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Influencer marketing is effective but challenging to pull off, especially if you handle the entire process manually.
Justin Cener, a known eCommerce influencer and Shopify expert says it's time-consuming to search through Instagram and TikTok for influencers manually. Once you find them, tracking and managing them is even more complicated.
"A lot of manual back and forth is why a lot of you haven't gone into influencer marketing even though you know that you need to," says Cener reviewing affable.ai, an influencer management platform on his YouTube channel - Cener Mastermind.
“You need everything to be based in one powerful dashboard of one platform, rather than having 200 emails to send out, 10 tracking spreadsheets, a notes app on your phone, and other documentation about how you reached out to a particular influencer,” he says.
Check out Cener's complete review of affable.ai, a data-driven platform that helps brands, agencies, eCommerce companies, and D2C startups automate influencer campaigns.
Influencer marketing is a popular strategy among marketers because customers buy more from trusted people i.e influencers as opposed to traditional ads. It is a cost-effective way to reach new parts of your target market and find new customers.
You might be running Facebook, YouTube or TikTok ads that's going to reach one portion of your audience. But there's going to be another portion on the influencer side of things, maybe customers that you can't reach or customers that aren't responding well to ads. This type of cohort can be effectively reached with influencer marketing.
I'm going to show you an easy way to jump into influencer marketing for your Shopify store.
affable.ai is a platform that I use and highly recommend when it comes to influencer marketing.
The affable.ai influencer marketing app is available on the Shopify app store where you can discover all of the platform’s robust engine of influencers. There's a free plan available for you to jump right into it to find and analyze influencers and manage them.
All you need to do is press the green “Add app” button to get the platform into your store. Once added click the green “Install app” button at the top right to access your affable.ai dashboard where you can either create a new account or log into your existing one.
Once you are logged in you’ll see the affable.ai “Influencer Discovery” section that helps you discover relevant creators from a database of 6M+ profiles. The affable.ai team has incredible expertise and the platform has every single filter and influencer that you could imagine to find your winning customers.
For example, I have used filters cats and the United States to find related influencers. So inside my discovery page I have 2300+ influencers that are interested in cats and have between 5000 and 1 million followers with less than 100% suspicious followers.
The influencer marketing platform has filters like size, keywords, age ranges, locations, fake followers to make sure we avoid creators with fake numbers or big engagement scores.
Even if you're not ready to run campaigns, affable.ai is an incredible tool for you to do some great influencer or market research.
You can change the filters from the “Filters” tab on the left. Let's say you want to work with bigger influencers who have say a hundred thousand followers, so you can put a limit on the “Followers” filter starting from 100k to 1 million and just like that it's going to update the database and show you influencers with a follower range between 100k and a million.
Save your filters by clicking the “Save” button so you can come back later. Name the filter, for example ‘cat influencers 500k to 1 million’ and save it.
There’s literally so many different things that you can filter through when trying to build your influencer discovery process which is going to be everyone's first step.
Under the “Audience” filters tab you can see filters with age , gender, interests, and countries. You can search for let’s say pets or even animals under Interests and see the grouping change again.
So there’s a lot of different searching abilities for you in the platform, saving you from browsing through hundreds of hashtags manually and building a Google sheet to do the same research that can be done in a couple of seconds using affable.ai.
The data is not at all specific to cats. You can search for a lot of different things under “Interests” or under “Audience Interest” or see a full demographic that is specific to our target customer.
Let's say you want to find fitness or bodybuilding influencers with an audience between 19 and 25 and a follower range between 100k to 1 million. Simply add the filters under Age Ranges, Interests, and Followers, and you can get new examples of related influencers.
Imagine how much time it would take for you to reach out to these influencers individually through DMs or emails, but with affable.ai platform you can find them in a couple of minutes.
You can also find influencers from the Content Discovery section by clicking the “Discovery” button and choosing “Content Discovery” from the drop down. This section will show you top posts from influencers that are promoting products on social media.
I use the content discovery section to find some hot products out there. So I added cats and sale as two hashtags under the “Hashtag and Caption” search bar to find some good products. You can also search for cats under “Interests” to discover related posts or search by “Brands” if you're considering working with any specific brand.
Now coming back to the “Influencer Discovery” page, let’s say you find an influencer you want to click in and investigate further, so you select the influencer profile and browse through the profile page to learn more about the creator.
The profile page will somewhat like this and give you insights on the influencer’s location, cost per post, followers, and more.
The profile also gives you an in-depth view of the influencer and his/her performance on social media through data like:
The “Similar Influencers” tab allows you to find lookalike creators in the same niche that you might be able to get to promote your products. The platform further shows you the number of followers, the estimated cost, etc., to help you understand if you're getting a good advertising deal or not.
It also gives you a direct email option to reach influencers directly from the platform. Further, you have the ability to add creators into an existing influencer group to keep track of things and export and download influencer data.
The best part is you can reach out to them directly on an individual basis through affable.ai’s Inmail chat feature.
“Recent Media” gives you a good sense of what the influencer has been posting about.
Also, you can take a look at the “Audience Age Distribution” section, just to kind of see what is out there in terms of the demographic. For example, Jackson Galaxy, a cat parent influencer, is followed by 87.5 percent of followers who are above 21 years of age, so you can see the influencer doesn’t have a kid audience.
