How to Get More Value from Influencer Gifting: A Step by Step Guide
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As influencer marketing becomes a core strategy for fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands, with more and more brands building in-house teams and investing in long-term influencer relationships, many are now asking how they can see a better return from their digital marketing efforts. With a greater internal investment comes greater expectations, and brands must now think strategically about how they are using influencers and what results they need to see from each collaboration.
Having managed more than 850 influencer collaborations over more than 3 years, from long-term ambassadorships to one off influencer events, we have seen what works and what doesn’t for a range of goals, from increasing awareness to generating sales. What we have found is that gifting influencers -- specifically gifting at scale -- has been the most successful tactic in terms of consistently delivering a strong ROI for the financial investment together with the time and resources put in.
Gifting at scale gives you a chance to “test the waters” with several influencers at once before investing in longer-term paid collaborations, says Shopping Links founder and managing director, Kim Westwood. “We find that it also provides brands with the ability to manage product fulfillment and track results more efficiently,” she said. “With a large-scale gifting campaign, you enjoy the benefits of many conversations taking place about your brand at once, creating a consistent buzz that keeps your products top-of-mind. For all of these reasons, we have identified gifting at scale as an important cornerstone strategy.”
“With a large-scale gifting campaign, you enjoy the benefits of many conversations taking place about your brand at once, creating a consistent buzz that keeps your products top-of-mind.
Although an effective marketing strategy should certainly include a range of tactics, including diligent market research, content marketing, and of course, word of mouth, incorporating influencer outreach at scale ensures that you reach the right social networks to help you spread your brand message.
Read More: Product Seeding 101: The Benefits and “How To” of Gifting at Scale
This guide is based on our experience working with Fortune 500 retailers, startup designers and brands of every size in-between. Bookmark it for tips, case studies and resources to see a bigger ROI from your influencer marketing campaigns this year.
Influencer Gifting Myths & Facts
Before we get started, we first wanted to address a few misconceptions and misinformation about influencer gifting. Since we hear these misunderstandings quite often, even from those within the industry, we wanted to provide some background and clarity from which you can base your own decisions:
Myth: “Good” influencers won’t accept gifts without payment.
Fact: Many top-tier influencers are happy to accept gifts -- but there’s a right way to engage them.
This is one of the biggest myths we come across, and we understand why it persists. Top-tier influencers do charge for their content, and many are earning enough from brand collaborations that blogging has become a full-time job. But this is only half the story. What is sometimes forgotten is that leading influencers have built such loyal audiences because they are genuinely helpful to their followers. Being helpful means trying new products, writing authentic reviews, and engaging with multiple brands. Influencers understand that their followers want to see more than just the same brands again and again, lest they start to feel like they’re a brand mouthpiece. The opportunity to consistently try and showcase new brands, potentially discover new favorites, and introduce fresh products is incredibly valuable to influencers, and gifting is often what allows bloggers to maintain this kind of variety. This is why even leading influencers accept gifts.
We have managed gift-only collaborations with bloggers who have more than a million Instagram followers, and the average Instagram audience size of our Product Seeding Collaboration, which is open to influencers with at least 10k followers, is actually closer to 50k followers -- a testament to the appeal of gifting to more than just emerging bloggers.
Read More: Why All Influencers Should Accept Gift-Only Collaborations
Myth: There’s no way to make sure an influencer will actually post.
Fact: You can absolutely guarantee exposure with gifting campaigns.
This is perhaps one of the more frustrating myths we see about gifting influencers, because it’s only true with poor execution and often associated with a PR exercise rather than influencer marketing. We absolutely guarantee results for brands who engage bloggers through our Product Seeding collaboration type, and we find that brands who approach gifting influencers with a contractual mindset do not run into issues with influencers posting. The problem typically lies with brands who are still approaching gifting with a traditional PR mindset. In the early days of influencer marketing, publicists often engaged bloggers in the way they engaged magazine editors -- by sending product or samples with a press kit and story “pitch.”
