Giving gifts to influential people is a great strategy to expand your brand and foster community. Let’s go over the what, how, and tools that will make gift-giving easier for you.
How to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Your Business
Influencer giving, sometimes referred to as product seeding, occurs when marketers send complimentary goods to particular influencers. Giving a gift to an influencer whose following is similar to your target demographic can be a fantastic method to capture their attention if you have a quality product.
Influencer gifting is the name of this strategy because that is exactly what it is—a gift. However, it’s crucial to understand that giving items away might not always result in a post or share. There is never a guarantee that you will be shared because you are not in a paid partnership or bound by any contract, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying!
Marketing departments can combine gifting with affiliate marketing, gifting with sponsored content, or just gifting.
Giving might introduce potential clients to your brand. Engagement rates for influencers are on average 2.39%. Micro influencers, on the other hand, have a somewhat higher engagement rate (3.86%), with less than 10,000 followers. With more followers, this percentage declines.
As a result, around 1000 individuals will interact with a post on your product made by an influencer with 25 000 followers. Around 10 additional people would become customers if just 1% of those who visit your website actually make a purchase. As a result, you’ll get more impressions, which will lead to more sales.
What are the four processes involved in sending merchandise to influencers?
Conduct research
You’ll gain from conducting your influencer study before to beginning to send your merchandise to arbitrary PO boxes. The key to a successful relationship is making sure your product and their brand are in line with one another. All influencers have a particular aesthetic and type of material to maintain; it’s what they’ve used to build their followings. By looking through your creator’s social media accounts to check if they have worked on similar partnerships with items comparable to yours, you can quickly determine whether it will be successful.
Having numerous creators to give your present to (depending on the quantity and capacity of your goods) is also advantageous because it prevents you from putting all your eggs in one basket. This will raise the likelihood that it will be accepted and shared by their audiences. If the gift is the same, avoid sending it to a group of related influencers with comparable audiences and send small modifications instead; doing so could potentially saturate the value of your product if it is shared by numerous authors, leading to the content becoming forced or repetitive.
Discover address details
You can usually find a PO Box for the most well-known and seasoned influencers on their YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram channels, but you can also look through their Shopify Collabs. However, to communicate with brands, new or small-scale influencers can use Shopify Collabs or direct messaging (DMs). Several gifting options in Shopify Collabs secure influencers’ private information and maintain the anonymity of address information. The influencer may quickly redeem a gift that marketing teams send them by utilising the information they have saved on their Shopify Collabs account.
Generally speaking, sending a gift without first communicating with the recipient via email, direct message, or another means is not advised. It’s common for unexpected mail to appear in the mailboxes of influencers, especially those who are well-known, thus communication is crucial.
Send your present
Before mailing your present, consider how you might make it special. Ideally, you want to make the package distinctive so that recipients can recognise it right away. The package should be tracked to make sure it doesn’t get lost and to acquire confirmation that it has been delivered.
Bonus advice: Include a thoughtful message with your gift. When seeding your product, small gestures can go a long way and may improve the possibility that the influencer will spread it on their networks.
Be persistent
Giving away free goods to influencers does not ensure a return on investment, and these marketing strategies take time to see any results, if any. If your chosen influencer(s) don’t share your passion for your company, don’t be discouraged; there are hundreds more out there.
What are the top ten things to remember when giving gifts to influencers?
Here are a few straightforward tactics that have previously produced positive results for Shopify Collabs users despite the fact that we’ve seen a lot of marketers and companies set up gifting campaigns. Use the tactics that are most effective for your brand.
1. Send gifts for birthdays
Brands that do the homework and offer unique presents to influencers on their birthdays or other special occasions may make them feel more connected to the company. If the creator has a sizable enough following, you can search online or use Shopify Collabs to identify an influencer’s birthday.
2. Present an uncommon chance
Getting influencers involved with your brand through events, product feedback sessions, and advertising campaigns is one of the best methods to get them interested in your company.
3. Display worth
An essential step in the influencer giving method is comprehending why a creator should be interested in your merchandise. Understanding the value proposition’s components is important because you need to stand out among the hundreds of gifts that some influencers receive each month. In your unique note, incorporate some of these responses.
- Why, compared to others, would this person open my package?
- Why might our relationship be successful?
- How does my product advance their reputation?
- How would my product improve their content?
- What kind of content could they produce with my offering?
4. Sending presents to bosses or assistants
Rarely are assistants given credit for their efforts. Sending a free product to an influencer’s assistant and asking them to make the ask on your behalf is one technique to get their attention. It could be challenging to locate an assistant’s or manager’s contact information, but one approach is to look through the influencer’s business email and cross-reference it on LinkedIn. You can also get in touch with them first via email and request an address to ship your product to.
5. Find a starting point
Although introductions are a great method to connect with people and start a collaboration, getting one is generally difficult, and you typically need to be moving in the correct circles. There isn’t exactly a similar platform for creators, although tools like LinkedIn are useful for folks in the corporate world because you can see shared connections. This implies that you might need to spend some time searching through Instagram’s mutual contacts or reaching out to your network to check if any creators have already worked with related companies.
6. Make a straightforward request.
Be specific about what you want from your free present, which is very crucial. If you don’t request to be featured, you probably won’t be. These kinds of assumptions won’t be made by influencers. Making a sincere request is one of the greatest methods to receive what you want, and it increases the likelihood that it will be granted if there is also a clear benefit for the creator.
7. Hold a contest
Competitions with influencer partners are a terrific method to simulate supply and demand while generating urgency and exclusivity. It’s a terrific idea to incorporate giving competitions into user-generated content because it gives artists free content ideas and the potential for higher interaction. This benefits both you and your favourite creators.
8. Make a product boast
Remember that before publishing anything on their social media, influencers will also conduct their own research about you. They will almost never collaborate with a company or product that isn’t congruent with their own. Send documentation that your present is a well-known brand and is well-liked by other authors, if at all possible. This generates a manufactured demand and priority. Influencers won’t want to pass up the chance to lead the pack in a hot and popular topic. They will thereafter hopefully post more frequently and feel honoured by the presents they have received.
9. Giving to an occasion
Gift bags are always appreciated and are a great method for influencers and celebrities to sample your goods. People enjoy receiving SWAG and free gifts at events, especially if they are of excellent quality and can be shared. One piece of advice is to differentiate your gift bag or product from the competition since most brands will be vying for customers’ attention. Make your present as unique as you can.
10. Giving gifts is not a form of compensation.
One thing to remember is that until you make it absolutely obvious, giving is not a form of remuneration. The best way to ease any tension and provide the foundation for a strong working relationship is to be upfront about expectations and requests from the outset.
How can I tell if it’s functioning?
Although there is no certainty that this strategy will attract thousands of new consumers, there are some techniques to gauge the impact of gifting.
- Once your gifts have been delivered, evaluate your user-generated content (UGC). If an influencer has mentioned you in a video or blog post, you should notice an increase in impressions or interaction. After six weeks, if you don’t notice a rise in interaction, think about finding and gifting a new set of influencers.
- If influencers aren’t interested in or aren’t using certain things, some marketers advise them to regift them. This may result in a rise in organic traffic and word-of-mouth sales.
- Many teams offer items for the influencer to give to their audience along with discount and affiliate coupons. This is a great approach to gauge sales and identify the influencers that are most effective for you.
Some of the top brands in the world use the simple, stress-free, and efficient marketing tactic of giving gifts to influencers. When it succeeds, it can significantly increase your small business’s organic growth or, at the very least, raise awareness and promote lasting partnerships that are advantageous to both you and the artists you like.
