Instagram influencers, your experience

[Daria_G]

Hi everyone!

How do you know if Instagram influencer will bring clients or at least visitors to your shop? Because if you pay them and they didn't bring people then it looks like a charity. Also, i see often many influencers who promote products and under those posts the least amount of comments (even with well-written caption), that means probably no buyers/followers. 

What is your overall experience? 

[DuaneBrown · Accepted solution]

We advice clients against influencer marketing unless their is a performance fee in place. i.e. the influencers can prove they drove revenue and then and only then do we pay them a fee. Just talking about a product and having lots of followers (which could be bought & fake) does not mean they are going to boost your business. Also, I would look for influencers that already talk about your brand, competitors brand or industry in general. Don't just go after influencers that have lot of followers/likes/comments as those all can be bought and sold for a few dollars. You want influencers who are genuinely already interested in your brand/industry and competitors.

[Rockpapercopy]

Really good tips DuaneBrown!

[SarahAtCarro]

To build on what DuaneBrown is saying, I can recommend Carro to help you find influencers that "already talk about your brand." Carro: Influencer Marketing app helps you identify influencers that have already purchased from your store, subscribed to your emails, or followed you on social. These influencers typically are excited to hear from a brand they love and can be more cost effective. They are also usually well-versed in your product and can really, passionately share about their experience with your brand. 

Good luck!

[thinkkeyspeak]

One interesting thing we've found for our store is that we've had influencers mention us on Instagram (without prior arrangement), and then there's a spike in traffic on our website. Those seem like the best people to partner up with for campaigns. It's a painstaking process though to correlate the google analytics data and the shopify sales data.

Any tools out there that make the process of identifying your key influencers and calculating the ROI easier?

[SarahAtCarro]

Hi,

The Carro app can help you find the influencers that have a connection to
your brand, which could help you correlate the data to Google Analytics,
based on their past posts. The Carro app will also help you find out their
email address so that you can contact them directly with opportunities.

The ROI is a little harder to track. When partnering with an influencer
officially, you can use a unique link or coupon code to track their
referrals.