Born between 1995 and 2010, Generation Z is changing the habits of social media usage. Born up to the digital era, Gen Z also called Digital Natives, Net Gen, GenWii, Tech Gen. Tech generation gets information mainly from social platforms, makes friends without seeing each other in real life, open to sharing their life on social media spend most of their time online. They are characterized by their unique style. Their purchasing decision heavily depends on celebrities or social media influencers which make brands shift their marketing strategies. They do not prefer traditional educational systems, instead, they choose to invest in their skills, take relevant courses. According to IBM statistics, 26% of Gen Z work online, while 16% work for themselves. Making money online is more attractive than nine-to-five jobs. 

Although statistics show Gen Z spends most of their time online, they do not only surf on social networks but make a difference where they go. Instead of blending in society, Gen Z is enthusiastic about standing up for their beliefs. This generation is political activists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and peacemakers. Despite their age, they take big steps to fight for human rights, equality, avoid plastics, are in support of the environment, are earth savers. These kids do not clearly identify their categories instead enjoy the diversities of their world.

Want to know an inspirational Gen Z?

Azerbaijani student Reyhan Jamalova invented the “rain energy” which designed to harvest rainwater as a source of energy in her 15. Forbes 30 under 30 was the youngest attendee at the 8th Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017 and got an estimable mention in Ivanka Trump’s speech. 

You probably heard about 16 years old Swedish Greta Thunberg. Environmental activist skipped school for her unbroken beliefs. Starting in 2018, she demanded the Swedish government to decrease emissions by 15%. Thunberg was awarded as Time’s Person of the Year 2019.

Former Disney princess Zendeya continues her stage carrier as a singer, dancer, and actress. She also made clothing collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, is a global ambassador for Lancome. The popularity of the rising star is not only for her talents but also for her activism in different social issues such as gender equality, body positivity, or bullying.

Gen Z reshapes Influencer Marketing

The consumption power of this group changes brands’ marketing and communication channels. They require brands to be creative, credible and authentic. It is difficult to influence Gen Z with chic promotions. As their older generation, Gen Z is also less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising, what they do in turn, they get information by the people they trust. What works for this group is a blend of traditional and modern marketing technics. 

Brands need to set a sophisticated approach. Focus on leveraging influencers for delivering messages instead of selling products. Brand story-telling is via different channels creates more authentic and engaging backlinks rather than stating fancy missions on your website. Cooler way of self-promotion is endorsing Gen Z influencers over your brand story-telling. Tech natives use Instagram for brand discovery, search for product features on YouTube.

Value creation is among the core issues Gen Z pays attention to. With 2.6 million followers on Instagram and  6.9 million YouTube subscribers, Orkun Ishitmak is one of the biggest influencers in Turkey. He creates a different range of creative content such as travel vlogs, testing, reaction, informative videos on his social media accounts. Plus to his successful influencer background, every New Year year Orkun organizes charity projects where he buys gifts to homeless and needy people. It is not surprising that global and local brands keen on collaborating with him for their commerce and charity works.

 

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Partnering with real people creates credible feedback for this group. This is why nano and micro-influencers are an alternative way of marketing. They are the best medium for raising awareness of small brands or campaigns. Micro and nano influencers generate greater engagements thus have a high ROI. Long-term partnerships also create authentic and high-selling projects, making Gen Z loyal to brands. When working with Gen Z influencers allow them to create User Generated Content, to present their style, freedom.

It is better to collaborate with influencers for online and offline partnerships. Creativity is one of the key ways of reaching out to this group. Go beyond social media platforms. Take Levi’s and Google’s partnership. Brands together launched new lines of “smart denim jackets” which warns wearers if they forget to take their mobile phones. 

Although Gen Z has unlike social media habits the rest of the population, however, have different preferences about social media platforms, different interests, say, platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Live.ly are mainly popular among teens, while the older Gen Z favors Instagram and Twitter. 

Whether brands have successful Gen Z experience or not, It is important to keep track of the latest trends, improve the quality of their products and promotions, as well. 

Despite the technological revolution in shopping experiences, purchases still take through human-to-human interaction. Whether your goal is to sell a product, build an audience for your blog, provide service, the first important point is to build trust. To achieve that level of trust you should humanize your brand. To quote founder at Convince & Convert, Jay Baer:

“Consumers are disappointed by brands. Trust in brands is lower than ever and the flipside of that is just as important, that people are trusted more. The reason people are trusted more than advertising is that there is no financial stake in the outcome.“

The key to success here is to spread the company’s message organically and build trust in customers.

Brands should steer away from the robotic marketing tactics, instead focus on being interesting, relatable, and human. Apart from sharing engaging content, a great way to ensure that your brand has an accurate voice is having the right people to speak about your brand. 

In this case, don’t overlook your internal influencers – your own employees. They are the new authentic marketing channel for your company. For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. They share the company’s latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts. Employee advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

According to LinkedIn, in total, employees have 10 times the social following than the brands they work for, which leads to generate twice more clicks on the content shared by an employee than content shared by business.

Humanizing brands is the top motivation for starting Employee Advocacy

For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. In a nutshell, the company distributes its latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts while increasing awareness around its business. Employee Advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

Advocacy can be anything from sending internal company newsletters, to fully formalized programs with KPI’s, and particular Employee Advocacy software. 

