Driving targeted traffic to your apparel brand is the initial step we need to take in order to make a sale. One of the best ways of doing that is through the use of influencer marketing.
In today’s post, I wanted to offer a little step by step information on how you can partner and leverage micro influencers in your niche to help you increase sales.
Let’s dive in and get started.
Partner With Good Influencer’s
When it comes to choosing influencer’s to represent your brand, you want to make sure they have these 3 elements in place:
- They Must Have Reach
Try to partner with influencer’s who have 5k-50k followers. The reason why I would suggest this follower range is because most of them will post in exchange for a product. Don’t get too caught up in the number of followers an influencer has. It’s not the amount of followers that matter, it’s the engagement from these followers that matter most.
- Strong Relationship With Their Followers
You want to make sure they have a strong relationship with their followers. An easy way to tell is to cross reference their youtube subscribers with their instagram following. More likely than not, subscribers from YouTube who go over to their instagram are what I like to call “brand advocates”. Those followers who love digesting the influencers content regularly.
Another easy way to tell is to look at their photos and see if they are replying to their comments. Are the comments conversational? Or are they short unrelated comments that have no relevance to the post? If so, that’s not a good sign.
- Relevant To What You Sell
This is pretty self explanatory but just in case, you want to make sure they have an audience with your direct target audience / ideal customers. If you’re selling vegan apparel products, it doesn’t make sense to partner with gadget influencers.
Platforms & Content To Utilise
What are some of the best platforms to use when trying to find micro influencers to partner with? My personal favourites are Instagram and YouTube. When we spoke about partnering with good influencers, I said that a good micro influencer is someone with good reach, a good relationship with their followers and must be relevant to what you offer.
Instagram and YouTube allow you to easily discover this information. Youtube is perhaps my favourite out of the two. It’s also a fantastic platform for running ads for ecommerce.
There is one up and coming platform that’s ticking a lot of boxes right now and that’s TikTok. Like YouTube, it’s a fairly untapped platform with a ton of organic reach.
Whichever platform you decide to go with. Here’s a simple strategy to get you up and running.
Let’s say you want new customers and you’re offering an attractive sale. Partner with 5-10 influencers and get them on a 1-3 post/story deal. Then have all of them post within the same 7 day period. Once you test out all influencers and figure out who gave you the best ROI, go deeper into a promotion with them next time round.
Spread your promotion into 10 – 14 days and have them post regularly about your brand. Have them hype up your promotion by revealing juicy content in the form of storytelling, social proof, before and after transformations etc
Content To Use
We talked about the use of content in the form of storytelling, social proof etc. You can also test out other content themes such as –
- Unboxing videos
- Reviews
- First impressions / Lifestyle
- Product demonstrations
- Problem and solution awareness
Influencer’s that operate in fashion & lifestyle (Daily life, outfit for the day, my makeup routine etc). These guys do well because they fit the style and social nature of these platforms.
Conclusion
That’s all I got today folks. I’ll leave you with a final tip. When you do work with a good influencer that can drive targeted traffic to your site, please bare in mind that not everyone will go ahead right there and buy your product.
More than likely those that do visit your site won’t buy your product on the first visit. It will probably take a few touch points from your prospects to go ahead and complete a purchase.
Your sales conversion rate all depends on your offer. Just make sure your Facebook pixel is installed correctly so that it’s recording your visitors’ event based behaviour’s. You can use paid ads to nurture these segments to purchase at a later date.
I would also test the idea of using some urgency and scarcity with your offer. Your influencer partner can convey this in the content they publish to their audience.
