Utilizing Influencer Marketing In Ecommerce

If you want to run a solid influencer marketing campaign, DON’T make the same mistake Febreze made partnering with Khloe Kardashian. Here’s what happened: Febreze is best known for fighting odors. Khloe Kardashian is known as a ‘neat freak.’ Sounds like a good match. But when Khloe posed on a bed, surrounded by Febreze bottles, claiming to have used Febreze Fabric on her bed (for years, mind you) — the BS radar went off. The media had a field day. It’s painfully obvious that Khloe isn’t a lifelong Febreze fan. Nobody believed her. And when that happens, the influencer loses credibility, the brand drives no sales, and the audience tunes out. This post was a major flop. A cheap attempt to trick her audience into buying a product she clearly doesn’t care about. So, what’s a brand got to do? Build real relationships with influencers who share your product with their followers because they genuinely love it and use it. Product seeding is a great way to accomplish this: 1. Send products to influencers, no strings attached. If they like it, they post about it. 2. Ask for usage rights so we can run ads on their content (that’s how you never run out of creatives). 3. Get fresh ad creatives without expensive photoshoots. 4. Organic traction signals Meta to boost your ads. Working with the right influencers and build real relationships is how you avoid scandals like this.

Last month, Storylane drove over 700,000+ impressions through influencer marketing. And at the start of the year, I had no idea how to make this channel perform consistently. I had no playbook, no proven process, and no ideas. So, I experimented. A lot. And while we’re still figuring it out, here’s what I’ve learned so far: 1. Smaller creators are outperforming larger ones for us Smaller creators often produce better, more authentic content. They’re typically more affordable, work harder, and deliver results with a hyper-focused audience. Larger influencers charge a premium, and the content often feels average. Exceptions exist, but they’re rare. 2. Build a curated influencer portfolio. There are more great influencers out there than your budget can handle. Start small, experiment, and refine a curated portfolio of creators who align with your goals, budget, and audience. This takes trial and error, so don’t rush it. Your “go-to” influencers will emerge over time. 3. Three months is enough to evaluate an influencer. In three months, you’ll know if the partnership is worth continuing. It’s enough time to assess content quality, audience engagement, and impact. 4. Set up clear contracts with influencers Include everything in writing: - Who owns the content? - Can you run ads with it? - Will they engage with your posts? - How many posts will they deliver? Clarity now saves confusion later. 5. Influencer costs vary... a lot. Pricing is all over the place, but here's a starting point. For this platform, expect $500–$2,000 per post for influencers with fewer than 100K followers. Bigger names might quote $5K or more. The highest I’ve seen is $650k per post (no joke). Decide what’s worth it based on your goals and their audience quality. 6. Influencer onboarding matters. Hop on a 1:1 call to align. Share your knowledge, past successes, and internal data. Learn their creative process and set expectations. The better you collaborate upfront, the smoother the partnership. 7. Influencer program management is a full-time job. I tried juggling this alongside my other responsibilities, and it’s a lot. Between sourcing, contracts, payments, content review, and feedback, the workload multiplies with every creator. Bring in outside help if you can afford it or upskill someone internally. 8. Give creators creative freedom. Over-controlling a creator’s content kills authenticity. Work closely on the brief to give them all the context they need, but let their voice shine through. The results are far better when they feel trusted. 9. Ethics build trust (with influencers and your buyers) Always disclose influencer partnerships (FTC compliance isn’t optional). I see a lot of brands and creators not disclose these partnerships (on LinkedIn, in private communities, Slack groups etc.) and it's WRONG. Don't trick your buyers. Be honest. We’re still learning, but this channel is showing promise, and I plan to scale it further in 2025.