EA programs build a shared sense of purpose in employees as they believe in the company’s mission so they want to promote their jobs. Engaged employees share a genuine representation of the organization, one which customers can relate to.

Let’s get started humanizing your brand with employee advocates

Identify your key employee advocates

First things first, decide who is going to take part in the Employee Advocacy program. You may start with a small group, beta testers of your EA program, then scale to the whole staff. Compile a strategy that resonates with the company culture, organizational structure, and size. Make your company culture a priority, educate your employees to become brand ambassadors. They want their jobs to have a meaningful societal impact and expect the employer to offer interesting and fulfilling work. So, activate your workforce to strengthen the team cohesion in your company and increase awareness around your brand.

Set goals and KPIs

Define what you want to achieve with the EA program, so you’ll be able to identify which tactics to use and how to measure the success. The common goals and results to expect are: 

• Increase brand awareness and engagement on social networks, social reach, clicks, impressions
• Conversion of qualified leads and increase sales
• Recruitment, career search rates, and applicants

Incentivize employee social sharing

When the brand content is shared by employees, it gets twice more clicks. Broadcast your content via employees, and you’ll get more engagement and awareness. Provide your employees with: 

• Great work culture,
• Gamification like leaderboards,
• Incentives – gift cards, gifts, or intangible equivalents like trophies, praise, recognition.

The better would be to run an internal contest or challenge to encourage employees. Make sure that they understand their industry benefits. Set a reward for more engagement and interactions such as likes, comments, etc. within a specific deadline. These interactions will give your brand lots of “human” bonus points!

Curate internal and external content distribution channels

Content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. You might have them to share company news, product launches, blogs, promotional offers, behind-the-scene photos, success stories, even memes, it does not necessarily have to be industry related. Obviously, sharing useful content is a key part of your EA program.

Use the Employee Advocacy Platform

Employee Advocacy platforms allow you to oversee the content distribution process flawlessly and measure the results easily. As a result, you can identify the best performers. EA platform can replace mass internal emails and message boards and make it easier for employees to find the content in one place. EA platforms simplify and speed up the content sharing process, also combines features like a list of most engaged employees, analytics and reporting. 

For a brand’s representation, nothing works better than the recommendation of someone who works there. But building a whole process is not something that will happen on its own, it requires lots of planning, time and effort.

Influencers are immensely valuable tools for businesses of almost any description. If your company has some sort of online presence, it almost certainly does, then an influencer can help your marketing massively. Influencers are individuals who are able to use their own private fame and following (usually through social media) to ‘influence’ on behalf of a brand. The most famous instances of influencers are the Instagram models who tout diet supplements or work out gear. But, in truth, there are influencers of all different sorts, on all different media platforms. Speaking of platforms, this opens up a question about how you go about sourcing and interacting with influencers. The central two possibilities are going through an influencer marketing platform or an influencer marketing agency. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages that are worth exploring before you commit.

But First: What Do They Both Mean?

An influencer marketing agency, is a formal agency, much like a film and television agency or a literary agency that has a list of talent on their roster, organized by fields and by specific areas of influence. “An agency can be looked at a bit like a middle man, putting together brands with brand representatives and making matches that will best suit a certain campaign, explains Deepak Singh, marketer at PaperFellows and EssayRoo. The agency will take a cut, naturally, of the marketing fee that your company provides.

An influencer marketing platform is a digital solution to the issue of putting together brands and influencers. The platform is optimized as a method for trying to show brands all of the most ‘influential’ influencers that are contactable and can be collaborated with to help elevate the brand. In some ways it’s like an electronic form of an agency, acting as a less intrusive middle man that can be paid for by a company when they set about trying to hire an influencer.

Convenience

Influencer platforms intrinsically take this battle, since they’re usually entirely comprised of very slickly designed electronic interfaces, not clunky human interaction. The software can be downloaded in minutes and your search for the right influencers for your brand can begin and end in a few hours. Naturally, when you go through an agency, it’s a lot more complex, with lots of discussions and billing requirements to deal with.

Flexibility

Swinging back in the other direction, influencer agencies offer that tailored approach that no amount of search filters will ever get you. “When you’re searching for influencers it can be hard to explain exactly the sort of person you’re looking for or strategy you have. This is especially true when you’re trying to tell a computer, not a human”, says Gloria Radcliffe, tech writer at AustralianHelp and Essay Writer. Filtering results in an influencer platform is nothing like as flexible and fit-for-purpose as going to an agency, where agents can talk with nuance about what they offer and what their clients will achieve. It’s a bespoke service that should feel much more made-to-fit.

Price

Sadly, all of that polish and flexibility comes at a price that simply can’t match the inexpensive software package that a platform will give you. There might be a few devs releasing the occasional updates but that will be nothing compared to the office full of paid employees that the agency has to support. If you want cheap, you should go with the platform.

Opportunity

With the program, your opportunities for connecting to influencers that could improve your marketing is very limited. Whatever influencers are connected to such a program are there to be used, but any larger scale, more exclusive influencers will be very difficult to reach. An agency, by contrast, will have access to anyone you want to reach, even if they’re not signed explicitly. Influencer agents have a much bigger network to take advantage of.

