Whether you are looking to increase your brand awareness, or simply build long-term relationships with influencers who represent your business, product seeding (or gifting) is an essential aspect of marketing that can help you reach consumers.
With the rise of social media, brands from various business sectors are able to get their products into the hands of influencers, who in return can produce great results, by simply mentioning the brand name in a sponsored post.
Moreover, getting your products out there is a cost effective way to create authentic, and engaging content, that is shared by a specific public figure.
With such a vast number of influencers these days, it can be difficult to strategize what products to send to the right people, who will reciprocate your brands values effectively.
In this article, we simplify the process by detailing 3 crucial steps that must be considered prior to carrying out this marketing strategy.
- Identify the right person & really get to know them
The first step is to identify the right influencer who will be representing your product and sharing their opinions on it with their followers.
During this planning phase, it’s important to establish who your target audience is, and how you can reach them with the most suitable candidate.
Important things to look out for:
- What is their audience demographic?
- Who have they previously endorsed, and are they aligned with your brand?
- Have they faced any negative feedback in the media?
- What is their engagement like? Will they help generate engagement?
If you’re starting from scratch, it can be difficult and time consuming to find the perfect person who fits all your requirements. Often times, brands work in collaboration with marketing agencies who have a strong network of influencers for you to work alongside. Making the process much easier!
It’s also important to get a feel as to how the influencer tends to engage with their audience.
At the end of the day, they will be sharing their opinions with their followers about your product, and it is important that you are aware as to how they will engage with them and what relevance their page has to your brand.
So our advice is to check out their social media feeds, and truly get an understanding of who they are, and what their interests and values are.
2. Ensuring the right products are gifted to the influencer  Â
If you are a brand that has multiple products within a range, or even various product lines under the same brand name, it is pivotal to choose the right products to be sent out.
Once you have chosen the right ambassador for your ‘campaign’, and they have agreed, it is wise to select certain products depending on the goal you wish to achieve.
Perhaps you have a new range of clothing items, and you’re only looking to increase exposure, or maybe you’re utilizing this strategy to boost sales.
That is where the importance of the first stage comes into play, to assist with evaluating the appropriate insights to decide what products are to be gifted.
An alternative way to go about this, is to send out a list of potential products to that individual, for them to choose what will resonate most with their audience, in order to gauge a little better how your product will be received.
Ultimately, by gifting to influencers, you are giving consumer exactly what they’re looking for – trust and authenticity, and by planning effectively you can make this process much more worthwhile and successful.
3. Managing orders & evaluating results
Measuring the success of the orders you ship out to influencers helps to get an understanding of how well certain products do, but also, how each individual influencer impacts their audience.
A useful tip as to how you can manage these insights is to give each person you gift an item to a personal discount code.
You can see this with a lot of different brands today, where they will present this discount code on the post that they share with their followers. For example, ‘ITP 10’, ensuring that their name is somehow included within the code, to be able to assess how many sales have come via their channel.
Another aspect is to assess the overall success of your campaign, after all, you have set out a budget and lot of time to carry this gift seeding strategy out.
Therefore, it’s important that you can go back and analyze against your KPI’s and intended goals for the campaign.
Like with many things these days, consumer behaviors have changed overtime, and we often seek recommendations from others to guide us in our purchase decision making process.
Branding, recognition, and overall exposure are critical to the success of any business, and by using an influencer to attain this is a wonderful marketing strategy.
Selecting the appropriate public figure will generate a lot of media attention for your business, and creates a lot of ‘discussion’ and can be a contributing driving force to increase sales.
Research from Connect with Influencers depicts that, social media engagement has increased by 67% above normal usage rates. So the numbers really do speak for themselves when it comes to the concept of product seeding.
If you do the correct groundwork beforehand, and maintain long-term reciprocal relationships with the influencers you work alongside, you can most definitely widen your consumer reach and design these campaigns in such a manner that elicits favorable brand awareness.
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