Influencer product seeding campaigns are an essential piece of your influencer program. However, the administrative side of influencer gifting campaigns can lead to wasted time and wasted product.
If you’re a marketer, you have probably experienced the plethora of tools that are available for all the different elements of an influencer product seeding campaign - from address collection, to communication, to shipment tracking, to campaign reporting (to name a few). While these are all great, they don’t necessarily make you more efficient. Below we detail how the influencer marketing platform, Traackr, can serve as your all-in-one platform for your influencer product seeding campaigns.
How Traackr Can Help Save Time and Money on Influencer Product Seeding Campaigns
The influencer product seeding challenge
We all know that influencer gifting is a standard practice, and for good reason. Traackr’s new State of Influencer Product Seeding report found that the majority of marketers find influencer product seeding campaigns effective for both driving awareness and sales. However, there are still a ton of inefficiencies that prevent marketers from getting the most out of each campaign.
For example, the survey found that 65% of marketers are sending gifted products to influencers even if they don’t post about the initial product that they received. This means that marketers are wasting their time, money, and resources sending products to influencers who won’t post about their brand. Sending and resending gifts to disinterested influencers is a wasted opportunity, and will undoubtedly negatively impact your influencer marketing ROI. There is also a negative impact on the environment to consider — this data is yet another point in favor of the well-documented waste issue in the influencer space.
So what could be some of the causes of this issue?
The same survey revealed that 56% of marketers are still using spreadsheets to manage influencer product seeding campaigns. This inevitably leads marketers to do what’s fastest and easiest: sending products to influencers who aren’t interested or going overboard and sending more product than an influencer wants.
There’s also the time-consuming manual process of switching between tools to gather shipping information, communicate back and forth with influencers for their product selection, delivery tracking, and monitor results from the influencer product seeding campaign.
So what can marketers do?
Influencer product seeding made easy with Traackr
With an influencer marketing platform like Traackr, all of these processes can be streamlined and completed with a single tool. Here are the different elements that Traackr offers that will help your campaigns run smoother:
- Find top influencers and vet them. Instead of taking a “more is more” approach and sending out batches of product to a massive list of influencers, identify potential partners for your influencer gifting campaign with detailed search parameters. Traackr provides the data and insights (e.g. performance metrics, audience demographics, past content search, etc.) that will help you discover and vet top influencers who speak to your target audience.
- Manage communications all in one place. Traackr Studios allows you to connect, collaborate on deliverables, and create with influencer partners. When inviting creators to participate in influencer product seeding campaigns, influencers have the opportunity to opt-in and browse available products that they’d like to receive. Giving influencers the choice to opt-in cuts down on potential product waste since they will have actively declared an interest in the campaign. Giving influencers the option to select specific products also curbs waste by ensuring creators aren’t receiving repeat items or things that they don’t want.
- Ship, track, and coordinate products with a Shopify integration. With its new Shopify integration, Traackr is now an influencer marketing platform that has simplified the time-consuming processes of influencer product seeding from beginning to end. Marketers now have access to their brand’s entire store inventory in Traackr, and can select which products to make available to creators for influencer gifting campaigns. Product selection is always kept up-to-date since Traackr dynamically syncs with your product catalog and inventory. The integration also allows influencers to complete the order themselves which means you won’t need to chase down influencers for addresses and contact info – more time saved! Once influencers complete their order, you can track fulfillment statuses directly in Traackr.
- Report on success and plan for next time. Measure the performance of your influencer product seeding campaigns and see your influencer partners’ posts in real-time. Traackr allows you to monitor KPIs like number of posts, number of engagements, number of video views, engagement rates, and more so you can see how your campaign is progressing and evaluate how to improve.
"Traackr hit the nail on the head, integrating our Shopify store directly into Traackr Studios so creators can go in, browse and pick exactly which shoes they want. Not only does it save our team hours of work, but it helps us live our brand values of sustainability and empowering every person to celebrate their individuality." - Natalie Kathleen, CEO of Jibs
Traackr’s goal is for marketers to be able to complete every step of their influencer product seeding campaign efficiently and cleanly in one platform. The aim is to minimize the time marketers spend on organizational and administrative tasks so they can save time (and money) and focus on the funner/more creative parts of influencer marketing. If you are curious to hear more about Traackr and our capabilities for influencer gifting campaigns and more, reach out to one of our experts.