Conclusion

So, it’s a tough decision on balance. You have the program that offers you a limited but fast and inexpensive service standing opposite the agency approach that is clunky but can bring in some really valuable targets that perfectly suit your branding tactics. Whichever seems to suit you best should be your avenue.

Chinese influencer market has different varieties form Western markets such as low CPC, more engaged audience, word of mouth marketing, and of course very distinct social media ecosystem. We already mentioned Chinese KOL Beck Li’s Mini Cooper fortune where she made 100 Mini Copper sold out in just four minutes through her social media account. This is enough to show how powerful are the influencers in the Chinese market. It is not surprising that western luxury brands are fancy for collaborating with KOLs. The Chinese influencer market is more than a place to raise awareness of your brand but a strategy to launch new products. 

What makes the Chinese market realistically powerful?

Trust building: If you ask big KOLs probably all of them will mention that trust is the biggest reason behind their success. According to the research, 49% of customer choice depends on KOLs’ opinion. 

Dedicated audience: The distinct feature is that Chinese followers are real and their choice heavily depends on influencers. 

Long-term partnerships: Whether it’s a collection or just a partnership long-term relations with influencers create more authentic content, more selling projects and accepted as more trustier by their audience. 

Customized products: It’s easy to find the usual product in the stores, the aim is to add influencer’s value, their uniqueness. 

Considering the feedbacks of the target audience: Influencers ask followers’ opinions during the production and designing process. 

Social media ecosystem: Chinese social media platforms are created to push e-commerce, thus, it has online shops where influencers and brands store their products upon the posts. The most popular ones, WeChat and Weibo are the platforms that made sold-out sales within few minutes. 

Let’s see a few examples of the selling power of Chinese KOLs.

 

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A post shared by @mrbagss on Oct 24, 2019 at 2:50am PDT

Mr. Bags

Tao Liang is known for his passion for capsule luxury bags. He made collections with different Western brands such as Givenchy, Montblanc, Longchamp. He sold 3.24 million RNM Tod’s handbags within six minutes. 

Yang Mi

Actress, high-fashion influencer Yang Mi collaborated with Michael Kors for Valentine’s Day. A limited-edition Whitney Shoulder Bags designed with heart and star studs. Red and black colored bags aimed to depict a confident, charming woman.

M.A.C. Cosmetics

Can you expect a makeup line to be inspired by anime characters? M.A.C cosmetics together with Tencent mobile game “Honor of Kings” launched lipstick collection. Limited-edition lipsticks came in five shades associating five of “Honor of Kings” heroines. To raise awareness, five reality show stars attended in the campaign posts. The campaign was sold out in 24 hours of its launch. 

The value of the influencer marketing industry in China is predicted to be 20 billion in 2020. Although China has bright influencers it is still fuzzy for western brands to enter in. In light of this, we’ve listed a few tips for running successful campaigns in this multi-billion market:

Use relevant influencers 

It’s better to invite micro-influencers to your small scale campaigns for raising awareness. Instead, collaborate with macro or celebrity influencers for Influencer X campaigns. Especially, luxury brands are a perfect match for this kind of collaboration. 

Relevant content for each platform

Chinese platforms are divided into three groups; blogging, short videos, and live-streaming. Suggesting YouTube or Instagram style formats doesn’t apply to China’s social media platforms. Brands should understand the different characteristics of platforms. For example, Weibo and Wechat are mainly blog sharing platforms and allows user-generated-content. Short video platforms like Xiaohongshu are effective channels for raising awareness. Live-streaming is the best way for detailed information about Influencer-X-Brand collaboration.  

Allow User-Generated Content

User-generated-content campaigns boost the exposure and increase the virality of content. Besides, UGC requires minimal effort and is visually-oriented, encouraging customers share their experience via an image with a short text. 

Here we have a creative approach by one of the luxury US shoe brands. Stuart Weitzman invited fashion influencer Zola Zhang to design outfits of the models for their show. In the end, Zola shared the detailed behind-the-scenes of the designing which created high engagements.

Focus on Millennials and Gen Z

Purchasing habits of Z-lennials are different in the West and East. Unlike Western Z-lennials who surf on different social platforms, shopping websites, the Chinese prefer to buy massively from Taobao. Micro-influencers have a more in-touch connection with their followers and more authentic content. Their growing capacity promises successful long-term partnerships for newcomer brands. 

Last but not least tip is budgeting

There’s one influential factor to start a campaign in the Chinese influencer market is budgeting. Without enough budget allocation, brands that intend entering China every campaign is “predestined” to fail. 

Brands falsely tent to believe that the costs in the Chinese market will be comparatively low and rewards will be high. This is commonly made mistake by businesses as they apply western KPIs and standards to the China market. But, China market is more competitive and expensive than that of the West. The obvious solution here is to increase the marketing spendings in order to get the expected results and grab the market share. As the above-shown report by Newrank, describes the rough amount spent on KOL campaigns during the first quarter of 2018 and 2019. 

While far from being a definitive guide to elaborating the power of Chinese key opinion leaders, brands can think around it and set more realistic expectations for Chinese influencer marketing campaigns.