The mega-influencer era just died, and nobody sent out a memo. While brands were busy throwing millions at celebrities with perfect feeds, Nike quietly shifted the game. In 2023, micro-influencers carried 52% of Nike's media impact value according to Launchmetrics data; not A-listers, not mega-stars, but everyday fitness enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Glossier, Inc. built a billion-dollar empire by turning 500+ customers into brand ambassadors, and SEPHORA's #SephoraSquad is pulling record numbers with 16,000+ applications this year alone. So apparently, authenticity fatigue is real. When your audience can smell a paycheck from three posts away, smart brands like ASOS.com and HelloFresh are betting on genuine conversations instead of staged perfection. Nike isn't just working with elite athletes anymore, they're partnering with your local yoga teacher. Glossier, Inc.? They made every customer feel like an influencer. The data backs it up: micro-influencers drive better engagement and ROI. But the real story? Brands are finally realizing that influence isn't about follower counts. It's about trust. And trust gets built in DMs and comment sections, not billboards and Super Bowl ads. The future belongs to brands brave enough to hand their reputation to people who actually use their products. Are you still chasing follower counts, or building real communities?

I don’t gatekeep my influencer discovery tricks—because when we all get better at this, the whole ecosystem wins. 🫶 If you're trying to find creators who actually convert, here are two of my favorite (and underrated) tips 1️⃣ Look at who's commenting. Not bots. Not other influencers. Regular people. If someone can consistently get real, everyday followers to comment on IG posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, or even Substack threads—it’s a strong signal that their audience is dialed in and influenced by them. 2️⃣ Ask for link click data. IG Story clicks from the last 30 days, or top YouTube video link clicks. This is gold. From there, plug in your site’s average conversion rate and model out potential sales. Better yet? Walk the influencer through their projected earnings. It builds trust and gets them excited to perform. Let’s stop guessing and start scaling. #influencermarketing #performancemarketing

Plot twist: Your influencer campaigns could be performing 10x better than you think 📊 Most brands are massively underestimating their influencer ROI because they're only looking at discount codes. Real example from our agency:  → Client thought cost per customer: $1,000 (based on discount codes) → Actual cost per customer: $82 (based on pixel data) → That's 92% of customers going untracked! 🤯 The attribution reality: Even our most sophisticated clients with seamless tracking see a minimum 40% "halo effect" of unattributed sales. For luxury/considered purchases? We're talking 100%+ unattributed impact. Why this happens: → People screenshot products and buy later → They share with friends who purchase → They search your brand name directly → They purchase but don't use the code. What to track instead:  ✅ Pixel data and site behavior analysis ✅ Brand lift surveys ✅ Search traffic spikes ✅ Overall sales velocity during campaign periods ✅ Customer journey mapping The takeaway: If you're only measuring discount code redemptions, you're probably missing the majority of your influencer marketing impact. Time to dig deeper into your data. Your CFO will thank you. How are you measuring the true impact of your influencer campaigns? #InfluencerMarketing #MarketingAnalytics #Attribution #ROI #Data #performancemarketing

