Searching For Influencers For Your Shopify Store

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The Essential Steps to Identifying and Partnering with the Right Influencers

Are you a Shopify store owner looking for new ways to grow your business and connect with audiences?

Shopify influencer marketing strategies have emerged as a potent tool for sales success, bridging authenticity and engagement in the crowded digital space.

Continue reading for a starter guide to find quality influencers to grow your Shopify store.

What is Influencer Marketing?

As one of the fastest growing digital marketing channels, the majority of Shopify store owners are looking to elevate their brand presence and connect more authentically with their audience.

But what exactly is influencer marketing, and why has it become such a pivotal tool for e-commerce success? Let's break it down.

Why You Need Shopify Influencer Marketing

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Influencer marketing leverages endorsements and product mentions from influencers—individuals with a dedicated social following who are viewed as experts within their niche.

These influencers can sway their audience's purchasing decisions because of their authority, knowledge, and relationship with their followers.

For Shopify store owners, influencer marketing strategies are not just about finding someone with a large following to promote your products; it's about finding someone who embodies your brand's values and can communicate your message to your target audience in a way that feels genuine and trustworthy.

Why It Matters for Shopify Stores

• Increased Brand Awareness: Influencers can introduce your brand to their followers, expanding your reach beyond your existing audience.

• Boosted Credibility: When a respected influencer endorses your product, it lends credibility to your brand, helping to build trust with potential customers.

• Enhanced Engagement: Influencers are skilled content creators. Their product promotion can lead to higher engagement levels, including likes, comments, and shares, driving more traffic to your Shopify store.

• Direct Sales Impact: Influencer collaborations can directly influence sales, as followers often consider their recommendations when making purchasing decisions.

Types of Influencers

Understanding the different types of influencers helps identify the right partners for your brand. They can be categorized based on their follower count:

• Micro-Influencers: Typically have 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They boast high engagement rates and are often seen as more relatable and trustworthy by their audience.

• Macro-Influencers: Have a larger follower base, between 100,000 and 1 million. They have a broader reach and are often professional content creators or celebrities.

• Mega-Influencers: With over 1 million followers, these influencers offer the broadest reach but may have lower engagement rates and higher partnership costs.
  

Choosing the right type of influencer depends on your marketing goals, budget, and the level of engagement you seek.

It's not always about the numbers; the quality of the influencer's engagement with their audience and their alignment with your brand are equally, if not more, important.

Create Your Shopify Influencer Marketing Goals

Before swimming in the pool of potential collaborators, you should anchor your efforts in clear, measurable goals.

What does success look like for your Shopify store's influencer marketing campaign? Outlining this will guide your strategy and help you measure its effectiveness.

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Define Clear Objectives

Your influencer marketing objectives should align with your overall business goals. Common goals include:

• Increasing Brand Awareness: If you’d like more people to recognize and remember your brand, influencers can help introduce your products to a wider yet targeted audience.

• Driving Sales: For many Shopify stores, the ultimate goal of influencer partnerships is to boost online sales. Specific, trackable affiliate links or promo codes can help measure the direct impact of influencer campaigns on sales.

• Enhancing Engagement: If your focus is on building a community or increasing interaction with your brand, influencers can create content that encourages likes, comments, shares, and saves.

• Growing Your Social Media Following: Collaborating with influencers can also be a strategy to increase your own social media presence and follower count by leveraging the influencer's audience.

How Goals Determine Your Choice of Influencers

Once your objectives are clear, they will directly impact the type of influencers you should partner with. For instance:

• If brand awareness is your goal, macro or mega-influencers with large followings may be your best bet.

• Micro-influencers, known for their higher engagement rates and niche audiences, could be more effective for driving sales or enhancing engagement.

• Influencers whose audience demographics closely match your target customer profile are ideal for growing your social media following, as their followers are more likely to be genuinely interested in your brand.

Consider a Platform Built for Shopify

The PartnerUp platform allows Shopify store owners to find influencers online and align potential partnerships with their specific marketing goals. Here's how:

• Targeted AI Powered Search Capabilities: PartnerUp's advanced search tools allow you to find influencers by niche, audience demographics, engagement rates, and more, ensuring they align with your campaign goals.

• Goal-Oriented Campaigns: Once you've identified potential influencers, PartnerUp helps you organize them into campaigns based on your specific objectives, whether increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or boosting engagement.

• Data-Driven Insights: PartnerUp provides actionable insights and analytics, helping you measure the success of your influencer partnerships against your predefined objectives. 

Step-By-Step Influencer Search Guide

With your high level strategy and goals in place, it’s time to find some influencers!

We've reached the influencer search phase, here's how to find and filter down an ideal list:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in finding the right influencers is clearly understanding your target audience.

This will generally overlap with customers who have purchased from you most in the past.

Your influencer's audience should mirror your target customer profile to ensure the highest engagement and conversion rates.

2. Begin Your Influencer Search

With your target audience in mind, it's time to start the search for influencers. There are many ways to do this - for example directly on the platforms.

On instagram for example, you can start with mentions and tags of your brand, and of your competitors, hashtags and similar.

Looking at who influencers you like are following is also useful. However these capabilities can be limited.

This is where a platform like PartnerUp can be quite useful, to search by keywords, and make sure you're seeing all the results.

3. Narrow Down Results

Once you've cast your net, create a short list where you can start ranking influencers.

Narrow your search based on specific criteria, such as location, interests, engagement rate, and follower demographics.

Content style is also very important - influencers completely changing their typical style to do a promotion generally does not work well.

4. Analyze Influencer Content, Engagement, and Demographics

Once you have a list of potential influencers, look closely at their content, engagement levels, and audience interaction.

Importantly, influencer audiences should match your target customers as closely as possible.

Typically, you'll need to ask for demographic screenshots, or you can use a tool like PartnerUp to get this data up front.

5. Watch Out For Red Flags like Fake Followers

Particularly on instagram, you can buy followers and even engagement... this is a massive issue when negotiating.

It's very hard to determine this number unless you're using an AI powered tool like PartnerUp, but it can save you tons of money and effort.

6. Create Your Ideal List & Reach Out

Once you've created a list of influencers you like, it's time to reach out with an initial message.

We cover this in other articles, but in short, keep the first message simple and personalized. If you get a reply that's where the negotiations start!

Consider an all-in-one solution

PartnerUp is an innovative new app that simplifies and solves many of the traditional challenges of influencer marketing for Shopify.

You can easily search the entire internet—every Instagram profile, blog, and social media platform—to find the perfect influencers who align with your ideal customer profile, and get key stats like audience demographics and fake followers.

On top of that, we automate things like gift order creation, affiliate codes, follow ups, and measure the ROI for you.

Amplify Your Brand's Reach and Results

Finding the right influencers for your Shopify store doesn’t have to be a daunting task.

By understanding your target audience, utilizing advanced search tools like PartnerUp, and engaging in strategic outreach, you can identify and partner with influencers who will amplify your brand’s message and drive tangible results.