Influencer marketing is a hot topic in digital marketing. Consumer-driven nature shapes strong relations with a target audience. It is not surprising that companies shift their marketing strategies to more connected and authentic influencer marketing. Predictably, the estimated spending on influencer marketing for 2020 is 10 billion dollars. 

 Plus to its benefits, influencer marketing has risks as well such as: 

• Picking influencers with an unsuited audience,
• Miss-management of relations with influencers. 

While influencer marketing is expanding to different industries important question is whether to develop an in-house team or work with an agency? 

Brands either assign a team of influencer marketers or they co-operate with specialized agencies. The matter is you know your customer better and the agency knows the market better. A lot of brands don’t have an assigned influencer team. If you have relative experience and dedicated team you can definitely leverage an internal team. Let’s have a quick look at insights into an in-house team and influencer marketing agency before deciding.

In-house

No matter you work with an agency or platform your internal team will engage in influencer marketing, review contents, check proposals and report. In-house programs allow you to directly connect to influencers and evaluate their approach. 

Pros 

Transparency with influencers. Control over the project, brands follow the process from milestones to the end. 

It’s more affordable as you don’t outsource a team of experts for a small budget project but use your professionals to find the best matching influencers. 

Solely working will bring practice and strategic management to influencer marketing. A huge number of projects will make you list the best influencers for you. 

The in-house team creates direct relations with influencers, allowing long-term relations with them such as brand advocacy. Long-term collaboration is also more authentic and influential and it’s accepted more organic by your target audience. 

It has long-term monetary and non-monetary benefits. Investing your employees and resources will improve your intangible assets and save your money for the long-run.  

Cons

It takes a long time to be prominent in influencer marketing. You may have unsuccessful partnerships or pick irrelevant influencers. Even if you choose the right influencers you may omit basic factors such as not creating hashtags, focusing on the influencers audience instead of quality content. 

Working only with in-house team may limit your access to new influencers, new channels as agencies are totally engaged with influencers.

Having a digital marketing expert is not enough for running an influencer program. If you plan for continuously running influencer marketing campaigns you need to hire a team of influencer marketers or train your employees which are additional costs. Your marketing team needs to follow trends, fully engage in the influencer market, rival brands’ campaigns and many more. And you as a company need to keep track of the team’s performance. 

Another thread here is entering the global market alone. Because brands aren’t familiar with foreign influencers, the local audience they need influencer strategies or campaign managers. 

Agency

An influencer marketing agency is a specialized agency that has tools, expertise in building, and managing influencer programs. Influencer marketing agencies or platforms are needed to reach the full potential of a campaign. 

Pros

They speed up the process of finding the most convenient influencers as they have a set of data of influencers in specific industries. Therefore, agencies ease the process of searching, reaching out to influencers, and creating organic content. 

Let’s say you are a new brand and you want a very famous celebrity to promote your product. Obviously, the celebrity manager will call for a recommended third party before coming to an agreement. 

Agency reputation plays an important role in the influencers’ decision. Plus, specialized agencies provide necessary metrics and give project reports. 

Their expertise allows to scale up your project through the right strategy on the right platform. 

The coin has two sides. Besides their benefits and expertise, agencies have lagging sides.

Cons

For a limited budget, agencies are additional costs. 

Lack of transparency. Not having a direct relationship with influencers may prolong the duration of projects 

Before reaching out to influencers you need to find the right agency, make them know your brand, what you expect from the project, which takes additional time. 

Considering all factors in mind you can make a decision whether agency or in-house. But, these two are not the only options available. There is one prominent option that you shouldn’t ignore – it’s influencer marketing platforms, like Keepface. It’s an all-in-one automated tool where your team can easily plan influencer campaigns, find relevant influencers through a huge database via smart filters, and most importantly have full transparency throughout the whole campaigns and get the full report of accomplished projects. It’s more like a free self-service influencer marketing that is also budget-friendly. 

Conclusion

To sum up, if you are new to influencer marketing or you may need influencer marketing specialists at first. For one-off projects, agencies will support you from the time and cost-saving side. If you plan for ongoing projects with influencers, it’s worth investing your internal workforce, training employees, or hiring experienced ones.

For any kind of businesses including eCommerce to stay relevant in their market, having a strong social media presence is essential. But considering the ad blockers and different ways of blocking paid ads on browsers and on social networks influencer marketing is a smart move. In this guide, we’ll show you an implementable and actionable strategy of how to leverage influencer marketing for your eCommerce business.

The history of eCommerce begins with a man who sold a CD of “Sting” to his friend via his website, which is considered the first American retail platform. Since then eCommerce evolved to make products easier to discover and purchase. 

Although e-business refers to all kinds of online business, eCommerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services, from retail to digital products. 

If you’re running an eCommerce business a working marketing strategy for generating new leads is very important to run your business successfully. And if influencers aren’t a part of that strategy, you could be missing out on opportunities to get in front of your target customers.

Influencer Marketing in a nutshell

Influencer marketing is about leveraging the power of word-of-mouth by getting influential social media users to talk about your brand. Influencer marketing is about a collaboration between brands and influencers, social media users who have expertise in a particular industry or niche with huge numbers of followers. What makes them influential on social media is their expertise and broad audiences. Therefore they have the power to affect the purchase decisions of their audiences. 

