Strategy and How-To Archives - The Shelf

HERE IS EXACTLY HOW WE RAN OUR FIRST INFLUENCER CAMPAIGN

Lauren Jung — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 07:11:53 +0000

Working with bloggers can be a somewhat daunting task if you’ve never done it before. I know this from experience. In fact, the rabbit hole that is influencer marketing is what pivoted our original business model from being a fashion shopping app to being a robust influencer platform.

I know there are a TON of articles out there about WHY you should work with bloggers but there isn’t a whole lot of detailed info about HOW to set up your first campaign from start to finish. I know this because even in 2019, 75% of the brands that use our platform experience the SAME pitfalls that we fell into when we first ventured into influencer marketing and working with bloggers in 2014(ish).

It was a total effing headache!

So, in this post, I want to tell you the fundamentals of working with influencers that I learned, not from running an influencer marketing firm, but from trying to run a damned campaign BEFORE we ever started connecting brands with influencers.

Six BIG Epiphanies I Had About Working with Bloggers and Rolling Out That First Influencer Campaign

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Working with bloggers can be a somewhat daunting task if you’ve never done it before. @shelfinc @thelaurenjung http://ctt.ec/dFP7j+

So First, a Little Background on My Pre-Shelf Awesomeness

I’m the Co-Founder of The Shelf, an influencer marketing platform. Most people don’t know this about us, but around 2014(ish), our platform made a pretty significant pivot into where we are today. Prior to this pivot, The Shelf was a smart-shopping app that sent sale-alerts to people as soon as the products they liked were discounted.

When we decided to start marketing our app, we tried Google AdWords, social ads, social media, and a bunch of other tactics to help market our app. But none of the typical techniques showed any sign of being effective.

Then, one day, I had a small epiphany.

(And this epiphany also requires a little more backstory… sorry!)

Before The Shelf, my mother and I had a little quilt business that we started together. Yes, I know. Totally cool! Quilts + my mom = POPULARITY.

We had a blog for our little quilt business and every six months we would participate in a quilters’ blog-hop, where about 20 quilters would each send traffic to one another. This was the greatest thing in the world for us! Because our rinky-dink blog wasn’t overly popular, the blog-hop allowed us to piggy-back on top of other people’s audiences and gain new traffic. The other thing that was really, really great about these blog-hops were the giveaways. Each participating blogger would host a giveaway on their blog, and this always did wonders for us! We’d get 600+ comments on each of our posts!

My First Epiphany Was to Work with Bloggers and Give Stuff Away

Based on that experience, my plan to promote our shopping app via bloggers began to hatch.

First, we needed to find bloggers who were bigger than us and get them to promote our content.

Second, we needed to do giveaways! From our experience, those got results!

At this point, my idea wasn’t overly developed. This fact became abundantly clear during our first attempt at influencer marketing when I got a friend of mine to host our first giveaway on her rather large quilt blog (key word being “quilt”).

Needless to say, our shopping app didn’t resonate quite so well with her audience. We had THREE people join our site because we bribed them with a $100 gift card to a fabric store. (Our price per user was a not-so-great $33.)

It wasn’t overly obvious to me what I’d done wrong though. My conclusion was that this initial blogger must not have been popular enough. So I contacted a much bigger blogger friend of mine also in quilts about doing a post about our fashion app.

Surprise surprise! This post didn’t do too well either. While we did get people to join our site in order to enter that giveaway, they wound up hating our app. It was just too untargeted. Further, quite a few of them sent us mean emails, demanding that we remove their email addresses.

Who knew quilters could be such a feisty little bunch?

Epiphany #2 : A Little Bit of Relevance Goes a Long Way

In hindsight, my mistake with the quilters is about as dumb as it gets. That audience was not even close to being our correct demographic. We had a fashion app! We needed fashion bloggers.

But I didn’t know any fashion bloggers!

So off to Google I went to search for “fashion bloggers”.

Surprisingly enough, typing in broad queries like that DOES in fact get you results. I found a slew of “top 20” or “top 50” or “top-whatever” lists.

After that easy Google search, I began breaking these lists down, blog by blog, finding contact info and pasting all of that into a spreadsheet, after which I pretty much mass blasted these celebrity-level bloggers with my “opportunity of a lifetime: partnering with The Shelf” messages.

Finding contact details took longer than you’d think though. And no one got back to me.

In fact, my first 50 outreach emails received no responses at all. That rather sad result transitioned me quite nicely over to my third realization.

