It’s hard not to start this article with Pam Moore’s famous quote, “You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the people in them.” This sentence shows why influencer marketing is an important part of the dropshipping marketing strategy. It is a steady-growing marketing trend that has grown from $3 billion to $6.5 billion in the last two years.
Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful trends in digital marketing, and it is known to deliver 11 times higher ROI than other digital marketing practices. Influencer marketing can help a lot in every industry, including eCommerce and especially dropshipping. If you are new to dropshipping, you probably haven’t thought of a good dropshipping marketing plan for your store yet. This is why you should find this article helpful. We’ll talk about influencer marketing and show you the most important parts of this type of digital marketing. Now that you’ve read this, you can set up a strong dropshipping marketing plan.
Who is an influencer?
Influencers are brands or people who can get people to support a cause, buy a product, or follow a brand. People tend to trust people more than brands, though, so people think that people are better influencers than brands.
Influencers don’t have to be famous people as long as they have the power to get their audience to do something. Most of their power comes from their reputation, their honesty, their knowledge, their dependability, or their authority. They mostly share brand-related written and visual content on social media sites and other social channels.
Setting your goal for influencer marketing
One thing is very important when making a plan for influencer marketing. At the start, you need to decide what you want to get out of influencer marketing. This comes way before you choose the influencer for your brand and the channel you’ll use. If you are just starting your online store, you should first think about what its most important goals are. Influencer marketing is used in many industries today to reach different business goals, such as:
- Brand Awareness
- Reputation of a Brand
- Reaching a new audience, boosting sales, bringing more people to your website, and improving customer retention or satisfaction
Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your marketing will help you choose an influencer more wisely. It is a crucial step because there are influencers whose job it is to improve the reputation of brands and others whose job it is to help brands make more money. If you choose an influencer ahead of time, you might spend money on something that doesn’t give you the results you want. Influencer marketing can help you reach all of the above goals in the end, no matter which way you look at it.
This article looks at the most common influencer marketing methods.
Once you know what you want to achieve, it’s time to look at the most popular ways to use this type of online marketing. Depending on their niche, each influencer has a different way of doing things and different services to offer. The most common ways that people with power use their power are:
- Program for Ambassadors
- Reviews of products (photos, videos, etc.)
- Mentions of Brands
- Discount Codes
- Affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing with a high price tag
- Content Coverage (PRs, product reviews, etc.)
Let’s say you dropship brand-name clothes and want to reach a new, specific audience. The best way to do this would be to work with a fashion influencer who would write reviews about the clothes you sell. People will be more likely to check out your website if these reviews include photos or videos of the influencer wearing some of your best-selling products.
Choosing from the most popular influencer marketing platforms
Each influencer chooses the platform that fits its voice and personality the best. Some people are more interested in visual content and share photos and videos with their brand on them. Others, on the other hand, are more likely to try to “influence” with written content like articles. To figure out which way to promote your store is best, you need to look at the different platforms and how the influencers use them. Also, it can be helpful to look into the dropshipping marketing strategies of your competitors. So, you’ll be able to see which platforms are best for promoting your online store.
These are the most common places where influencer marketing takes place, no matter the industry:
This platform has 855 million users around the world. By 2023, that number is expected to grow to 988 million. In 2018, influencers are also paying for 3.7 million Instagram posts. By 2024, this number is expected to be more than 6,12 million. Instagram is one of the most popular places for influencer marketing and “Instagram shoutouts,” which are sponsored posts by influencers. It gives you a lot of ways to promote your dropshipping business (photos, videos, and stories), and it has been shown to work very well.
Statista numbers show that influencer marketing on Instagram is growing at a rate that has never been seen before. In 2018, the market was worth about $1.3 billion, but by the end of 2023, that number is expected to double.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world right now. It has more than 2.6 billion active users. This makes it a very powerful tool for putting together a good influencer marketing plan. Most of the time, Facebook influencers share photos or videos from brands on their Facebook pages. The biggest difference between Snapchat and Instagram is the age of the users. Statista says that 64% of Instagram users are younger than 34 years old. On the other hand, men between the ages of 25 and 34 make up the largest group of Facebook users. Many resellers think it’s the easiest way to market their dropshipping business and bring in more sales.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most-used platform, with more than 2 billion people using it every month. You can’t go wrong with YouTube if you want to use videos to market your online store with the help of influencers. A survey on Klear, a platform for influencers, found that nano influencers with 500 to 5,000 followers on YouTube charge an average of $315 USD per video. On the other hand, celebrities with more than 500k followers charge an average of $3857 USD per video.
Snapchat
Statista says that as of the first quarter of 2020, 229 million people use Snapchat every day around the world. It’s a popular app for sending social messages and sharing photos, and most of its users are between the ages of 15 and 25. So, if this is your target audience and you sell things to people in this age range, you can use Snapchat to do influencer marketing. Many people think that Snapchat is an interesting way to spread word-of-mouth advertising. Many big brands all over the world use Snapchat influencers to tell the world about their brand. Usually, they do this by giving the influencers full control of their profiles.
Personal blog
Last but not least, there are influencers who, in addition to the above channels, also have their own website or blog. They are using content writing as a tool to get people to do what they want. In fact, blogs and articles are the main ways that these influencers share branded content. People share this content later on some social media sites. Most of the time, these influencers write reviews of products and include branded and sponsored links in their articles. Most of the time, the brands they promote also have an affiliate or discount program.
Types of influencers based on how many people follow them
The market for influencers is shaped by four types of influencers. Their main classification is based on how many people follow them. So, we can tell the difference between the four types of influencers below:
- Nano Influencers: They have between 500 and 5,000 people who follow them.
- Micro-Influencers: They have between 5K and 30K people who follow them.
- Power Influencers: They have a following of between 30 and 500K people
- Celebrity Influencers: They have more than half a million fans
As a general rule, the cost of an influencer campaign goes up with the number of followers the influencer has. So, how do you choose between a nano and a power influencer? Read the next chapter.
Choosing the right type of influencer for your dropshipping store
Whether you choose a micro or a celebrity-type influencer can have a big impact on the future of your brand. A key part of your marketing strategy is deciding how much you will spend on influencer marketing. You can go with a mega influencer, for sure, but is it worth it? Of course, it depends on what your store is about and what you sell. “Less is more” can mean everything when it comes to certain products. The truth is that you can’t know right away. You have to choose one way and keep track of your progress as you go.
Choosing a powerful person can be both good and bad. You could spend a lot of money on a partnership with a big Instagram influencer, and the result might be more traffic but no sales. On the other hand, if you choose a nano- or micro-influencer who is an expert in your niche, you may only get a few new customers, but they will be the right ones. So, based on statistics, it might be better to build a relationship with an influencer who has a smaller but more focused group of followers.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is thought to be a good way to get people to know about a brand, boost sales, and build trust with customers. No matter what kind of dropshipping store you have, you can do research to find influencers in your area and then reach out to them. There are a lot of examples of how influencer marketing has worked well and helped with branding and sales. So, you can grow and expand your business if you have a well-thought-out dropshipping marketing plan and a good influencer as a partner.
