How to successfully run influencer marketing campaigns and manage a logistical ramp-up?

In this article, we share with you some tips to help you make the most of your influencer campaigns! And since your influence marketing usually results in significant sales peaks, we'll also explain how to adapt your logistics to this surge.

8 best practices for successful influencer marketing campaigns

1. Set measurable objectives

Do you want to generate sales? Develop your community? Benefit from high visibility with a targeted audience? Generate leads?

Choose your goal and build your influencer campaign strategy accordingly. Depending on the objective you choose, the KPIs you will follow will differ: number of sales generated by the campaign, number of new subscribers, engagement rate, number of impressions... Set numerical objectives: they will help you measure the campaign's performance later on.

2. Choose the right social network

Twitter or Facebook? Instagram or Tik Tok? YouTube or Twitch? To determine which social network to promote on, first think about your target audience (gender, age, interests...).

Then, analyze their social network consumption mode. Does your target prefer textual, photographic or video content? Short or long formats? Fun or serious? Do not hesitate to create personas to help you.

3. Collaborate with the right influencers

Choosing the right influencers is critical to the success of your campaign. Take the time to establish a list of influencers whose editorial line, tone and values you appreciate. Check that their audience is in line with yours.

The temptation to choose only influencers with millions of followers is great. But it is often preferable to use micro-influencers, or even nano-influencers, who may have smaller communities but more relevant and better targeted ones.

Also, avoid "isandwich influencers" who want to earn money above all, even if it means offering their subscribers a large majority of sponsored publications.

4. Contacting influencers properly

To conclude a collaboration with the influencers you have identified, it is important to take care of your contact method. Therefore, avoid sending a standardized or copy/pasted email to each influencer.

Personalize your initial contact by sincerely explaining your approach and what you liked about the editorial line of the person you are contacting.

5. Define the budget of your influencer campaigns

Collaborating with an influencer is not necessarily free, and offering a sample of your product or service is not always enough. The visibility, engagement and sales generated thanks to collaborations with influencers must be rewarded.

This counterpart can be a product giveaway for example, in which case the brand must pay special attention and offer products that can really interest the influencer and that are in line with them (content, passions, community), but also with the time they will take to create the content.

The compensation can also be financial. The more the influencers are followed by a large number of people, the more they are solicited by the brands and negotiate the sponsorship at a high price. It is then possible to agree on a fixed amount to start the collaboration, or to define a variable amount that will depend for example on the number of sales generated.

6. Contractualize the terms and conditions

The service provided by the influencer must be contractualized. The contract must mention the administrative information of both parties and summarize the course of the service (number of publications planned by the influencer, duration of the campaign, editorial requirements...). The reward (remuneration or product endowment) must of course be specified, and additional clauses (confidentiality, retraction...) can be added.

7. Monitor your campaigns

It is important to monitor the performance of your influencer campaigns. As mentioned before, you can start by defining the KPIs to follow according to your objectives.

If the influencer campaign extends over several publications, analyze these KPIs throughout all the campaign in order to correct the situation if necessary. Once the campaign is over, monitoring will allow you to identify good practices and areas of improvement to work on for the next ones.

8. Get support

There are many aspects to take into account in order to run a successful influencer campaign. Fortunately, some companies offer solutions to relieve e-merchants of this complex and time-consuming work.

This is the case of Hivency, a platform that allows brands to identify and contact the micro-influencers that fits their needs thanks to a matching system. The whole campaign then takes place on the platform, from the selection of influencers to the analysis of the ROI. A great way to simply test influencer marketing!

Now that you know how to launch a marketing campaign, you have to be aware of the fact that if your campaigns are successful, you will probably soon experience a peak in sales on your website... and a correspondingly higher volume of goods to be shipped. To cope with this influx of orders, calling on a specialized service provider can bring you a lot.

Why outsourcing your logistics is the best way to manage your campaigns' sales peaks?

1. Anticipate logistic peak

There is nothing worse than realizing at the moment of the influx of orders that you will not be able to ensure the delivery of the packages to the final recipients in time - especially in the case of influence campaigns, which usually imply shipping a very large number of orders in a short period of time. If you don't anticipate enough, you run the risk of deteriorating the customer experience and compromising your image. In order not to be caught off guard by the peaks generated by your influencer campaigns, it is crucial to anticipate their potential success: being accompanied by the right logistics partner can prove to be a crucial asset in this context.

2. Benefit from the expertise of a specialist

Working with a specialist in e-commerce logistics also means being able to rely on his expertise and benefit from his know-how, in order to manage the peak. Thanks to Cubyn's automated processes and algorithms, for example, service quality and delivery times remain optimal, whether you have 100 or 10,000 packages to ship. Such standards are much more difficult to reach with your own logistics management, and this way of working will necessarily reveal much more time-consuming. Such a logistic organization avoids having to multiply contracts with carriers for example, while remaining able to monitor all your operations remotely thanks to a monitoring platform.

3. Save money

The interest of entrusting the logistic management of your influence campaigns to a third party is also financial. Indeed, the large number of parcels sent daily by a logistician allows him to realize significant economies of scale, which will result in lowering your invoices. Most of the providers will also offer you discounts according to the number of parcels shipped per month, which is a significant advantage in the framework of influence campaigns.

4. Build a strong relationship with a partner you can trust

Outsourcing your logistics to an external service provider means building a long-term partnership. Relying on such a relationship of trust is an opportunity for you to completely evacuate the pressure and pain points related to logistics and to focus only on your core business and the development of the brand. Moreover, a logistics expert will be able to take on a consulting role with your brand, in order to help you anticipate the highlights of the year (Christmas, Black Friday, sales...) more serenely. With his support, your customers will be delivered on time and will benefit from an optimal customer experience, and you will be better able to retain them and make your influencer campaigns profitable.

Ship with Cubyn and improve your sales!

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