Unlike celebrities they can be anyone, they are industry experts, gurus, artists, even your math professor. 

The reason why influencer marketing is effective is that the engaging nature of social media. Today’s consumers want to interact, to be informed and entertained by brands. Besides, there is the fact that influencers already built up a high amount of trust with their audience, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers. 

It’s no surprise that the influencer marketing industry is set to reach $10 billion in worth by 2020. The survey conducted by Mediakix found that 89% of marketers said influencer marketing was better than other digital marketing strategies. 

By having influencers to mention your brand or product is a marketing campaign by itself. The beauty of influencer marketing is that unlike traditional advertising it’s more organic and audience-specific. 

All things considered, influencers’ posts forge trust with customers. Indirectly, brands enjoy valuable endorsement that cannot be replicated with standard ads. 

To take it a step further, influencer marketing is an eCommerce strategy that focuses on using these social media influencers. They drive your brand’s message to a larger market instead of marketing directly to them yourself.

How influencers and social media are changing eCommerce

The product discovery on social media is growing continuously. More than 80% of consumers discover products they like on social media. Instagram, specifically holds the largest share among other platforms as 48% of consumers discover products on Instagram. For comparison, this number was 18% in 2017. The other platforms like Facebook and Pinterest are growing with 70% and 22% respectively.

As you can see from the results social media plays an important role in driving consideration introducing people to things. 

Gaining online trust equals sales. Influencer marketing is a tool to build trust around your brand. By aligning your e-business with influencers you’re not only gathering influencers’ audiences but also the audience that trusts them. It’s one of the most effective ways to attract customers as they hear about your ads through someone they trust. 

So you’ll need a strong eCommerce strategy that will generate trust in your brand. A powerful eCommerce strategy will help you to plan a process to achieve your online store’s goals and increase its position in the market. Before starting a promotion campaign be sure to have a proper checklist. 

How to Build Your Influencer Strategy

• Identify Goals and KPI

First thing first, set clear goals. Many young brands often falter on the goal-setting stage. Influencer marketing can serve to build and increase brand awareness, reach new audiences, and drive customer acquisition. Every campaign should target one business goal. When you focus on too many objectives at once, it will not help either. 

• Choose the target audience

If you want to maximize sales and get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to define the right target audience. Knowing who is buying your products will help you to know whether you’re working with the right influencers and save you from spending all your marketing budget. So, how to identify your audience? 

It’s a good start to begin with a larger group that would be interested in your brand then get more specific by considering demographics like location, gender, age and so on. You can use these metrics to narrow the audience even more. 

• Establish social media channels

On top of finding the right audience, you’ll want to find the right social media platform for eCommerce business. The platform you pick will depend on where you want to reach your audience and what kind of influencer content you want to create. 

Instagram

Instagram already reached 1 billion active users in 2018 and the number is steadily growing since then. It means that the chances of your potential consumers being on the platform are high. The average age demographics are no older than 35 years old, with the majority of users being female. 

As Instagram’s built around sharing photos, it’s the best platform for any retailer who wants to show off their products. Instagram stories have more than 250 million daily active users. This feature allows posting videos and photos, creating simple polls to gather customer data. 

Besides, Instagram’s Shopping Tags feature allows eCommerce marketers to tag specific products in their images so they are shoppable on the platform.

If your goals are reaching new audiences and building awareness, creative Instagram campaigns should be part of your influencer strategy.

Facebook

Facebook with 1.62 billion active daily users is the most popular social media platform in the world. This makes it a logical starting point for an eCommerce retailer. 

Facebook marketing is a great way to blend into the experience users enjoy most about the platform. The posts that users find more informative and entertaining always get higher engagement. That’s why it’s essential to know and understand your target audience very well. In fact, most users find the brand’s Facebook page more interesting that the company website.

Keep in mind that, there is a high competition for News Feed. Businesses have to pay to boost their posts to stay competitive. Depending on your goals the platform offers various marketing tools to get the most out of your efforts. Businesses can target their audiences by using advertising filters such as their interests, income, behaviors, etc. Just like Instagram. Facebook’s algorithm is also good at personalizing paid content by users. So your boosted content will find the right people to engage with it. The key here is not to forget to engage with your users, as well.  

YouTube

As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words. It’s a powerful visual social network with nearly 2 billion monthly active users. The audience is diverse with the age demographics between 25 to 44. 

The platform offers highly engaging content, regular and live videos. YouTube users enjoy a total of 1 billion hours of video content daily. 

The platform is a good way to go viral. Try to create posts that solve the customers’ problems or address common questions related to your industry. For an eCommerce business, there is no better way than to move into the area of viral videos. 

What makes YouTube unique is its ability to demonstrate your products in use. The platform also allows adding a direct link in the video’s description to the relevant product page to connect it to your site. 

These were big brothers of social networks, now, time to talk about a new breed of social media platforms: Twitter, Snapchat and Tik-Tok. 

While Twitter has a character limit that may seem a barrier to convey your message, it’s an effective platform in terms of influencer marketing. There is a 5.2 times increase in purchase intent when users see tweets from both influencers and brands. 

