How to Plan and Execute Stellar Influencer Marketing Campaigns for your D2C Brand

The rise in online shopping and creator based economy has reaped great benefits for both influencers and brands in recent times.

As content consumption grows and innovations in digital media rise, brands get to reach a wider audience quicker and exponentially through influencers.

Influencer Marketing has proven to be incredibly helpful for D2C brands who want to break through the clutter on tighter budgets while building trust and credibility for their product.

Influencing no longer means just getting a top celebrity onboard to endorse your brand.

Let me explain through an example.

Say you’re a biking enthusiast and love going on trips with your friends every weekend.

This time, you decided to wear your super comfortable biking jacket before leaving.

As you meet your friends, they start noticing how comfortable you are while riding in hot temperatures. When you stop for a short break, suddenly, you are bombarded with questions.

While you answer, you recommend people to buy this jacket because of its low price, amazing shopping experience and obviously the look, feel and comfort.

VOILA!! You are now an influencer. And that’s exactly how influencer marketing works.

Let’s dive a little deeper into the many advantages of influencer marketing and how you can do it at scale for your D2C brand.

Influencer Marketing is a Must For D2C Brands in Today’s Day and Age

Influencer marketing doesn’t just help you sell more. Take a look at the below benefits.

Increase Credibility and Trust

People are not just influenced by their favourite content creators, but they also look up to them. Working with such influencers helps you build trust with their followers as they start associating your brand with good experiences and results.

Skyrocket Brand Awareness

Since influencers are content creators, they usually come up with smart ways to plug your product within their content. Every time you watch your favourite creator’s reel, you see the product in the background, or they are probably using it visibly. Your audience gets aware of your product, its benefits, and, moreover, your brand.

Ability to Create More Content

Influencers are experts at creating new and fun content angles, which can be repurposed to get more mileage. You can repost, run UGC (user-generated- content) based ads and reach even more people than with just that 15 Second Reel.

Making Easy Purchase Decisions (Increase sales)

Since influencers educate people about your product in a way they know appeals to their target audience, it is easy for customers to choose your product without the hassle of researching on their own.

How to Find Influencers and Go Live with your Next Campaign

The internet is flooded with influencers, and you must ensure that the people you choose to partner with are honest and relevant to your brand.

Here’s how you should do it:

1. Use Technology to Discover

With advancements in AI, it has become very easy for brands to look for relevant influencers and shortlist their favourite ones.
Online tools like Qoruz and Upfluence help you find influencers based on categories like Niche, Followers, Engagement Rate, Trust Score, etc.

2. Start Email Reachout

Once you have locked upon a few influencers you want to partner with, you build an email list and reach out to them by introducing yourself, your brand, and its USPs.

Here’s a free email template that you can use while reaching out to influencers:

Hey [Insert Influencer Name],

I have been following your profile on [insert social media platform] and really loved your post(s) on [insert topic]. [Insert another sentence about their feed that adds a human element].

My name is [insert name here], and I work for [insert company name]. We [insert what you do/sell]. Since [insert what they are passionate about or what they like to post about that coincides with your brand], I thought I would reach out to see if you would be open to testing our product and doing a collaboration together!

Let me know if you are interested, and I will send more details!

Thanks!

[insert your name here]

(Credits: https://www.joinstatus.com/)

3. Create a Content Plan

You are excited to start your campaign, but it’s easy to get lost in this process.

You need to set realistic expectations, finalise the metrics to judge your results with, and come up with a plan that accomplishes your marketing goals while making it easy for influencers to work with you.

Bonus: Here are a few content pillars we recommend starting with-

1. User-Generated Content
2. Testimonials & Tutorials
3. Before-and-after Transformations
4. Product Reviews
5. Reels with Trending Audio
6. Q&As and Live Streams
7. Unboxing videos

4. Setup Tracking: It’s important to measure ROI (Return-on-Investment) for any influencer campaign that you do.

This rich data will help you get better at selecting your influencers, crafting more precise and engaging campaigns, and also tell you which product resonates with your audience more.

There’s not one set metric to help you analyse and make decisions, but you can look at numbers for Reach, Engagement, Website Traffic, Sales, and ROI to make better decisions in the future.

Tools like upfluence can easily integrate with your Shopify store and give you deep insights on the entire journey of your campaign.

5 Influencer Marketing Examples from D2C Brands to get Inspired from

At LimeChat, we closely work with 175+ D2C brands who are doing an amazing job at influencer marketing and using it to its advantage for boosting sales and increasing brand awareness.

These 5 examples can help you inspire and plan your next influencer marketing campaign:

MamaEarth

We all know how big MamaEarth is in the grooming and personal care industry.

The brand placed huge bets on Influencer marketing way back in 2017 when the industry was untapped.

The brand started working with mom influencers and skincare professionals to highlight its USPs to the audience. Its eco-friendly, natural, and cost-effective products have now made it a household name among the gen-z and millennial audience.

Supertails

The Pet care industry is huge, and Supertails has done an amazing job at tapping this market.

The brand collaborated with lifestyle influencers and dog/cat trainers to reach its target audience on Social media platforms like Instagram.

By posting heart-melting dog videos, it has cemented a position in the minds of dog lovers as a go-to pet care brand.

Neeman’s Shoes

Neeman’s Shoes has repeatedly proved its stealth at marketing innovation by leveraging influencer marketing in the best ways possible.

The brand usually partners with nano and micro-influencers and uses its fun and quirky reels to show how its shoes not just elevate comfort but give you a chance to up your fashion game on a budget.

Mcaffeine

The new age coffee grooming brand loves to keep things fresh and simple yet engaging and interesting.

With an Instagram following of more than 400K, the brand regularly partners with influencers ranging from micro-influencers to celebrities like Alia Bhatt.

They also leverage content to communicate product USPs, results, and discount offers, regularly building trust among the followers.

Man Matters

Man Matters is India’s top men’s grooming products brand and has managed to amass a huge social media following with its innovative marketing campaigns.

The brand has partnered with micro-influencers and promoted the idea of men’s grooming to communicate its values and ideology.

The brand currently has 360K Instagram followers and posts informative and entertaining reels from time to time to educate the audience in a fun way.

Don’t Miss out On Influencer Marketing

Now that we know why influencer marketing is necessary and how to do it, your next step is to build relationships with your partners and reward them for their efforts in increasing sales and brand awareness.

It is best to negotiate with influencers before you start working with them.

Creating content is not an easy task, and influencers spend a lot of time conceptualising and creating content for your brand. With data on reach and engagement available beforehand, you can project ROI and growth for your business and negotiate a deal that is a win-win for both parties.

It might be hard to gauge expectations, and that’s why some tools also tell you the industry average for a particular niche and target audience.

That said, influencer marketing campaigns have proven to be a game changer for new-age D2C brands by not just skyrocketing sales but building brand awareness, trust, and credibility among the masses.

About LimeChat- An Omnichannel Help Desk Uniquely Made for ECommerce Brands

Our human-level AI is our signature chatbot made for D2C brands only.

Our attention to how the chatbot learns and answers queries specific to the ecommerce industry has led to us empowering 175+ D2C brands through conversational marketing- purely through word of mouth.

Our Smart Agent Escalation can proactively identify unhappy customers and connect them with human agents, whereas our retention campaigns have helped boost retention by over 30% with proactive customer support.

You can also run powerful influencer marketing campaigns and re-routing questions that come on the post through Instagram DMs.

Ready to give us a try? Book a demo here, and we’ll love to have you set up immediately- yes, faster than you expect!