influencers posting about products and experiences with keywords related to your small business’s industry. When you find a good fit, scan the influencer’s content or bio for mentions of product reviews, unboxing videos, and promotional content.
To find influencers quickly and easily, use an influencer marketing tool. These platforms streamline the search with filters to pair you with the influencers who can best promote your brand’s products.
When you have made your selection, you can draw attention to your brand by engaging with the influencer. In addition to following their account, retweet their tweets, comment on their social media posts, subscribe to their blogs, and reply to their emails.
Finally, remember to approach influencers as creatives. Incorporate your small business’s goals into their creative process to solicit their ideas and insights, which allows them to feel more invested in the partnership and enthusiastic about collaborating with your brand.
To cultivate sincere and long-running partnerships, open by being straightforward about compensation, negotiations, intellectual property rights, and other conditions. Convey how much you value their contributions and efforts when the campaign launches.
As the campaign progresses, show appreciation by keeping them in the loop about campaign results, commenting on and sharing their content, and inviting them to your brand’s events. When the campaign ends, follow up and stay in touch.
Use metrics to evaluate ROI on your influencer gifting campaigns
Your small business will base an influencer campaign’s effectiveness on a set of predetermined metrics such as clicks, sign-ups, purchases, or content views. Based on how much these goals mean to you, you will determine how much to pay a given influencer.
Before launching an influencer gifting campaign, define your brand’s goals. Do you want to increase your audience, boost your sales, or generate more leads? Influencer marketing can impact any area of your marketing funnel, but different influencers work best for different goals. Some specialize in brand awareness and engagement at the funnel’s top, while others drive direct sales at the funnel’s bottom.
Establish your objectives and metrics before kicking off your influencer marketing campaign. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound — or SMART. For example, a SMART goal might be increasing your small business’s website traffic by 15% over six months.
Your campaign’s metrics are the key performance indicators you use to measure whether or not you are achieving your goals. For example, impressions, clicks, or conversions are all tangible results that can demonstrate progress toward a goal.
To set achievable time-bound benchmarks for the goals of your influencer campaign, look at the influencer’s social media following, industry standards, and your company’s campaign history. Remember that external variables like seasonality might cause historical figures to be either under or overstated.
Calculating your ROI during an influencer gifting campaign is most accurate over a longer period. You will get a very different picture if you attempt to determine ROI on an influencer’s post as opposed to their entire campaign.
Create your metrics, set your benchmarks, and use Google Analytics to track them. Google Analytics lets you view the results for each influencer campaign in detail if you add tags called UTM parameters to every link, which allows you to see what users do after clicking on a particular link. If you align your small business’s goals with well-defined metrics, your reporting will clearly show the ROI from your influencer marketing campaign.
The fact is that people trust influencers and frequently prefer influencer-generated content over branded material because they see it as more genuine and authentic. Partnering with the right influencer can lead to increased sales, brand exposure, and lead generation for your small business, making influencer gifting an extremely cost-effective marketing method.
Amanda Webster is the Chief Operating Officer at Fund&Grow.
