Why Influencer Product Seeding Promotions are the Best Promotions

With influencer marketing now a multi-billion-dollar industry and thousands of influencers engaging with their followers across different social media platforms, as a business owner – you may be looking forward to engaging with like-minded influencers in your niche. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve witnessed a staggering spike in brands showing their interest in hiring influencers to promote their products and services.

This ever-increasing demand has resulted in brands, especially the ones with a low-to-medium-sized budget, finding it harder to engage with influencers in their niche and getting them to promote their products or services.

But – what if we told you that you don’t need a gigantic-sized budget – one similar to the size of Eiffel Tower – to run highly-strategic influencer marketing campaigns? 

At Stack Influence, we’ve helped thousands of brands generate more high-ticket sales and increase their revenue by planning and implementing scalable influencer marketing campaigns.

And the best part is – these brands didn’t pay thousands of dollars to influencers they wanted to collaborate with.

The Influencer Marketing Paying Models

Technically, there are two common influencer marketing paying models:

• Product Seeding – Involves sending product(s) as a gift to influencers. 
• Paid Influencer Campaigns – Paying influencers on a contract basis – the terms of the contract are decided prior to engagement.

When it comes to paid influencer campaigns, here’s what an unnamed influencer with around 100,000 – 250,000 followers claimed that she charges:

On the other hand, another unnamed influencer with slightly lower followers said that they charge:

• Instagram Post – $1,000 Per Post
• Story – $200 Per Story
• 60-Second Video – $2,000 – $5,000

Even though there is no standardization in terms of what the influencers charge a common metric is brand pay $10 for every 1000 followers an influencer has which can add up quick if you’re really trying to raise brand awareness at an effective scale. Sometimes, you may end up paying $10,000 or $50,000 or even more to really get a good ROI from your influencer promotions.

That’s the reason, at Stack Influence, we prefer sticking to Micro Influencer Product Seeding Promotions.

What are Influencer Product Seeding Promotions?

Also called influencer gifting, influencer product seeding promotions is the strategic process – where you, as a brand, can prepare a list of influencers you’d like to promote your products or services – and based on that, send out free gifts to them. 

For example, if you run a leather bag eCommerce store in the US, then you can ship free, high-quality leather bags to like-minded lifestyle influencers. And when they receive them, they would probably love nothing more than to share photos and their experience with their followers.

36% of brands have reported that they prefer the influencer product seeding promotions model over paying cash to influencers. The reason why this method works as well as it does is – when you send free products to influencers and they post about it across their social media handles, their followers will know that it’s not a money-driven promotion.

They’ll find it to be much more authentic – which will result in more engagement and higher conversions. At the same time, it’ll help you save your top dollars, which you can invest in other portions of your business. 

But – as good as influencer product seeding promotions model sound and look – it has its fair share of problems.

The Problems with the Influencer Product Seeding Model

Problem #1 – No-Show

Very often after sending influencers your product to promote, they will never post about it across their social media profiles. Imagine sending a $400 item – only to know that they never posted about it losing your precious time and money. 

Brands have informed us that they experience this issue of “influencer fraud” 10% – 20% of the time they send influencer free products. When there is no money on the table, influencers can feel like there’s not a big obligation to promote a product after a brand sends it to them (even if they agreed to post). Since the name of the game with product seeding campaigns is scale, this issue of no show influencer promotions can really take a toll on your wallet. Also with influencers having more colalborations opportunities than ever these days, it can add fuel to the fire of people forgetting which products they promised to promote.

So, let’s say you send a high-ticket item that costs $200 to 300 micro influencers you’d like to collaborate with. Out of the 300 influencers 20% of them never share their experience with their social media followers or get back to your emails reminding them to post.

That’d be a $200 x 60 = $12,000 loss. Not very good for your marketing budget.

Problem #2 – Not Being Able to Find Enough Targeted People to Gift Your Products

Problem #1 is a big one. To tackle it, you may attempt to only collaborate with influencers that you see posting about their experiences with other brands who you know are also running free product gifting campaigns. However, another big problem is scale. Most influencers who are willing to promote products without getting paid will have less than 20K followers so in order to run an effective influencer campaign you need to work with hundreds if not thousands of social media users. You’ll also want to make sure that they’re a part of your niche and have a high engagement rate.

And when you try to find that many influencers with so many filters, you may run into some issues. Not only does it involve you having to spend a huge amount of your time, but the results may turn out to be disappointing, unfortunately.

And That’s Where Stack Influence Comes to Save the Day.

Throughout the years, we’ve helped thousands of brands generate more high-ticket sales and increase their revenue by planning and implementing scalable micro influencer marketing campaigns. Over the years we’ve fine tuned our platform to solve all the issues with influencer product seeding. 

So – how do we tackle the two biggest problems?

First – we have a database of 11M influencers and an A-Z management platform, which makes it extremely easy for us to find highly-targeted influencers – ones that would love nothing more than sharing their experience with their followers in exchange for only free products without getting paid.

Goodbye Problem #2!

Now how do we solve Problem #1 and prevent all the inventory loss from product seeding campaigns? Our solution is simple:

• We ask influencers to first purchase your brand’s product(s) from your online eCommerce store. 
• They receive the product, test it out, and share their experience across their social media profile(s). 
• Influencers submit their final social posts into our platform and once their social media post requirements are confirmed they receive a reimbursement for their product expenses.

And that’s how the end-to-end process works. No inventory loss, no loss of time, and no stress ☺

Also if an influencer doesnt complete their social promotion after purchasing your product, we don’t charge you anything for that influencer so you just get a free sale! We’re the only influencer marketing agency across the globe to have this unique process in place. 

And we’d love to do it for you.

So, what are you waiting for?

Level up your influencer marketing campaigns with our influencer product seeding based approach today.

Read More Awesome Content:

• The Go-To Amazon Influencers Guide for Sellers
• The Top Amazon Influencers You Should Work With 
• The 5 Best Amazon Seller Software
• 5 Proven Amazon Product Launch Tips New Sellers Should Consider
• 5 Clever Amazon Sales Strategies to Implement to Grow Your eCommerce Venture

By William Gasner

CMO at Stack Influence