Nik Sharma might be the 🐐 of influencer marketing. Here are 18 of my favorite lessons from Nik on the power of influencer marketing + the right way to approach it as a brand: 1. By partnering with influencers, brands are able to integrate their products into a relevant community with a high conversion rate at a relatively low cost. 2. Fans expect influencers to promote products they care about. 3. Most influencers only want to work with brands that they believe in and promote products on their social channels that they would use. 4. More than 41% of consumers get more interested in a brand when they partner with a celebrity or influencer they love. 5. Traditional brands follow this template: Select the influencers. Give them free products + discount code. Pay them for a sponsored post. This approach is purely transactional and sets up the influencer marketing campaign for failure. 6. The goal of influencer marketing shouldn't be to pay them for sponsored content. Instead, you should develop a meaningful relationship that is beneficial for both parties. 7. Successful influencer partnerships are based on trust—not reach. 8. If brands are so focused on their return on investment, they can overlook the value social media influencers provide. 9. The best influencer marketing campaigns are multi-faceted. 10. Successful influencer marketing campaigns build brand loyalty, decrease customer acquisition costs, and enable marketers to track influencer-driven impact on a performance level. 11. By forging a relationship with the influencers you’re working with, they’re more likely to post about your brand without you even having to ask. This content is more native than the old-fashioned branded content with #ad front-in-center in the copy. 12. You need to find influencers with audiences that is closely aligned with your target market. 13. Find influencers who believe in your product. If they don’t, the content they create won’t resonate. 14. Offer to provide your product to the influencer to test before they have to commit. 15. When you work with an influencer that truly believes in your brand and appreciates your product, the content that they create is gold. 16. Don’t solely focus on the number of followers they have or their content, but rather, pick influencers that have a high engagement rate and have values, goals, and ethics that align with your brand. 17. Brands that treat influencers as partners as opposed to paid marketing channels will see the value in their campaigns. To take this approach, brands need to work collaboratively and focus on long-term gains rather than short-term revenue. 18. By selecting the right influencers, crafting your pitch, and maximizing your success, you’ll get more out of the partnership than a one-time increase in sales. You’ll get an entirely new audience to work with and an ambassador that’s sharing your product in effective, engaging ways. #influencermarketing #niksharma #marketing

Influencer marketing has come a long way. What started as “pay for a post” is now a $21B industry. But here’s the problem: too many brands are still measuring success with likes, comments, and follower counts. Vanity metrics are easy to report, but they don’t answer the question every CEO and CFO asks us as CMOs: Is this driving growth? It’s time to rewrite the rules. ✅ Quality over Quantity The right audience matters more than reach. Micro- and mid-tier creators often deliver deeper trust and better conversions than celebrities. ✅ Commerce over Clicks Influencers aren’t just amplifiers anymore, they’re storefronts. TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and affiliate programs prove that influence = transactions. ✅ LTV over Impressions Customers acquired through trusted voices are often more loyal. That’s long-term value we can measure. ✅ Brand Halo Influencers build cultural relevance and trust in ways paid ads simply can’t. At impact.com, we’ve seen this shift firsthand. Brands use our platform to track every stage of influence, from discovery to commerce impact to lifetime value. By connecting influencer partnerships with performance data, we help marketers prove what we already know: influence is one of the most accountable, growth-driving channels out there. The mandate for CMOs is clear: stop treating influencer marketing as “nice-to-have” brand spend. Start treating it as a core growth channel. Because in the end, influence isn’t about how many people are watching. It’s about how many people are buying.

A few months ago I was on call with the CMO of a $25M+ brand. They had just wrapped up a 100 person influencer campaign. Guess how many were ROI positive? Seven. Just seven. This wasn't a failure of the other 93 creators. This was a clear indication something was fundamentally broken in how they did influencer marketing. We went through a simple 5-step checklist to that could be applied immediately. If you're a brand in a similar situation, here's how to go from "influencer marketing doesn't work" to "we need more creators!" 1. Introduce New Data Most brands model off of CPMs, never looking at actual performance. Use social commerce platforms to include actual conversion performance. Display it all against rates to sort by projections we actually care about: CPA, CPC, etc... 2. Measure Alignment Use this data to now measure actual alignment with your brand. Things like AOV, content relevance, messaging... The surface level connection is not enough. 3. Focus on Audience A creator's demographic matters less than their audience demographics. Look at the age, gender, geography of their audience. Plenty of creators that fit your demographic but have an entirely different audience demographic and vice versa. 4. Generate Creative Outlines from Creators Bring creators into the planning stages, letting them shape your creative outline. The right messaging and style is more likely to come from them than you. Then turn this into a content brief that provides direction but is not a script. Let creators do what they do best. 5. Treat Content as the Asset The reach you get from a creator is valuable, but the content they've created is far more valuable when used correctly. Setup whitelisting, repurposing to your own socials - get the most utilization out of every single video. -- Creator marketing works. But it's not 2017 anymore - sending product and seeing what happens is not a strategy. Dig in. Build the right strategy. Find the right creators. Let them do their thing. Maximize their content.

