Why Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Isn’t Driving Product Sales

Have you struggled to show the correlation between product sales and Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing is a great public relations tool. It can send key message points to your target audience and allows you to engage with them to show you care. It grows your community of devoted customers and allows you to gather information about them. More than anything, Influencer Marketing will boost your brand credibility and has the potential to position your brand as an expert in your industry. But, can it also drive sales? If you’re building a strong community who knows your brand and what you stand for, why aren’t you seeing an increase in sales, too?

Influencer Marketing can drive sales if you know how to optimize your campaign for sales and know where to look for the results. This post will take a deeper look and provide explanations as to why Influencer Marketing doesn’t drive sales.

This Post at a Glance

The Reasons Why Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Isn’t Driving Product Sales

Influencer Marketing is a powerful tool when driving sales. It can drive the needed knowledge, trust, reviews, and image that customers need to make a purchasing decision. You can add trackable links and measure instant conversions, but influencer activations will drive sales long past the campaign. This is exactly what makes sales through Influencer Marketing so powerful but also extremely hard to track. On the bright side, studies show that 83 percent of people discover new products or services on social media and 80 percent make a purchasing decision.

If that’s true, why are businesses having a hard time driving sales through Influencer Marketing? Let’s look at why influencer Marketing may not be driving sales for your brand.

Too Many Product Sales Terms

The reason why Influencer Marketing is a successful marketing tactic is because it allows the chance for real people (the influencers) to give real reviews (the social shares). These shares will not only share more information about the brand’s product and/or services, but they will also help answer questions about the brand.

When influencers start reading scripts like a radio commercial, including all of the key sales terms, the authenticity quickly dies away. Pushing a hard sales script on an influencer is not likely to be accepted by the influencer or their followers. Even if it is coming from a trusted influencer, marketing campaigns that are focused solely on sales instead of helping their viewers are easy to sniff out.

Too Few Key Product Sales Terms

On the other hand, you need to acknowledge that getting sales is your key objective. Therefore, your Influencer Marketing campaign strategy should use tactics that lead to that end goal. Understanding what exactly it is you want people to do at each stage of the process will help lead them to the ultimate goal of purchasing your product.

Sales Related CTA

While giving your influencers a script to follow is a big “no” in the Influencer Marketing industry, it is still advised to give them key message points to include as they discuss their product with their following. For example, make sure you and your influencer know your call to action (CTA). Here are a few examples:click here to check it out, swipe up to buy, or enter your email for a coupon. As you properly collaborate with your influencer, you and the influencer can find messages that will engage consumers and encourage them to act.

Unique Product Value

Along with a clear CTA, you can also provide your influencer(s) with other information that will help them sell your product. For example, encourage influencers to share the benefits of your products, explain how it can help their followers solve their current problems, and discuss why it is unique from other competitors. Allow influencers to pick what message points they and their followers most relate to and to share them in their own voice. This will provide their audience with the authenticity they are looking for while also providing them with the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Urgency

Including a sense of urgency in your CTA is a great way to not only increase sales but also correlate them to a specific campaign. Again, it’s pivotal you work with your influencer(s) to ensure this doesn’t come off as too salesy. However, that doesn’t mean you should be afraid to use sales techniques. Integrating a sense of urgency into your CTA can not only boost sales, but it also helps give authenticity to your influencer(s) by showing that they have an “in” with the brand because they know or have something that other people don’t (e.g., a coupon code that only lasts for 24 hours).

Hard to Find Purchase Links

Sales through Influencer Marketing can also fail because the products or services are hard to access. Make purchasing as easy as possible by providing quick links to purchase or to get a coupon.

Currently, the easiest direct links for influencers to include in their content include:

swipe up on their Instagram stories
links in their live Instagram and YouTube videos

Of course, you should always ask influencers to include your brand links in their social profile bios, in their content copy, or on third party platforms they might be using such as their LIKEtoKNOW.it page.

Tip! Just be sure to include these requirements in your influencer contract. Some influencers might charge a higher fee if they will be required to include a link in their social media bios.

