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February 26, 2024
7 Min
Aspire vs. Influencer Hero: Comparing Two Leading Influencer Marketing Platforms
In this article, we will outline the details of an international expansion campaign into the UK, for which we primarily leveraged influencers.
Context:
Until we started working with this client, most of their sales (95%) were generated in North America, mainly in the US, with around 7-8% of sales coming from Canada.
Based on their market research, they identified the UK as one of their key target markets to accelerate their growth and international presence.
A couple of factors played a role in this decision:
Several months before Easter, we met with the client and proposed our plan. Keep an always-on influencer channel where we “test” new influencers each month to identify high-performing influencers who will be welcomed to our brand ambassador program. Working with affiliate & gifting campaigns in this stage allowed us to keep costs low while identifying top-performing influencers.
Up until the launch of the easter campaign, we had identified a solid group of performing influencers, which we then used to organise an easter campaign. Read our detailed article, 10X+ ROI with influencer seasonality campaigns, here.
The client operated within the home & living sector, and we knew that gifting during family get-togethers was the key purchasing moment. This is why we wanted to start early to ensure customers get their gifts in time to come together with their families during Easter.
The ideal timeline to start your influencer seasonality campaign was 3 weeks before the gift date. This date allows 2 whole weeks of purchasing time + 1 week of shipping to get the gift in time. Balancing the timing is crucial as you don’t want to start too early, where getting a gift is not top of mind yet. Still, you also want to avoid starting late, as your potential customers might have already purchased the gift or get hesitant due to the risk of not getting the gift in time.
Below is the invitation email we send out to our existing influencers. Click here for all easter campaign templates, including influencer invite, follow-up, negotiation, and closing templates.
We typically decide how to allocate budgets based on past performance. We use a simple Google sheet to export the data we need to forecast expected sales based on which we can allocate budgets.
Below, you can find an overview of the data you need to forecast budgets:
Simply put, you want to forecast how many sales you can expect and decide what % of the expected revenue you can afford to bring the influencer on board.
To calculate this:
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A risk is always involved, as a post could perform less compared to previous posts. It could, however, also be the other way around. That being said, to hedge the downside, we typically prefer to work with a combination of fixed payments and a performance-based affiliate structure to balance this out with medium to lower-performing influencers. With high-performing influencers, working only with a fixed component is typically more cost-effective.
Now, getting back to the easter campaign, there are typically three possible outcomes once you have invited your influencers.
Below, you can find the templates for each of these scenarios.
In the realm of influencer marketing, establishing effective communication is crucial. It’s important to be aware that influencers receive numerous messages on a daily basis, so it’s essential to follow up frequently. This process can be streamlined using Influencer Hero, which allows for the automation of influencer outreach through drip campaigns and email sequences scheduled in advance.
When it comes to negotiations, it’s imperative to make your proposition as enticing as possible, even when working within budget constraints. Highlight all the benefits and gifts, and lay out the opportunities for generating extra income via your affiliate program.
After securing agreement from your influencers, ensure that the products are sent out promptly, considering any shipping durations. Our influencer gifting functionality integrates seamlessly with CMS platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, facilitating the direct and effortless sending of products to influencers.
The effort doesn’t stop with the dispatching of products. It’s also necessary to provide reminders to your influencers before your campaign’s launch using the following template.
After the influencers have shared their posts, which our Influencer User-Generated Content (UGC) feature automatically tracks, expressing your gratitude to them is crucial. Additionally, encourage them to keep sharing information about your ongoing promotion.
For this purpose, utilize the template provided below:
Hold off on relaxing just yet. In the case of seasonal campaigns the majority of revenue is amassed during the concluding days of the promotion, as illustrated in the screenshot that follows. You can see the spikes in the analytics screenshot. Typically, you see a spike on launch day with slightly lower sales in between as it is often difficult to keep up momentum and a spike at the end of the campaign where we leverage urgency and FOMO to get additional posts and where conversions spike as customers don’t want to miss out on the offer.
Use the template below to max your posting rate at the end of your campaign, as these are often the days that contribute most to sales.
Now that your campaign has ended, thank all the influencers who participated using the template below.
You might think this is a lot of work, which is true. However, hard work pays off. The ROI on these campaigns often exceed 10X+, which is very difficult to achieve using paid channels.
through these campaigns, you also collect a lot of UGC, which can be reutilised through paid channels. With long-lasting clients, we do the same campaigns each year, which is why we can boost the videos from previous campaigns through paid social. We then get access to the influencer's social media account so we can run the videos through their profile. This process is called influencer whitelisting and allows you to automate your influencer program while keeping the same organic and genuine impression. Read more about our paid advertising services on Meta here.
If you are interested in replicating this for your brand schedule a free consultation with one of our Media Experts below!
Schedule a Demo with one of our media experts below.
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