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February 26, 2024
7 Min
Aspire vs. Influencer Hero: Comparing Two Leading Influencer Marketing Platforms
Every year Americans spend over $20 billion on Father’s day making it an ideal opportunity to boost sales for your D2C brand.
Other key Father’s day statistics every merchants should know:
Now that we know what a great opportunity Father’s day is, let's dive in and look how you can capitalise on this opportunity. There is no better way to drive sales during a gifting season than through influencers and being included in their gift guides.
In this article we will walk you through a $30K Father’s day case study to illustrate how you can drive sales using influencers from this upcoming Father’s day.
To fully understand the context let's go back a couple of months when we started the influencer program for this client. We recommended to start working with an affiliate & gifting campaign in order to keep the cost low in the earlier stages to identify high performing influencers with which we can build long lasting relationships.
We constantly stress the 80/20 principle in influencer marketing which follows a very strong power law distribution. This concept becomes more profound and what we typically observe is that around 5-10% of the influencers we work with generate over 80% of the revenue in influencer marketing.
That being said, we ideally want to keep costs low in the beginning stages as we don’t know yet which influencers will be able to sell. We call this process “testing influencers”. We used Influencer Hero’s affiliate marketing integration to track sales and clicks.
By running this program for a couple of months we identified a solid group of performing influencers which we then invited to our Father’s day campaign. In order to effectively manage these relationships we used Influencer Hero’s Influencer CRM which allowed us to bulk send emails, automate follow ups and streamline our communication efforts.
The first step is the invitation email. Feel free to copy paste the template we used below or access all Father’s day influencer campaign templates here. We typically contact influencers based on past performance data and the files includes both templates for fixed payments as well as for affiliate offers.
INVITATION EMAIL: FIXED PAYMENT + COMMISSION
When contacting influencers always make sure to:
Not all influencers accept your offer right away. Persuasive communication is always crucial when working with influencers. Try to find a middle ground which works for both parties and using past performance data to forecast budgets is the ideal way to justify your cost. In each stage the influencers might stop replying. This doesn’t mean that they are not interested. Keep in mind that they are being contacted by hundreds of fans every day as well as from other brands which are fighting for the influencers attention. Make sure to send follow ups in every stage. With Influencer Hero you can schedule drip sequences to automate this process.
Once the influencers agreed to join the campaign we used Influencer Hero’s automatic product send out feature to quickly dispatch products to influencers. Make sure to start on time so the influencers all have their products which they need to advertise. Influencer Hero directly syncs with your CMS like Shopify or WooCommerce so you can dispatch the products from your Influencer CRM which is ideal for influencer gifting.
Once the influencers agree to join your campaign and you have dispatched the products the work doesn’t stop here. Make sure to send a reminder the day before your campaign launches to the influencers don’t forget to post. Receiving the product should also help as an additional reminder.
You can use the template below to remind your influencers the day before your campaign starts:
Once they post the first time, thank them and remind them that the offer will stay up until a certain date in case they want to continue to give their followers access to the offer. Try to maximise the number of posts you receive during the campaign. It is important here to communicate this in a way without sounding pushy. Always formulate your messages in a way you are asking for a favour even when working with fixed payments. Demanding or dictating typically has a negative effect on the relationship and your campaign.
One of the strongest drivers of conversions is: urgency. Together with social proof and a good offer, urgency is probably one of the biggest triggers to get a consumer to enter their credit card details into your checkout. That is why we always ask the influencers to make a final post when the campaign ends. This typically results in posts where the influencers tell their followers that the sale is ending which leads to an increase in clicks and conversions.This is also visible in the spike at the end in the chart below. We ended the Father’s day campaign on June 19.
Use the template below to ask for a final post when your campaign is about the end.
If you are working with affiliate deals you need to formulate this in an optional way. In case you work with fixed packages and the influencer hasn’t completed the agreed number of posts the request to ask for the post can be more direct. You can access both templates in our father’s day campaign templates here.
Once the campaign has ended make sure to thank all your influencers and inform them that the payment will be processed. With Influencer Hero you can process all influencer payments automatically saving valuable time.
Use the template below to thank your influencers for being part of your campaign. Make sure to do this in a good way so you can ask them to be part of your next campaign.
CAMPAIGN ENDED - THANK YOU EMAIL
Hi {{ firstname|default(influencer_handle) }},
Thank you so much for being a part of this year’s Father’s Day campaign!
It was a great success, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your support. As a small business, we genuinely appreciate it! We look forward to partnering with you again soon :)
Your payment will be processed this week. I’ll let you know once it has been done so you can check your account.
Thank you again for being part of the campaign!
P.S. Your affiliate account will stay active so you continue to earn affiliate commission!
Now that you have finalised everything and paid out the influencers it is time for reporting and analysing your results. Gathering key influencer KPI’s such as clicks, conversions, estimated reach. The required data depends on your situation. If you are working at an agency or larger corporate this might be more detailed compared to the required reporting working at a smaller or medium sized company. For internal campaign reporting you can access our free influencer reporting template here. Within your Influencer Hero account you can also directly access your campaign results which looks as follows and saves a lot of time. NOTE: the numbers are made up for illustration purposes and do not represent actual campaign data.
You will also be able to access a table overview with your top performing influencers.
We hope this case study will help you to prepare and succeed with your upcoming Father’s day campaign!
Schedule a Demo with one of our media experts below.
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