Intangible Products

One of the best sales techniques across the board is to actually get the product into your consumer’s hands. Did you know that 49 percent of customers said that not being able to touch, feel, or try a product is one of their least favorite aspects of online shopping? This proves hard in our ecommerce world. However, influencers make it more than possible in ways that other online marketing methods can’t. If your goal is sales, use influencers to make your product as tangible as possible.

Because of the authenticity of influencer content, consumers can get a good idea of how your product or service performs without needing to experience it for themselves. If you want to see an increase in sales, use influencer video content to show the product or service from all angles. Videos convey a clear message and result in a significant increase of engagement when compared to static images. This is because the influencers can touch the product, show it in use, get up close, and explain the aspects of the product that the viewer can’t understand, such as the texture, feel, smell, and taste.

Influencer Marketing is also ideal for distributing products and allowing consumers to experience your product or service. For example, influencers can host sampling parties and give away your product to their friends and followers.

Influencer-Hosted Events

Influencer-hosted events are great for sales because you physically put the product into the hands of your target audience allowing them to have not only the touch and try experience that is going to turn them into repeat customers but also a VIP experience which grows a special connection to the brand and incites consumers to share the product with others.

Giveaways

Giveaways are a helpful sales booster. Not only do you get all the perks of extra engagement and impressions, you also put it in the minds of the consumers that they want your product.

Gifting

Gift giving will provide the influencer with your product and also allow them to give it one to giveaway winner. This puts the product into more hands. It also shows your audience how they can use the product as a gift. In doing so, you are encouraging them to purchase not just one for his/herself, but maybe one for a friend as well … which is excellent for marketing.

Hidden Results

The last reason why your Influencer Marketing campaign might not be driving sales is because the results aren’t where they are expected to be. Where should you really be looking at the correlation between Influencer Marketing and sales?

First of all, it is crucial you determine what you want a conversion to look like. For example, it’s easy to want to know the exact number of people who purchased your product because of your Influencer Marketing campaign. This is where proper tracking is important. Ensure your campaign is using links with UTM codes and effective landing pages. You want the conversions to be tracked as easily as possible.

While direct sales correlation is great, sales from Influencer Marketing doesn’t stop there. Influencer Marketing continues to drive conversions from all corners of the buying process. To see the highest increase in sales, influencer content should be pushed to all areas of your sales funnel. The content should also be watched to prove high ROI.

Website Reviews

Potential customers will likely arrive at your product page from a variety of sources—whether organically or through other paid promotions. Pushing your influencer review to your product page can increase the conversions of other potential buyers. On average, product page visitors who interact with customer reviews convert at a 58 percent higher rate compared to those who do not. Plus, sites with featured UGC see a 20 percent increase in return visitors.

Digital Advertising

Digital ads are another way to use Influencer Marketing to drive sales. In fact, ads with User Generated Content (UGC) generate 5x greater click-through-rates (CTRs) than brand advertising. This can be executed by turning influencer creative into ads from the influencer’s or the brand’s social ads manager accounts. Adding a button that drives viewers to purchase is a great way to increase conversions and track them. By repurposing influencer content on your own page, you can also add the eCommerce touch. You can add product tags to influencer images and promoting them through paid digital advertising.

Emails

Retailers in the US receive 24 percent of their revenue share using email marketing. Using influencers to introduce products to new markets is an effective way to increase email acquisition and in return, sales. Plus, using your influencer content in your emails has been proven to drive a 73 percent increase in email CTRs. That’s a pretty significant increase!

Wrap it up

Influencer Marketing will always be key for credibility, awareness, and genuine conversations with your followers. However, there’s no reason why it can’t push a product sales agenda at the same time. To drive sales through Influencer Marketing, be sure your influencers provide followers with the information they need to make a decision. Instead of giving your influencers an advertisement to read, give them a clear CTA and allow them the creative freedom to get their followers to act. A good way to accomplish that is either through video or by enlisting the help of influencers to place the brand product in the hands of their friends and followers. Lastly, ensure your influencer content is pushed to different parts of the sales funnel to see an increase in sales.

How will you make sure your Influencer Marketing campaign will drive product sales?

Sources