In-House Influencer Marketing vs. Marketing Agency

Many eCommerce merchants use influencers marketing to promote their store. You can hire a marketing agency to do the strategy, and the work, or you can develop your own influencer marketing. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, of course.

Hiring an agency for Influencer marketing:

If you have a sufficient budget, then I think you'll get better and quicker ROI by working with a marketing agency. They can set up an influencer marketing plan for your eComm brand, provide the content, and deliver reliable results.

Having said that, I must mention that working with agencies is neither easy nor cheap, and you don't necessarily get good results. Hence there are a few things I would look for when selecting a marketing agency to work with. Here are a few:

1. Recommendations - Ask the agency for references and speak to previous and existing clients. Check if they're happy with the process and communication.
2. Results - Marketing must be based on measurable KPIs that affect the bottom line. So the number of posts on social media, likes, comments, etc. don't matter. What matters is if they can actually generate traffic that converts into sales in your store.
3. Skin in the game - The marketing agency should make money only if you make money. You should look for a model that compensates the agency based on the actual results they deliver and not for the work they do. I know it's not always easy and sometimes not even possible, but you should definitely push in that direction. Even a model that combines a base fee for work and an extra to be paid per result is much better than an entirely fixed price.

Creating your own Influencer marketing

If you don't have the budget for a marketing agency but do have the time and capacity, then you should create your own influencer marketing strategy to promote your store. The general guidelines to follow when approaching influencers:

1. Small influencers - You can directly send the product you're promoting to influencers that have 5000 followers or less, and ask them to share it with their audience. You'll need to package the product nicely and explain to them what value your product can provide their followers. If you do a good job convincing them, you'll be able to promote your product free of charge. If you can't convince them to promote your product for free, you'll have to offer the influencer an affiliate fee or another form of payment, of course, but the price shouldn't be much.
2. Medium influencers - Influencers with more than 10,000 followers will not promote products for free, so you'll have to set a price that is either based on the interactions the post gets from, the number of sales it generates, or a fixed rate. It really depends on the influencer you're engaging with.
3. Large influencers - As a solopreneur or a small brand, you must have an exceptional offering in order to convince a famous influencer to promote your product. In most cases, prominent influencers will have agents that filter their communication, and you won't be able to get through.



Important points to remember

• Always ask the influencer for their post statistics or any other method that can help you measure results.

• Influencers can take a while to respond to your messages.
• When you message influencers, you have to be concise, include all of the relevant information, and make sure the value for the influencer or their audience comes across clearly.
• You'll likely be rejected if the influencer has an agent representing them unless you can show you're a pro.

It may take longer to build an effective influencer marketing strategy for your online store by yourself instead of an agency. But you can end up getting better results when you run your own marketing, plus you'll learn a ton in the process and also ow your business's marketing, which is always an advantage.