Influencer marketing is one of the most talked about ways of growing your brand awareness, but the reality is that most brands struggle to build a successful influencer strategy. This guide breaks down a clear strategy for how to ACTUALLY find success working with influencers and set proper expectations.
If you’re like most brands, you’ve tried working with influencers before and it was a complete flop. At a minimum, it was probably a waste of time and maybe a waste of money. So let’s break down how this process works.
Most brands suck at influencer marketing.
But it’s not your fault.
There’s a perception, created by some agencies and software platforms, that influencer marketing is complex and expensive.
It’s portrayed to be a “boujee” marketing channel reserved only for brands with lots of funding or lots of cash in the bank.
If you want to be successful at influencer marketing, that belief must be broken. So let’s tackle it briefly, before I show you the step-by-step process you need to take.
What I’m gonna show you below is a method I perfected after working with 1000’s of influencers. I call it the “brand advocate” strategy and it’s different from anything you’ve heard commonly before.
Ready? Let’s dive in…
Your first question might be why exactly should you – a CPG Brand – do influencer marketing?
Let me give you 2 main reasons…
Food and beverage brand inherently have a large potential customer base, but they are dispersed across the entire country. Let’s consider a snack food brand. This brand could partner with fitness influencers to promote its products as a healthy snack option for those who are trying to maintain an active lifestyle. Alternatively, they could partner with parenting influencers to position their products as a convenient and nutritious snack option for busy moms on the go.
The great thing about influencer programs is that they can scale easily as you have a wide pool of influencers to partner with.
Your brand is able to tap into a different audience each time, with different interests and needs. This means that the same product can be marketed in multiple ways, by partnering with influencers who have different types of followers.
Because CPG is usually something everyone can consume in one way or the other, you can be creative with how you position yourself to influencers and have an endless supply of creators to promote you.
When was the last time you saw a product show up everywhere on IG or Tiktok? It happens all the time. Sure the first time you see the product promoted by an influencer it won’t get you to buy. But by the 5th time, you’ll be wondering why everyone has this thing except for you.
With the usually affordable price tag of CPG products and perceived everyday use, it’s an easy impulse buy to add to the cart without a second thought.
The only hurdle is getting in front of the customers enough times with people they follow and trust.
That’s where influencer marketing helps. By showcasing the product, highlighting the benefits, and providing a glowing testimonial, influencers can make the buying process even faster. You piggyback off the trust that creators have built with their audience over YEARS!
Additionally, influencers often offer special discount codes or promotions to their followers, which can create a sense of urgency and encourage consumers to act fast. All of these factors combined make influencer marketing a powerful tool for CPG brands looking to drive quick sales.
The most important thing is to properly set expectations for what influencers can do for your brand so you go into it with the right mindset. Here are three potential goals for working with influencers:
SALES – Drive referral revenue.
AWARENESS – Introduce people to your product for the first time.
CONTENT – Get video and testimonials to then use later.
When working with influencers, go in knowing your goal and setting proper expectations.
Here’s the 5 step process to building a successful influencer program:
In the following sections, we’ll break down in detail how to execute on each of these steps. Relationship building is extremely important when working with dozens of influencers and us usually where the process becomes so overwhelming that you quit. Let’s face it, you’re a small team and have a million other priorities too. I used to manage this process in a spreadsheet or CRM, but now utilize SARAL’s influencer management software. Why?
They make the process so easy that you’ll actually reach scale where you’ll see an ROI. So in each of the sections below I’ll be highlighting how to manually do this process along with how to use SARAL.
When looking for influencers, you need to find ones who match your brand’s audience and values. It’s not enough to partner with someone just because they have a lot of followers. Your influencer should be able to reach the right people and share your message in an authentic way.
If your brand values sustainability, don’t work with influencers who promote fast food. It’s not a good match.
Find influencers who share your values and beliefs. They’ll be able to connect with their audience and promote your brand message in a way that resonates with them.
Use their built-in influencer search feature to find partners in bulk with tons of filtering options. You can search by hashtags, view key stats for influencers, and save their profile right in the platform.
You can also use the free chrome extension that lets you see a creator’s stats, predict a fair fee to pay, and save them directly to your list without any copy-pasting. So you can spend less time managing spreadsheets and more time working on your marketing campaign.
Pick the top 3-5 niche hashtags in your industry. Don’t go too broad with this. Eg: If you’re a supplement company, don’t target #fitness or #supplements. Go for #nootropics or #vitaminsupplement or #bcaaenergy. These are more narrow and hence ideal for you. A good ballpark is between 10k-50k posts under that hashtag.
Look at all the “Top” and “Recent” posts and save those influencer profile links into a google sheet. Make sure you review their content and see if they’re a good fit for your brand before you decide to save them. Quality matters. Posts last forever and you don’t want to associate with someone who doesn’t embody the ethos of your brand.
Here’s a template you can duplicate for your brand, along with a walkthrough video.
While doing the hashtag search you’ll find some really good influencers, follow them. Once you do, Instagram or TikTok will show you other accounts similar to them, check their profiles out, and add them to your list as well if they’re a fit. This saves you a lot of time finding the right influencers as the social media platform understands what you like and does the heavy lifting for you.
If they like your competitors products, they will like and recommend yours too. Just use the “Customer Advocates” method above to find your competitors influencers and save them to your outreach list.
This method can also apply to adjacent or tangential products i.e. products that also sell to your target customer.
Eg: If you sell yoga mats, finding influencers who recommend an ayurvedic supplement brand may also help.
Source: AdWeek
This works only for Instagram and Facebook creators.
This will help you simply search for creators without having to sign up for expensive database tools. They’ve also got reliable in-platform data such as audience overlap and recommended creators based on your past partnerships.
Learn more here: FB Brand Collabs Manager.
This is the same thing for TikTok. For now, they only have influencers over 100K followers, so it will not work if you’re taking a micro/nano-influencer strategy.
Again, these have authenticated in-platform data, which is the most accurate. Learn more and apply here: TikTok Creator Marketplace.
Once you have the list of influencers you want to collaborate with, it’s time to connect with them whether it’s via email or DMs.
But before you hit “send” on that email, it’s important to do some research and make sure you’re approaching the influencer in the right way. Personalize your outreach by taking the time to learn about them and their audience.
Here’s a template you can use to email influencers:
Hey {{influencer.first_name}},
I hope this message finds you well. As the {{job-title}} at {{brand}},
I’ve been following your content on {{platform}}, and I’m impressed by your
unique voice and style.
We’re on the hunt for standout influencers to join our new ambassador program,
and we think you’d be a perfect fit. Our brand/product is all about
{{one line describing your brand/product and how it aligns with their audience}}.
We believe your audience would be interested in learning more about us,
and we’re excited to see how we can collaborate to spread the word.
In terms of compensation, we’re happy to offer you {$$} for every {{conversion}}
you drive. But more importantly, we’re looking for a long-term partnership that
benefits both of us.
Would you be open to discussing this further?
I’d love to learn more about your thoughts and ideas on how we can work
together. Let’s chat!
—
{{Signature}}
You can expect responses 3/5 times if they’re a right fit. If you don’t hear back from them after your initial emails, don’t lose hope.
Add them to a once-per-month email drip that provides them with updated ambassador results, posts, and other exciting news from your brand. This keeps your brand top of mind and helps to build a relationship over time – it shows that you’re committed to working with them.
And if you really want to work with them, go the extra mile by occasionally commenting on their posts.
If you’re having a hard time manually managing this process, SARAL also helps you automate follow-ups, so you don’t have to worry about influencers missing your initial email. If they don’t respond, SARAL will automatically send a follow-up message to keep the conversation going.
There are more templates available for you inside the platform so you don’t have to come up with one from scratch!
Once you’ve got a positive response from the influencers, now it’s time to ship your products to them so they can get a taste of what your brand has to offer.
Whether you’re sending it for them to try, be sure to make the unboxing experience amazing. Write a custom note, add something for their pet or kid, or personalize the product for them. Use tools like Slippy to send personalized notes to your influence-partners.
Here’s an example of Athletic Greens’ unboxing experience. The box itself highlights the brand and stylishly showcases the products. They get a high score on presentation alone.
By showing genuine care and attention to detail, you’ll create a great first impression that could lead to a long-term partnership.
Once you start shipping products to influencers each week, it will get hard to create orders manually, generate a tracking link using a third-party tool, and create coupon codes for the influencer’s audience. But if you use a tool such as SARAL, you’re able to ship dozens of products at once by connecting your Shopify, and generate tracking links & coupon codes so you track sales and ensure you’re profitable!
Managing and tracking your influencer marketing campaigns is crucial for success. If you’re using Shopify to manage your store, you can easily create a discount code for each influencer you onboard. But if you’re not using Shopify, don’t worry! Just use UTM codes to track conversions inside your Google Analytics.
SARAL integrates with your Shopify so you’re able to automate this as well!
Tracking can get as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. We like to keep things simple here!
Remember, Simple Scales — Fancy Fails!
Here are the metrics that you want to track:
The best metric to measure this is ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). The ROAS basically tells you the return you’re getting for every $1 in ad spend. In case you are wondering, 4:1 is considered to be a good ratio. It means you are making $4 for every $1 spent. Just make sure it’s not less than 1 while you’re getting started!
ROAS can be calculated per creator or in totality. We recommend calculating it for each particular creator first, and then the overall campaign aggregate.
The “ad spend” would include the fee that you paid to the influencers, the shipping cost, and the COGS of all the products you sent them. The “Return” would be the total sales generated. Now just divide:
Some creators would perform great for you, others will do okay, and some not so well. You will have to look at each of these campaigns and find the common traits of the successful ones. What are the things that made these campaigns better than others? Same with the least performing ones, why did these campaigns not work out? Is it because of the content or because you chose the wrong influencers?
This analysis is important because it’ll help you make the right decisions moving forward.
If you are aiming for brand awareness, the best metrics would be site-traffic, clicks, and engagement.
You can easily track clicks using a click-tracker like Bitly, we also have this functionality built-in to SARAL.
Again, track engagement and clicks for each of the campaigns and see which type of campaigns are performing well. Feedback is the most important, especially at the earlier stages.
Don’t quit because you don’t see a 3x ROAS, you’ll crack it eventually.
Now that you have the concepts down, let’s dive in some details about how you can actually get the numbers to do the calculations. There are three main ways to do it.
Once you install GA on your site, you need to follow 3 steps to set up your tracking effectively.
Create UTM links here for each of your campaigns. You will have to fill in four fields.
Here’s an example link: https://www.eatruani.com?utm_source=influencer&utm_medium=instagram&utm_campaign=foodsmithnyc
Once your creators start posting about you, all you need to do is navigate to Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns in your GA account and you will be able to see the performance of each of the campaigns.
UTM’s automatically sync the data on your GA account under campaigns.
This is optional when starting but do it sooner instead of later. Set up goals to measure your actual conversions from any particular campaign.
Conversions can be sales, email signups, clicks, add to cart, etc. Here’s how you can set it up.
Go to your admin toolbar at the bottom left-hand side. Choose Goals under the View section.
View > Goals
Now, you will have to select a new goal to create. You can choose a suitable goal like newsletter signups, product purchases, or clicks. You may also want to create a custom goal if you want to track something that is not already in the GA template.
Next is the Goal description, give your goal a name and select ‘destination’ under ‘type’.
In the ‘Goal details’ section enter the address of your thank you page. Don’t enter the full URL but only the address of the page such as /thank-you. You can enter the value if you want and also toggle on the funnel if you want to analyze the entry and exit points affecting your goals. Click save and you’re all set.
Now, you just have to go back to Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns and select a goal from the dropdown. You will be able to see your conversions from any particular campaign.
If you have moved to GA4, the setup would look different for you. You simply have to mark an event as a conversion. Here’s a short tutorial.
If you are only looking to track sales, another way is to send unique coupon codes to each influencer and you will find out exactly how many sales you get from each promotion. Whether you use Shopify, WordPress, Wix, or others. You can easily create and distribute the discount codes to the influencers.
You can generate coupon codes via SARAL directly that sync with your Shopify store.
Add their discount code to a Custom Parameter in SARAL
Many brands tend to not do this analysis as they think it’s all about getting more creators to post. That may be true, but you also need them to post the right things. Think about this step as “creative testing” on FB ads. You need to iterate and see what works in order to spend effectively in the future.
Once you start collecting data, it’s time to ask some questions.
Asking these questions will make you understand your audience better so you can do more of that content in the future. This is how your ROAS will improve. Very soon, you will have built a system that consistently gives you profitable growth.
Of course, it’s not enough to simply set up tracking and hope for the best. Make sure you have the right Google Analytics set up and test it out yourself before launching any campaigns. This ensures that you’re collecting the right data and that it’s accurate.
Tracking is arguably the most important aspect of the whole pipeline, as it helps you make informed decisions about which influencers are a good fit, what type of content resonates with your audience, and more. So take tracking seriously and invest the time and effort to set it up properly. It will pay off in the long run!
If you’re tracking your sales in a tool such as SARAL, it’s able to show you the traffic and revenue each creator generates while also giving you a wholistic view of what your ROAS has been.
It’s important to remember that influencers are not just a sales machine that you can tap into for revenue. They’re real people with their own interests, values, and goals.
To build a genuine relationship with influencers, catch up with them regularly and get to know them on a personal level. This means going beyond just sponsored content and finding ways to offer value that aligns with their interests and needs. For example, you could offer them early access to new products or invite them to exclusive events.
Here’s what Griffin Thall, the CEO of Pura Vida has to say about this:
“I can personally say that I’ve met 90% of our influencers in person and have either gotten food with them, been traveling with them, or done something where it’s not just about a photo or a handshake.”
By investing time and effort in building a real relationship with influencers, you’ll create a sense of trust and loyalty that can translate into more impactful campaigns. When influencers feel connected to your brand on a personal level, they’re more likely to be genuine and authentic in their content and recommendations.
Don’t focus on numbers too much. First and foremost, understand if their message and philosophy aligns with your brand. Do they care about the same things your brand cares about?
Do they speak about it vocally?
How good are they in creating content their audience relates with? Are they engaging thoughtfully in the comments and stories, etc. Remember our goals section above? If they’re creating engaging content but have a small audience, then you can amplify their message through your own organic and paid media.
You want to test for “connect” here. There are many small things you need to verify, but don’t fret about getting everything right. No one is perfect. As long as you get a good vibe from their profile, and their content looks like something you’d like consuming – you’re good to go!
As an additional check, you can also look at the past promotions they’ve done on their profile. How did that content do as compared to the other normal posts? Were they persuasive enough?
All this will eventually become second-nature to you.
Immediate Followup – After an influencer posts be sure to followup with them, asking privately how they liked the product, and thanking them for giving it a try. Remind them that you’re a small business and how much you truly appreciate them.
People love knowing they can connect with the founder or early staff at a startup.
Monthly Communication – The more you can get influencers involved in your company, the better. Create a dedicated e-mail series every month for all influencers who you worked with and share company updates, new store launched, new products, personal updates, and anything shareworthy.
You can also launch internal leaderboards with prizes. Company swag makes a great gift for influencers hitting certain milestones like number of posts or the amount of affiliate revenue.
B2B companies maintain relationships with their clients using a CRM. We can learn from them and maintain all our relationships in an Influencer Relationship Management platform, so you never miss out on following up or checking in with one of your long-term partners.
This can be done in Klaviyo with tags, Hubspot, or SARAL.
You’d be surprised how much impact it has on your bottom line too!
By leveraging ambassador programs, Liquid Death successfully made canned water a trendy and desirable product among Gen Zs.
They’ve gone beyond the typical social media partnerships and recruited a diverse range of ambassadors, including students, creators, and even celebrities.
They work with unique and talented creators, like skydivers and skateboarders, to create viral content that perfectly aligns with the brand’s identity. And with reposting creator content on their social media channels, they’re maximizing the impact of their efforts.
Athletic Greens mastered influencer marketing for maximum ROI and went on to become a $150m brand.
Athletic Greens’ influencer marketing strategy is a great example of how to create authentic partnerships that drive engagement and sales.
They’ve created a dedicated partner page that helps them get inbound leads for influencers and offers customized partnerships. They focus on partnering with creators who are also customers, creating natural advocates for the product.
Athletic Greens creates landing pages that are themed for specific creators and offer reviews from health experts and other customers, adding social proof. The brand also creates unique promo offers for each of its creators and uses whitelisting to reach new audiences with paid ads that uses the influencer’s social credibility.
Glossier utilized an ambassador program to make their skincare and makeup products a staple in the routines of five million individuals.
Glossier’s ambassador program strategy involves creating customizable products that inspire customers to create high-quality content, which Glossier then shares and reposts to build a sense of community.
This approach also attracts talented content creators who are then invited to join the brand’s ambassador program and earn a commission on sales.
By leveraging the barbell strategy of influencer marketing, Glossier balances low-risk, low-upside affiliate-only deals with micro-influencers, and high-risk, high-upside celebrity endorsements to maximize impact.
Glossier’s early strategy also involved creating landing pages for each of its ambassadors, although they have since discontinued the practice. Overall, Glossier’s approach is a lesson in partnering with creators for long-term impact and making them the hero so they keep promoting the products.
With the growing importance of social media in our lives, CPG brands can no longer afford to ignore the potential of influencer marketing in their overall marketing strategy.
By partnering with social media influencers who have a strong following and credibility, CPG brands can create a genuine connection with consumers and build trust around their products. Moreover, influencer marketing provides an opportunity for CPG brands to showcase their products in an authentic way and tap into new audiences, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue.
But let’s be real, the process isn’t easy – unless you have a tool like SARAL to automate the entire process. The best part is that they offer a free trial so you can test it first before you decide to continue with them! Claim Your Free Access >>
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