Snapchat caters only for the youngest audience. With over 188 million daily active users, the platform has more engagement than any other social media platform. It also allows for ads and customized filters by location. Snapchat recently released an in-app eCommerce platform for products. This means that brands can actually sell their products within the app. 

To some, TikTok seems like a digital fad. To others, it’s the next wave of social media. Just like Snapchat, the majority of users are youngsters who love funny videos. Users can add music, face filters, emoji stickers, and other free editing tools to make videos more creative. The key feature of Tik-Tok is live streaming. Because of its immediacy and real-time engagement opportunity people love live streams.  

• Find influencers in your niche/industry

The next step is finding and selecting the relevant influencers for the eCommerce business. You can find valuable influencers on every social channel around the web depending on what type of content you want to create. The right influencer for eCommerce business is the one that matches your brand’s style, tone, and mission as well as might depend on your budget and business objectives. Before collaborating with influencers review the key metrics and decide which are important for your strategy. There are four types of influencers: 

• Celebrities
• Macro-influencers
• Micro-influencers
• Nano-influencers

While celebrity influencers might work well for years, influencer marketing grew out of it. Besides, they usually charge enormous sums and most consumers don’t trust them these days. Considering that your audience is online, this one is not a good option to go for.

As people started to trust traditional advertising and celebrities less and fewer,  micro-influencers took a more central position. 

Here important things you should know before starting micro-influencer marketing:

• More authentic: They are much like their followers. 
• Engaged with the audience: Micro-influencers tend to have a highly-engaged niche audience that values the influencer’s recommendations as a peer. They also have good communication with their followers. 
• Niche-focused: They are experts in their industry. As a result of their expertise, they are highly likely to affect the purchasing decisions of their audience. So, micro-influencers drive most traffic into conversions. 
• Finally, there’re many of them on social media who ready often to collaborate. 

 Where to find influencers 

Influencer marketing platforms like Keepface is the right place to start. All you need is to sign up as a brand and find relevant influencers just filtering by audiences, demographics, location or industry. In addition to just helping to find the influencers, the platform automates the whole influencer campaign for you. 

• Create meaningful content

Creating meaningful content is key to get people to trust your brand and make a purchase.

Unlike paid ads, influencers are exceptional at generating meaningful and organic content. Organic influencer content has a higher engagement rate, brands also can benefit when an influencer shares or mentions their content.

Keep in mind that you should strive to only partner with influencers who align with your brand. 

Make sure the content that influencers are creating is relevant to your eCommerce brand and products and represents your brand’s beliefs, values, and mission. 

How to collaborate with influencers

There are many collaboration ways with influencers. Here are the most popular types of campaigns that are best for the eCommerce business. 

1. Discount codes and affiliate marketing 

Provide influencers with promo codes. Incentives such as discounts associated with promo codes are a great way to promote your products. Who doesn’t love discounts?

2. Competitions and giveaways

What is better than discounts is winning free products. Holding giveaways to followers is a great tactic to quickly drive followers to the brand’s social media channels. 

3. Instagram storytelling

Instagram’s amazing feature allows for posting more content without cluttering the followers’ feed. You can also attach direct links to your products, so influencers can easily draw their followers to your website.

4. Product reviews 

Product review is one of the most common but also most efficient influencer campaigns. This type of campaign works so well because they are similar to reviews from peers. The idea is simple, people always check reviews first before buying something. 

Finally, the last step is to measure the true ROI of the influencer marketing campaign. Which metrics are important to measure.  

• Reach and views 
• Engagement 
• CTRs to an eCommerce page
• Increased search traffic
• Shares and referrals
• Tracking tags 
• Coupons and promotional campaigns

Let’s take a look at some successful influencer campaigns done by eCommerce brands.

eBay’s “Fill your cart with color” campaign

World’s growing eCommerce company eBay started an influencer marketing campaign to combat the global domination of its competitor, Amazon. 

eBay worked with fashion and lifestyle influencer @kerifay, to market itself as a lifestyle brand – a place of limitless imagination, color, and style that you can use to mix and match and create a new look. The campaign, called #fillyourcartwithcolor, saw record-setting results, with nearly 350K engaged followers. 

The reason behind eBay’s success is its right strategy. As you know, eBay is neither a fashion brand nor a clothing company, not even a lifestyle brand. But, Instagram is very much a lifestyle-based social media platform that is in love with fashion. eBay used the influencer campaign to rebrand the company for the Instagram audience. By the time the campaign was over, eBay became to known as a lifestyle market where millennials could create their own unique look.

Gwynnie Bee’s influencer campaign

Gwynnie Bee, a rental clothing e-retailer for plus-size women, always puts influencers at the center of their social media strategy. Rather than looking specifically for individuals who often worked with other fashion companies, considered those whose audience overlapped with their own. This means looking for micro-influencers on YouTube who create content related to topics such as lifestyle, accessories, food and more. Just like @plusjones, Youtuber and co-owner of PLUS Model Magazine. 

Together with influencers, GB created more authentic and non-scripted but that also aligns with BG’s overall marketing goals, as well. The goal was YouTubers to spread Gwynnie Bee’s messaging in a meaningful way. 

Besides, the company also created a “closet” on the brand’s website to showcase the specific items that loved most. As a result, the campaign saw CTR of 5.85%, which is about 3x the average. 