We’ve generated ~6M impressions for our clients at Creatorbuzz. Our most successful influencer campaigns leverage these 5 tactics 👇 1️⃣ Video-first We’re still seeing great engagement from text and image-based content, however, our clients who are leveraging video content are seeing higher impressions and engagement. Influencers who can make great video content will win in 2025. 2️⃣ Real World Application Lots of B2B Marketers think Influencer Marketing only works if the influencers are customers of their products. While that helps, this is not the case. The Influencers just need to have a real world application for the product. The product needs to be able to solve an actual problem the influencer experiences or has experienced in their day job. The audience can see right through it if not. 3️⃣ High Value Resource If your CTA is a demo page, you might need to re-evaluate your influencer strategy. In B2B, sales cycles can be 3-6 months long (sometimes even longer). And demos are usually only requested AFTER the buyer has already done 80% of their research. So by having your influencers share a demo page, this will lead to a poor conversion rate. Instead, have your influencers share a high value resource to help buyers through the funnel. For example, have them share a resource report, some sort of template, or free certification. Anything that provides immediate value. 4️⃣ Full Funnel Content Some campaigns are strictly for brand awareness, while others are more performance based. Duh. However, I’ve noticed our best campaigns have full-funnel content. I recommend using a mix of different types of influencers to achieve this. Select some influencers who make general content in the “Marketing” space that will guarantee you impressions. Then select a few SMEs within each category that will provide more specific content within a niche of Marketing, like MOPs for example. The SMEs may not have as large of a reach, but it will help you target a specific community with tactical advice. 5️⃣ 3 Month Campaign Minimum All of our clients start on a 3-4 month campaign minimum. Why? A few reasons. (1) For the influencers, they’re not interested in signing one off brand deals anymore. (2) In B2B, given the length of sales cycles, it may take a few months to start seeing an impact- especially, if the company has an awareness problem. (3) This 3 month campaign will be a great testing period to see what’s working and what’s not. After the 3 months are up, companies can now extend longer term agreements to the creators who are the best fit. B2B companies will have “Always On” influencer campaigns just like they would for Advertising. These are just some of the tactics our best clients are leveraging for their Influencer campaigns. What else would you add to the list? Interested in launching a B2B Influencer Campaign for your business? Send me a DM 🤝

The 3 Fatal Mistakes Killing Your Creator Recruitment After building creator communities for almost 100 brands, I've seen a clear pattern emerge. Most are sabotaging their efforts before they even begin. Mistake #1: Obsessing Over Personalization Counterintuitive but true: Sending simple, pointed messages to 5,000 creators beats spending hours on "personalized" outreach to 50. Brands waste time crafting messages creators instantly recognize as templates-with-names-inserted. Meanwhile, their community stalls at 20-30 creators. Volume beats personalization when building a scaled creator community. Save the personal touch for those who respond. Mistake #2: Not Enough Outreach Volume The math is brutal: 10% response rate 50% opt-in from responses Goal: 100 creators monthly You need to contact 4,000+ qualified creators monthly. Most brands hit 200 opt in. One of our clients scaled from 500 to 4,000 monthly influencers outreached. Creator acquisition jumped from 12 to 137 per month. Mistake #3: Panicking Over Support Tickets Every scaled outreach strategy will generate support tickets. But that's not a bad thing. It creates an opportunity to confirm that it's real while directing them where they can sign up. Brands often slash recruitment after creators hit their support email asking if it's legit. The answer isn't fewer messages. It's better systems for handling routine requests. These tickets are the cost of building a massive creator community, not evidence of a flawed strategy. The brands winning aren't doing anything magical. They are writing simple outreach copy, sending emails to 4k+ influencers a month, and building systems to eliminate as much friction for creators as possible. What mistakes did I miss?