5 Ways E-Commerce Businesses Can Drive Sales Using Influencers

As competition bites harder in e-commerce business, marketers tend to think more of viable ways to stand up to competition and make more sales. Working with influencers is one of such viable ways. Influencers help marketers to bring their products in front of their large audiences. That’s where they become quite relevant in e-commerce marketing. Working with influencers is a scenario of people working with people for mutual benefits. It can be a very highly rewarding experience for marketers if they learn to work with influencers as people. Learning to do very simple things other marketers do but in different ways while working with influencers can at times make the real difference in enhancing sales. The following five ways are such tested and viable ways.

1. Make Things Simple: When working with influencers, it is best to adopt simplicity over complexity in everything you do. Buyers usually don’t have much time on their hands. Getting a simple message out to them through influencers can make things really easy for influencers as well as the buyers. So, if for instance you are trying to launching a marketing campaign using influencers, it helps if you can put yourself in the buyer's shoes. That way, you can discover how quickly and comfortably you can make it for them to purchase the products you are marketing. Making available to influencers the right affiliate links helps to make things really simple for them to push your products in front of their followers. This and any other simple things that can shorten the path to a purchase are desirable.

2. Focus More on Result:  Yes, most influencers always have a very large reach but that shouldn’t be the main focus. Even though desirable, results from the reach are by far more important for e-commerce marketers than the size of the reach. It is advisable therefore to always focus more on result than reach. Reach still matters no doubt, but in the fiercely competitive e-commerce industry, there's nothing more important than sales, sustainable sales. It is best therefore to carefully choose influencers who deliver results in terms of sales. Such partners must be results-oriented particularly in terms of sales and not just views.

3. Give Preference to Full-Fledged Partner: Partnering with an influencer tends to yield better dividends than using them for just a one-time ad channel. This makes it better to share with influencers not just a product description and goals, but results as well. If you partner with an influencer that shares your long-term vision for brand development, they help you to make more sales. You can share with them analytics and any insights that can help them better understand your processes. That way, they can easily buy into and help you build a sales strategy based on the data generated. This yields better sales results over the long term.

4. Encourage Freedom: To get the best out of an influencer, try to encourage their freedom to operate. Avoid any attempt to control what they do and how they do it. Always remember that they’re influencers and independent business persons in their own rights. That they’re partnering with you does not in any way mean they’re ceding their independence to you. Influencers as content creators know their audiences and their needs more than anyone else. As e-commerce business owner partnering with influencers, it serves your interest best to just give influencers direction and leave the rest to them. Just make sure the direction you give aligns with your goals. It is then left to the influencers to freely create content that's organic to their audience in alignment with your goals.

5. Always Think Long Term: When partnering with influencers, it is always better to think long-term instead of short-term. Most people never do things without taking their time to think things through. Making a buy decision takes a similar pattern. Long-term partnerships with influencer content creators help to build the much needed audience trust. That gives them ample time to get sufficiently interested in the products they’re promoting to earn real credibility in doing so. Their involvement therefore means the products are worth buying. This stems from long term trust building.

Bottom Line

E-commerce businesses that partner with influencers benefit in many significant ways. They mostly benefit from the large reach of influencers. This large reach helps with conversions and the opportunity to create long-term business value for the audience. This is why the content creator influencer economy isn't just about increasing visibility for a business. It involves tangible and measurable results too, particularly in terms of sales. It is hugely important therefore, not to see influencer content as just another element of commerce, but to effectively use it as one of the main pillars of traffic, conversion and sales.