While this is an appropriate strategy for securing earned media, PR is not the same as running a sponsored campaign. The former carries an endorsement with no guarantee of exposure; the latter is a contractual agreement that must be disclosed to followers and is essentially a business transaction between the influencer and the brand. For best results, and to ensure guaranteed exposure, make sure you have a contract in place or that you utilize a platform such as Shopping Links, whose terms and conditions cover posting requirements. Under our terms, bloggers are required to post within 30 days of receiving product. If a blogger does not post within 3 months, brands may appoint a new blogger at no charge.
Read More: PR vs. Influencer Marketing: What’s the Difference, and Why Does it Matter
Myth: It’s impossible to measure the return from influencer gifting collaborations.
Fact: Many tools now exist that allow brands to track the success of influencer campaigns, even beyond immediate sales.
We include 3 months of detailed campaign tracking and social commerce conversion with every Product Seeding collaboration, allowing you to track your results, including the reach, impressions, social media engagement, traffic and sales data, by individual influencer. We also find that many of our brands can trace sales directly to a campaign by narrowing their focus to a specific product. One large international department store, for example, recently gifted its branded Peppa Pig pajamas to leading influencer Arielle Charnas of Something Navy. The day after Arielle posted an Instagram Story of her daughter in her new PJs, the brand reported a 1,400% increase in average sales for Peppa Pig products, jumping from 0-1 orders to 33.
The brand continued to see a number of better-than-average sales over the next month as followers continued to comment about the pajamas on Instagram. Although certainly not every collaboration success is as dramatic, we can share from experience that most brands are able to see a clear correlation between sales and influencer-promoted products over a period of time.
Read More: How to Measure Your Influencer Marketing ROI
Myth: Influencers aren’t required to disclose the brand relationship if the collaboration isn’t paid.
Fact: All contracted collaborations must be disclosed.
As we just discussed, one great benefit of influencer gifting is guaranteed exposure. However, this means that collaborations must also be disclosed. It’s your responsibility as a brand to ensure that bloggers disclose their collaborations, whether by including a clear tag such as #ad or #sponsored, or by utilizing Instagram’s sponsored post template. At Shopping Links we require all influencers who secure a collaboration via our platform to disclose the collaboration using #ad in their posts.
How to Run an Effective Influencer Gifting Campaign
Now that we have looked more closely at the benefits, challenges and misconceptions of influencer gifting, let’s take look at how to run a successful campaign. Here are four strategies you can implement to ensure the greatest possible return on your collaboration.
1. Find a turnkey platform. One of the biggest mistakes we see among brands and agencies alike is a reliance on individual outreach to bloggers and manual tracking of the ‘likes’ and comments. While a personal note certainly helps to establish an authentic relationship, sending emails one-by-one is not practical nor cost effective for brands looking to secure multiple influencers within a set timeframe. Manually tracking the results is also time consuming and immediately out of date. Without an Influencer Marketing Platform approved for Instagram insights, you also do not have access to a range of fundamental metrics including follower demographics and detailed reach and impression data from your specific campaign/media.
Our Product Seeding collaboration type is designed to quickly connect you with qualified influencers who are pre qualified and want to work with your brand -- so you can spend more time analysing which ones are the best fit using a range of validated metrics, and less time trying to gauge interest. With Shopping Links, you can select 10, 25 or 50 influencers, all of whom have at least 10k followers on Instagram. Influencers are required to post on Instagram, tagging your brand, within 30 days of receiving their product or experience. You can run your campaign as per your business requirements, so you may want them all at once or spaced out over a six month period. We have found that this streamlined approach works well for both brands and bloggers, ensuring clarity on both sides and guaranteed results for the brand.
2. Personalize each gift. This is particularly important as you approach leading influencers. Arielle Charnas of Something Navy would never have posted her daughter’s Peppa Pig pajamas had she not genuinely loved them. Your product needs to feel like a real gift -- not a promotion for your brand. Keep in mind each blogger’s personal style and choose products that reflect their aesthetic. When in doubt, simply ask or engage an influencer agency who keeps a close eye on your target influencers and maintains a close relationship with many. Taking the time to ensure a blogger will love what she is receiving can mean the difference between results that strictly meet your requirements, and content that provides ongoing returns. Arielle has posted the M&S PJs multiple times since the holidays when she first received them, with strong interest from followers each time.