The “Audience Gender Distribution” shows the ratio between female or male audience for example, 75% females or 25% males in a niche. To get a sense of the audience’s location, you can go over to “Audience Location Distribution” like where the major portion of the influencer’s audience is residing.
“Influencer Brand Affinity” data is to see the past collaborations of an influencer and get a sense of her/his experience.
The “Audience Brand Affinity” section shows you which other Instagram accounts are most relevant to a network or niche. From this section you can find tons of other influencers just on one click.
With the “Engagement” score section, you will get an idea of the total engagement percentage generated by the influencer and number of suspicious followers on their profile.
If you want to know the level of growth in an influencer's followers and engagement over a period of time, you can take a look at the “Follower Timeline” and “Engagement Timeline” section.
“Branded Content Distribution” shows the total number of content pieces with a ratio of branded vs. non-branded content. It is suggested to stay away from the influencers who have more non-branded content showcasing way too much promotional stuff.
To give you more insight on the audience, “Audience Interest Distribution” reveals what niche the influencer’s followers are interested in such as pets and animals, food and beverage, home and garden, clothing, etc.
If you like the influencer simply add the creator into your shortlist by clicking the ‘Add Influencer to new/existing group’ button.
Besides Instagram, there are other networks like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to make sure you reach 100% of your customers.
Now let’s explore affable.ai’s “Campaign” section where you can manage all the actual campaigns that you're going to be running.
So, click into an existing campaign or create a new one by clicking the “Create Campaign” button.
Once you’re in, make sure that you connect your email accounts especially if you're using gmail so you can access it in one click.
In the “Campaigns” , you’ll see a list of the shortlisted influencers and other tabs like Content, Chat, Fixed pay, and more to track outreach, discovery, effectiveness of the campaign, budgets, estimated reach, estimated media value, and all of the different posts created by influencers. You can check and see to make sure that everything actually looks good and comes out the way that you expected.
In addition, there’s a “Creator Portal” that allows you to create a proposal page for the influencers you want to invite for the campaign. In the “Creator PortaL”, you can handle everything from creating product gift orders, tracking deliveries, collecting campaign briefs, collecting influencer preferences like shipping details, getting the content rights, and a lot more.
Under the “Campaign Brief” tab you have the “Campaign Title”, where you can name the campaign. Then you have the “Campaign Description” box where you can describe what you're looking for from your influencers and you can also add an image under the “Campaign Image” box.
Coming to the “Product Gifting” tab, you can gift products to your influencers especially if you want them to do product reviews. So you can add some of your most popular products by clicking the “Import Product” button. Search for the product you want to add and click “Import Selected” and “Save”.
Next to the “Product Gifting” tab is the “Fixed pay settings” tab to enter the fixed payment amount for influencers such as thirty dollars or a hundred dollars per post. You can also allow influencers to propose their costs and collect their Paypal email ID so you could have everything set up ready to go.
With the “Affiliate tracking” tab, you can carry out commission and affiliate tracking using custom codes. Add a description in the box and put a discount price code, for example, 10% off on the first campaign. You also have the option to enable commission with affiliate code by selecting percentage or fixed value whichever you want and then ask for influencer payment details.
You can change affiliate settings with fixed pay as you may not need to do both but sometimes you can leverage affiliate settings if creators want more money than you're willing to give. You can give them a little bit of fixed pay and then you could also give them 10% of every sale.
Next, under the “Influencer tasks” button you can add what the creators need to do for the campaign with a description of what type of content you need like Instagram stories or multiple other tasks. The description allows the influencers to understand exactly what you're asking from the creators and whether it is mandatory or not.
To add terms and conditions about content rights, you can go to the “Content rights” tab. In the tab you can use the existing terms available or add your own content rights.
So everything you set up in the creator portal will be sent out and tracked by all these influencers.
You can handle everything through the affable.ai campaign dashboard, including distribution of affiliate codes and links to the influencers, sales, commissions, conversions, payments, chats, and reports, all within affable.ai.
To know if your influencer campaign is working, affable.ai has a “Reports” section that allows you to track data from the influencer posts.
You can see the data from the campaign as a whole, including total posts, number of likes, comments, engagement, estimated reach and estimated media value.
The “Campaign Reach” tab shows the age, gender, and location of the audience the influencers reached.
With the “Comment Analysis” tab, you can figure out if your audience liked the content or not based on the reaction from their comments on the post. If the sentiment graph looks mostly green then it indicates a positive reaction as you wouldn't want to work with influencers that just constantly bombard their users with advertisements.
The “Comment Snapshot” section reveals the exact comments from the audience so you can determine what type of reaction you’re getting, average comment length, etc.
You can even see the comments and engagement on individual influencer generated posts, including the location and age groups of the audience who saw your posts.
affable.ai not only helps you discover influencers but gives you the ability to scale your campaigns by communicating with influencers directly, tracking progress, and more.
You are now set to run awesome campaigns and find new customers to unlock tons of new revenue opportunities for your Shopify store.
If you want to try the affable.ai platform for your campaign then get a free trial today!
Source: How To Find The Perfect Influencers And Manage Campaigns (At Scale) For Your Shopify Brand by Justin Cener
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