Epiphany #3 : Don’t Go for the “Kim Kardashians” of the Blogosphere”

Kim Kardashian? Okay, this was in 2014, back before the hubby and kids. But… you get my point. If you line up bloggers on a spectrum of influence, some of them have become so influential that they have reached the status of being mini-celebrities.

Would a celebrity go with you to the prom? No, probably not. They’re busy going to the prom with other celebrities.

The same applies in this case. Celebrity bloggers are off galavanting around with celebrity brands. Not some no-name startup, like The Shelf.

This isn’t a bad thing. Just because a blogger isn’t an enormous celebrity with a global following does not mean that they don’t have influence.

After realizing that we were aiming a little too high, we decided to shoot for people getting around 15-30 comments per post.

But that’s where we got stuck. Finding this elusive 2nd-tier group of bloggers was quite a bit more challenging than scanning “top 50 lists.” No one was publishing lists of up-and-comers. I started to embark on a multi-day project of sifting through blogrolls and aggregation sites like Bloglovin. Once I found a blogger who looked like a good fit for us, I’d add her to a spreadsheet and then I’d start sifting through her blogroll, assuming she had one, trying to find more matches.

This task proved to be way WAY more time-consuming than I’d expected. The part that took the most time was FINDING the right bloggers for our app. Now that I had realized the importance of relevance, I became neurotic about finding the right matches. For our fashion app that helped people save money, we decided to look for fashion bloggers who were price-conscious. For every 10 bloggers that I’d come across who matched our engagement criteria, only 1 or 2 of them would also be price-conscious.

I worked on this for days. It got to be really embarrassing when I’d report to my Co-Founder each day that after 4 hours I was only able to reach out to around 10 people.

I wish I could say that things started moving a little better at this point. But there was one more light bulb that needed to go off.

I was spending tons of time narrowing down the right bloggers. But I wasn’t spending any time on my emails. I was sending them all the same basic template. And even though I myself knew why I had selected a particular blogger (as opposed to the 50 others that I had deemed irrelevant), I wasn’t telling the blogger about my rationale.

And no wants to feel like they’re at the receiving end of a mass-email blast.

Epiphany #4 : Cold-Emailing is Lame (but it sure does work when it’s done right)

This should really be pretty obvious. But I admit, it wasn’t obvious to us right away. I finally arrived at this conclusion after quite a bit of A/B testing. I tested out long emails, short emails, personalized emails, emails that mention payment in the title…literally every variation in the book. In the end, I found that my winning combination was to focus on personalization. Short. And with a subtle implication of compensation mentioned within the my message The email subject that did the best was somewhat vague, but also intriguing: “Collaboration Idea.”

Powerful, right?

This winning combination is going to vary for everyone. But the point is, don’t just settle on the first thing you write and then blast that out to a list of 100 people. Try variations. And personalize everything! Try to put yourself in their position: What sort of email would YOU want to receive? What kind of email would really get you excited?

After weeks of working on this influencer marketing project, my first big break came in the form of a price-conscious fashion blogger named Kimberly, who maintained a blog at Penny Pincher Fashion.

She will always be my favorite blogger. She was the first person to give us a chance, and the results of the giveaway I did on her blog were so fantastic, I knew I was onto something! Those results gave me the incentive to keep going with blogger campaigns, because honestly, things were looking pretty bleak with only the quilter posts under my belt thus far.

Epiphany #5 : Name-Dropping Helps

Up until Kimberly’s post, our hit rate was 1 in 80 (!) – as terrible and embarrassing as that is.

That being said, we’d learned a lot by that point. Moving forward, we were armed with all of that knowledge and now we had a link to that great post put together by a reputable blogger. From that point on, all of my outreach emails included a link to her post and this worked wonders. Our hit rate became closer to 1 in 10. And this gave us the momentum we needed to line up our next two posts.

Epiphany #6 : Paying Bloggers is NOT a Bad Thing

There are many brands out there who passionately refuse to pay bloggers.

We were never one of those brands. At that point, I was so darn glad to get someone to respond to my emails I was more than willing to shell out some cash. But that’s not to say I wasn’t extremely cautious with how we spent our money. At this particular stage of our company, my partner and I had both been working for a full year without salary so we watched every dollar spent.

I think it was this extreme cautiousness with our money that allowed the rest of my epiphanies to come in rapid succession. From that point on, I’m happy to report that I wasn’t learning my lessons the hard way anymore.