In another of our favorite examples of effective personalisation, M&S hosted an event for influencers at a recent London Fashion Week where the brand gifted blankets embroidered with each attendees' blog name. The event resulted in 23 pieces of content with more than 32,000 "likes" and comments, but more importantly, it solidified M&S' relationship with bloggers who have continued to support the brand.
3. Don’t forget presentation. How a blogger feels about your brand is as important as how they feel about their gift. Take the time to add a handwritten note or a personalized touch. If you’re promoting a new line of cosmetics, for example, add in a little sunscreen if you know the blogger spends all her time at the beach. If you have a rapport with a blogger who you know has a dog, add a small gift for the pup. These little details can make a big difference and demonstrate your interest in the blogger not just their ability to promote your brand.
4. Be reasonable about requirements. Although many top-tier influencers are indeed open to accepting gifts, it’s important to manage your expectations. The more restrictions you impose, the less likely you are to attract interest from leading influencers. A simple, straightforward request with a streamlined process will help you get more value from each collaboration by attracting influencers with wider audiences. The more requirements you add such as timing of the post and key messages, the less likely you are going to see a huge interest. The blogger is also trying to work out whether your brand is a good fit for them and their followers. We would encourage this first engagement to be as natural and organic as possible. Once you see how it goes and get an indication of the results, then you can look to incorporate more requirements and payment if required.
5. Take advantage of the retail calendar. One of the key advantages of influencer collaborations over traditional PR is the opportunity to choose your timing. To promote gift ideas ahead of Mother’s Day, for example, which takes place May 11 in the US and Australia, you can time content to run within the peak sales window. We find that gifting collaborations are most effective around 4 weeks ahead of a retail holiday, allowing to you plan your annual collaborations accordingly -- a great advantage for in-house teams.
Case Studies
We have worked with a number of brands on successful gifting collaborations, from MARKS & SPENCER to Review Australia. Here is a snapshot of results from these campaigns:
MARKS & SPENCER
The objective: Make an impact on the US market ahead of the holiday season.
The approach: M&S worked with Shopping Links to send personalised gifts to 20 influencers in key US markets, emphasizing the brand’s “Britishness.”
The result: M&S received multiple pieces of complimentary content, including Instagram Stories, which drove significant traffic and resulted in higher-than-average sales for featured products.
Read more about this case study: Product Seeding 101: The Benefits & “How To” of Gifting at Scale
AQUIS HAIR
The objective: Raise the profile of Aquis hair towels among consumers by demonstrating the products in use among key demographics.
The approach: Aquis worked with Shopping Links to identify influencers in New York, California, Texas, Utah, Illinois and Washing, DC, among other key markets, to showcase how they use the Aquis turbans.
The result: Aquis realized a potential reach of 100k, with dozens of comments related directly to the turbans. The brand also received complimentary blog posts, which contributed high-quality, SEO-boosting inbound links, and was also able to repurpose influencer content as shoppable posts on its own Instagram account.
Read more about this case study: Stop Wasting Your PR Budget: Gift for Guaranteed Reach
REVIEW AUSTRALIA
The objective: Reach customers in all key markets ahead of Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties to increase dress sales.
The approach: Working with Shopping Links, the brand collaborated with influencers in the US, the UK and Australia to showcase seasonal dresses during the holidays.
The results: The brand reached targeted consumers in Austin, San Francisco, Sydney and other key cities with advice for holiday shopping, generating thousands of likes and comments directly about its products, giving the brand specific accounts to target for lead generation campaigns.
Read more about this case study: How Influencers Can Boost Your Holiday Sales
The Bottom Line
Having run hundreds of influencer collaborations, from large-scale events with leading retailers to paid campaigns with some of the world’s most followed influencers, we are firm believers in the power of influencer gifting and the importance of engaging multiple bloggers to test new markets and demographics. The benefits of “trying out” potential influencers to see which ones are most likely to become your viable long-term brand ambassadors before making a heavy financial investment is just one more benefit of this strategy.
We hope this guide offers insight into how to run an effective campaign, while shedding light on some of the misconceptions that persist in the industry. We would be delighted to offer $100 off your first Product Seeding collaboration with us to start testing results from influencer gifting for your own brand. Click here to get started, or reach out at hello@shoppinglinks.com with any questions.
WRITTEN BY
Shopping Links
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