Instagram’s aim used to be sharing happy moments of life with friends, family when it was first launched in 2010. Now it is completely different than the beginning. Celebrities, brands, social media influencers changed its nature to a business profile. However, wealthy people use Instagram to give insight into their dynamic and admiring lifestyles. Some use Instagram like any of us while others show off every piece they buy, every place they go. Just as these richest kids of Instagram, they take it one step further by sharing every new purchase, lavish parties even private jets in the coolest way possible with billions of followers.

Here we list some of the top 10 richest kids of Instagram:

 1. @prince.pd

German real estate entrepreneur’s Instagram may lack in followers numbers but not in his wealth. His Instagram is full of expensive cars, skyscraper photography, drink bottles, private jets, exotic travels. 

2. @dradinova

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Daria Radionova (@dradionova) on Jun 25, 2019 at 10:19am PDT

Although, there is no public information about Daria’s business background. But this rich kid of Instagram is famous for wrapping her expensive cars into crystals. She previously designed her Mercedes car with crystal which then sold for a dog shelter in London. Later, Daria covered her Lamborgini Huracan with 1,3 million crystals. Her recent work was Lamborghini Aventador. Daria’s Instagram account is flooding with photos of her crystal cars, luxury bags, designer shoes, watches, fragrances, jewelry. The Instagram model only wears from Fendy, Gucci, McQueen, Balenciaga. Crystal beauty is also a fundraiser for children that fight against serious illnesses.

3. @markvandelli

 

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A post shared by Mark Francis Vandelli (@markvandelli) on Aug 20, 2019 at 10:46am PDT

Son of  Russian socialite and Italian industrialist, Mark Vandelli is a former editor for Insider magazine, a businessman, model, and interior designer. At 21, he was picked up as of the best-dressed men in Britain. Recently, he works as a jewelry designer for Channel, Tom Ford Christie’s. With high-classed costumes, well-defined angle poses, noble interior places Mark’s Instagram is a pure example of elegance.

4. @dorothywang

 

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A post shared by Dorothy ✨✨ (@dorothywang) on Nov 16, 2019 at 12:26pm PST

Self-described as funemployed, fabulexe Dorothy Wang is an American actress and TV personality, daughter of a Chinese billionaire. She gained Instagram fame after posting with #richkidsinstagram hashtag. 10 million wealth owner designed her necklace line with her famous hashtags. Dorothy shares her adventures lifestyle, lavish parties, fancy costumes.  “I can share a different side of richest kids of Instagram”, said Dorothy.

5. @letthelordbewithyou

20 million wealth owner with doing not so much. He gained popularity and giant wealth after the show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. In 2018, he launched his clothing line Talentless. Despite sharing his own brand, he features his tasty lifestyle, Ferrari car, Richard Mille watch, he partners with brands as an Instagram influencer.

6. @emirbahadir

 

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A post shared by EMIR (@emirbahadir) on Nov 23, 2019 at 7:50pm PST

Emir the next richest kids of Instagram on our list. He is from the real estate empire family in Turkey. Instead of following his family business he launched his own lifestyle and entertaining brand called Bahadiring. Instead of being respected for his family he prefers to be valued because of himself, mentioned Emir in one of his interviews. The young entrepreneur is keen on to help and inspire young entrepreneurs, make them believe they can do it if they believe in themselves. He doesn’t hesitate to share his pictures at business events, on high-end wears, fabulous parties, glorious travels and of course in private jets on Instagram. Traveling is in his DNA. For Emir, Instagram’s purpose is to show life from the entertaining and fun side. 

7. @evanluthra

 

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A post shared by Dr. Evan Luthra (@evanluthra) on Aug 2, 2019 at 12:38am PDT

Evan is an Indian millionaire tech entrepreneur, one of the “Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30”. He started his first app at the age of 12. Angel investor’s company EL Group International is a technology provider for Fortune 500 companies. Currently, he shifts to the crypto business. Evan is also a spokesperson for TEDx, United Nations, Washington University, and Dehli University. You can see his passion for his work on his Instagram account. The impressive young man also finds time for fancy parties and yacht voyages as well. 

8. @kanelk_k

Thanks to his billionaire family, he made his business at 18. Kane Lim studied fashion at the University of California. He said: “I went to the designer shoe and said I will take each pair one color”. A luxury collector displays every piece of bags, shoes, and jewelry from his wardrobe. Fashionista’s favorite brands are Cartier, Channel, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Christian Louboutin.

9. @faz3

 

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A post shared by Fazza (@faz3) on Oct 30, 2019 at 6:31am PDT

Active social media user, Crown Prince of Dubai, 400 million dollar wealth owner Sheik Hamdan is Chairman of the Dubai Execute Council, Dubai Sports Council, and Dubai Autism Center, and one of the rishest kids of Instagram. The so-called “Sheik of Instagram” uses his account to share his wonderful lifestyle with 8.8 million followers. Apart from sharing his family, he posts about his charity works, Dubai sky, his passion for sporting, travel, photography, and animals. Besides his family members, Fazza follows different accounts such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, sports personalities Cristiano Ronaldo, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and few photography pages. 