During our influencer marketing efforts, we ran a total of 5 campaigns, not including the two quilt posts. Of those 5 posts, there was only one that didn’t hit our campaign goals (and it just missed by a little bit). The other four were such huge successes, we felt like we hit the lottery. They outperformed our goals by 3 times!

In fact, the blogger who charged the most ($400 for a post + the $250 gift card that we gave away) performed exponentially better than our wildest expectations. She sent a whopping 9,000 people over to our site within the first few hours. And we had 3,000 signups by the end of the week!

We ended up taking that pivot from The Shelf as a shopping app and applying what we learned and making The Shelf into an influencer marketing tool. Guess what? We started our focus in fashion.

The 5 Mini Epiphanies That Really Brought Everything Home for Us

Now that I’ve given you all that history, I can tell you what I know now:

Do your research!

Do it thoroughly (preferably with a platform like ours, The Shelf). Your highest priority should be to find bloggers that match your demographic down to the finest nuance.

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Your highest priority should be to find #influencers that match your demographic down to the finest nuance. @shelfinc http://ctt.ec/C4r70+

Get performance metrics. Depending on what sort of campaign you plan on doing (in our case it was a giveaway), check back through the blogger’s old posts to make sure they have a track record of performing well for the type of project that you plan on approaching them about. I was extremely diligent with this. I’d review the last few months of posts for each person before I’d contact them. I’d also check to see what the comment count looked like on their past giveaways (most people had huge fluctuations here). Because of those fluctuations, I’d then look to see which giveaways performed the best, and why. We needed to be able to replicate their results.

Find out if brands returned. I also took this a step further to see if the blogger had repeat customers. If a brand used her once, did they come back a few months later? This is always a good sign if people liked them enough to run a second post!

Get a media kit. Most bloggers have a media kit. If they don’t, it’s okay for you to ask them about their traffic stats and past campaign results.

Communicate expectations. I was always very clear about what sort of ROI I wanted to achieve. Be nice about it, since not all bloggers will be receptive to this. However, you should let them know what expectations you’d like and then ask if they think this is going to be achievable based off of previous campaigns they’ve done Every blogger that I spoke to about this was totally up-front. Also, by defining my goals before the post went live, it helped me out with the one post which didn’t perform well. The blogger was aware her post didn’t deliver the results I was looking for. She did everything she could to make it right, creating multiple social posts, as well as sending out a newsletter to her followers. The extra effort did wind up getting us close to the ROI we were shooting for initially.

In the end, our four campaigns were a huge success! We wound up paying around 30 cents per signup. You really can’t beat that! That ROI blew Google AdWords so far out of the water it was worth the massive amount of torment that went into learning the ropes behind the enigma that was influencer marketing.

Concluding Thoughts

You might be wondering: why did you guys switch ideas if you were doing so darn good after these campaigns? Good question. It was a very gradual change. After we decided that influencer marketing was the way we would grow our business, we started building an internal database for us to use when setting up these pushes.

If you remember, the shopping app was all about products and pricing. The technology we have in our current app powered that very shopping app that gave us the ability to analyze blogger posts and extract out the products they talk about. What does this mean and why is this great? We know exactly what brands and prices of products are being written about. Using this technology we had earlier, we built ourselves a jerry-rigged blogger search engine that let us discover bloggers with a certain amount of comments per post (say, 15-30) and also narrows down further to bloggers who talked about affordable stores and sale items. Bam! That’s a very specific demographic (ours). This blogger list was automatically generated, rather than spending days compiling a list with Google.

Initially for internal use, we saw a huge opportunity. We had struggled so much with creating our own blogger campaigns but this tool made our lives SO much easier! We would have been doing mankind a disservice if we’d kept it to ourselves.

All kidding aside, that’s the story behind our first influencer marketing campaigns, about the mistakes we made and the progress we’ve made to date. The rest is history.

The post HERE IS EXACTLY HOW WE RAN OUR FIRST INFLUENCER CAMPAIGN appeared first on The Shelf.

HOW TO NAIL THE TIMING OF YOUR BACK TO SCHOOL CAMPAIGN

Sorilbran — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 06:17:34 +0000

Welcome to the Back-to-School 2019 shopping (and marketing) season!

Believe it or not, Back-to-School marks the unofficial start of the annual shopping season – not to be confused with the start of the holiday shopping season, which is Black Friday. That’s a different thing. