The increasing demand for social media has ushered in the age of user-generated content and ‘classic ads,’ in which polished models and sets try to persuade us to buy one thing or another, are now getting outdated. Peer reviews and opinions now have far more clout than traditional corporate marketing. Raw, authentic, and unfiltered posts and videos that resonate with their fears, dreams, and desires are what customers want to see.
Marketing agencies and brands recognize the value of user-generated influencer/affiliate marketing. This helps run more profitable, engaging, and targeted campaigns using a data-driven approach.
When brands or marketing agencies form a partnership with someone with huge followers across multiple platforms, this is known as influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing & Product Seeding
Influencers have captivated their audience’s attention, allowing them to establish trust and authority, and, as a result, they are becoming a powerful tool for influencing consumer actions and decisions. We consume content on various social media platforms and are exposed to influencer marketing in most media outlets.
Product seeding is an integral part of any influencer marketing campaign. It’s a strategy that works for all sizes of direct-to-consumer and e-commerce businesses. Product seeding will kick-start your influencer marketing and help you reach your goals, whether you want to drive brand awareness with a giveaway competition or drive sales with a promo code campaign.
Getting your products into the hands of top creators will enable them to create engaging and authentic content that converts at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.
The best way to generate authentic content, incentivize influencers, and increase sales is to send products to creators. Product seeding is the process of sending free products to your influencer network in exchange for the influencer creating content about your product that is then shared with the influencer’s audience on social media.
Best Product Seeding Tactics For Influencer Marketing Campaigns
The following are a few product seeding tips that help brands to be successful with their campaign:
- Determine Your Campaign’s Influencers
You may already have an influencer network, but if you’re just getting started, there are a few strategies that can help you get started. First and foremost, you must choose the influencers who will participate in the campaign. You can use an influencer search tool like Upfluence to find creators who best match your brand by using filters to search a large influencer database.
Another option is to link your online store to your influencer platform and look for influencers in your customer database.
- Select The Products You Want To Offer Your Influencers
After you’ve chosen your influencers and they’ve accepted your invitation to participate in your campaign, you can decide which products you want to seed. The goals of your campaign will determine the products you send to your influencers.
It’s also a good idea to let your influencers choose from a pre-selected list of products. They are aware of their style and the types of products and price points that will appeal to their target market. Include several different styles and colours in your product list if you want to promote your winter coat line, then let your designers choose which one is the most appealing.
- Create Orders & Track Their Shipping process
When you start scaling your influencer marketing efforts, manually managing product orders and shipping becomes too time-consuming and confusing! Brands should look for a solution that automatically collects important order and shipping information, reducing the amount of time spent on manual data entry and increasing efficiency.
Once an influencer has chosen a product, marketers must act quickly to get the product to the influencer in a timely manner so that content creation can begin. The last thing you want is a bottleneck that puts your campaign on hold right from the start. If your product is also your primary source of income, you’ll want to get it out as soon as possible to help build strong relationships.
- Create Authentic Content
Content creation can begin once your influencers have received their products. You’ll need to plan ahead of time to create your influencer brief. This is your chance to explain the campaign’s goals, content formats, which social media channels they should use, and any dos and don’ts.
Define the type of campaign you’re running, such as unboxing, a how-to, a giveaway, or a promo code campaign. An ideal influencer brief provides direction and expectations while allowing your influencers to express their individuality and creativity. After all, creators are social media experts who know how to engage their audience in the most effective way possible.
Conclusion
Seeds may talk more about specific product functionalities and features than overall desirability because companies encourage them to describe their experiences with a new focal product in as much detail as possible.
In addition, they are expected to describe the typical process of obtaining a focal product sample, unwrapping it, inspecting it, trying it out, and determining whether the product performed as expected. They are also more likely to adopt a narrower perspective as a result of this. However, with the help of the tips mentioned above, brands can succeed with their product seeding.