10. @chrystan_x

 

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A post shared by ♕ Chryseis Tan ♕ 陈雪铃 (@chrystan_x) on Sep 5, 2019 at 5:32am PDT

Daughter of Malaysian tycoon, CEO of Berjaya Corporation, successful investor Chryseis Tan uses social media to increase awareness about her business instead of showing off her wealth or work. In the beginning, she used Instagram for sharing her travel pictures. As it seems from her sophisticated outfits, the business lady is interested in beauty and fashion and keen on investing in these ventures. 

Although the term “Influencer” was one of the most popular marketing buzzwords of 2016, influencer marketing has seen a huge increase up till today. And there are already a huge number of influencers in various categories that collaborate with all types of brands.

Statistically, 40% of the world’s population, approximately 3 billion people are actively using social media and the majority of such active users are under the influence of social media influencers like you. The rest are looking for ways to become one.

You see there is an immense amount of noise on the Internet. So how break that noise, set yourself apart in your industry and make it easy for brands to reach you?

Being an influencer may seem the most attractive job to have, but regardless of the extent of your experience as an influencer, how many times have you struggled while communicating with brands?

Brands might not express their content ideas clearly, as a result, they don’t get satisfied with created content, or they change their requirements at the last minute, or you don’t get paid on time, or, … there are plenty of variations. That’s only a matter of chance that could occur to any influencer.

If you could relate, read on to see Keepface’s solution to free you from the common problems that most of the influencers face.

Exclusive Partnership Program – Keepstar

As a global influencer marketing platform, we’ve recently launched an exclusive partnership program with influencers to help them to stand out among the crowd, get noticed by brands, and most importantly, save their time and efforts while dealing with the brand representatives. Read on to find out more benefits of this program.

Save your time and energy

When you’re building up your online presence and start working with brands, approaching those brands can be tricky, finding the right person, knowing what to say and making sure that your emails won’t be lost in the inbox forever.

Besides taking the time for dialogue and briefing influencers is essential to get the best result of the collaboration. Both sides are often not aware of how time-consuming it is to start a collaboration. Rushing the campaign by pressuring the influencers into delivering only affects their quality.

So, joining this program frees influencers from dealing with time-consuming meetings and documentation and paperwork, which all will be handled by the Keepstar team. The team will provide you with all the details about the project. And you’ll invest all your time fully in your creativity.

Reach and negotiate with lovely brands

Behind all of the glamour of an influencer’s social media profile, there lies a truckload of hard work to do.

Doing brand research, understanding the brand’s “story”, what they want their users to feel, finding out what kind of posts are right for them is overwhelming for influencers.

Besides, oftentimes brands to be at the center of full attention, therefore they tend to put more restrictions and demands.

However, what is most interesting to the followers is the influencer’s life and personal events, etc. Keepstar team maintains and protects the interests of influencers, makes sure to keep a balance between the brand’s standards and influencer’s personal reflection on posts to increase the post’s authenticity and organic reach.

Keepstar’s expert team is in influencer marketing for years and knows exactly which type of content works for what kind of businesses.

The team handles all negotiation processes, gets a clear brief from brands, makes necessary consultancy and gets the best possible deal for influencers, as well as ensures the quality of implementation of the project.

Collaborate with Global Brands

The social media is pretty saturated right now and it can be pretty hard to stand out among the crowd. There are thousands of influencers on social media who are competing for the attention of their target audiences and, more importantly, brands.

You might have high-quality content, a huge audience and plenty of experience with local brands, but collaborating with global brands is another level in this industry.

So, with such cut-throat competition, as an influencer how you can get noticed by big brands?

The devil is in the details. Get recommended by industry experts (shoutout to the Keepstar team). It’ll be easier to pitch yourself to a brand if you’re collaborating with professionals.

Here at Keepface, we work with international brands such as P&G, Danone, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Toyota and create opportunities for thousands of influencers to collaborate with these giants. Why not join them?

Just-in-time and Secure payment

Getting paid for great work is one of the primary motivations of influencers and also a really sensitive area especially for new influencers. But what if the brand forgets making payments? Or too busy to make it on time? Even if you got paid how to handle tax reports and other legal issues?

As a Keepstar team, we make sure that you get paid just-in-time and straightforward! We assure the payment no later than a week after the successful completion of each campaign. Besides, the Keepstar team handles all legal issues, including the preparation of all tax reports for the Ministry.

Bonus

Influencer Academy. Keepstar program provides you with training programs to improve your social media activity on:

• Digital content creation
• Social media ads training

Professional photo and video shooting. Also being in the partnership program provides you with professional photo sessions to execute projects successfully, of course upon your request.

This is your opportunity to be a Brand Ambassador!

After letting go of all wearisome details to Keepstar Team, it’s your part to play. Keep in mind that becoming an influencer in your industry is not enough, to monetize your influence you need to be a good one.

Start with a passion for your topic and then it’s about 2 essential activities that require relentless effort. Creating content and building an audience that shares them.

As long as you create your own brand for yourself and have a targeted audience, own vibe, aesthetic and passion, you are solid. Following the right steps should eventually elevate you to ambassador status.

Now, are you convinced enough to get to the board? Get in touch with us for more details at keepstar@keepface.com.