Welcome back to our series on advertising your online platform. Our first look was at Content Marketing, where we explored the benefits of creating blog posts and other content to raise awareness for your e-shop. This article looks at a second marketing technique that might help you connect with the younger crowds.

How to Promote a New Online Store with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to promote a new online store, according to the experts at Linkeo Ltd. The best part of influencer marketing is that it’s easy and inexpensive to get started. All you need to do is identify relevant influencers and send them your product to test and review.

Sending your products to influencers leads to two big benefits. First, it helps you gain exposure through the influencer’s audience. Second, it acts as quality assurance for consumers who like to study reviews before making a purchase – as most people do.

This second point is key. In order to start producing online revenue, the most important thing is to build trust with your audience. Having a relevant influencer promote your product not only increases your traffic, but it also helps you start to build a relationship of trust with your audience.

However, when it comes to influencer marketing, bigger isn’t always better. Don’t work with influencers with millions of followers right from the get-go. Start small, with what certain market analysts like to call macro-influencers—those who have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers—in your niche. Make sure their followers are engaged and correspond to your target audience.

Then, build a relationship with the influencer and start building and promoting content together. After that, analyze your campaigns and optimize. Remember, sending your product to a few Instagram influencers isn’t going to be enough. There are three things all successful entrepreneurs do that make their influencer collaborations successful:

• They have a great product that was unique and new in the market. Influencers were excited to try it out.
• They emphasize the need for ‘real’ responses from these influencers. All they asked for was feedback and a share on their Instagram page if the product resonates, which it hopefully will. This shows a trend away from ‘polished’ influencer posts and towards a more authentic sharing of our experience with a product.”
• They combine their influencer campaigns with a customer-focused, user-generated content campaign, leveraging the same hashtags and style for the imagery. This ramps up the believability of the influencer posts.

So, what’s the actionable takeaway? In a nutshell, don’t just aimlessly send out products to influencers and expect to go viral. Focus on those who have influence over your narrow customer group, emphasize the ‘one thing’ that you do better than anyone else, and make the whole experience believable by backing the quality of your product.

How To Choose Influencers to Partner With?

While this in itself will be a subject for a later article in our overarching series on digital marketing and building an effective online presence, there are a few tips we can share about how to choose the right social media influencer for your purposes. The biggest one being: Do your research. Remember that these influencers are individuals, not faceless corporations with PR gurus on speed-dial. Review their existing content to see if they have ever produced content that might affect your own image. Also, check how they interact with their community – do you have a similar approach to your own customers?

Influencer marketing can be an effective method of building a buzz around your products, and also provides you with a relatively constant customer base. We hope the information in this, and future posts will help you harness the power of these techniques to grow your business. Be sure to check back for part 3, where we will look at more methods of online advertising.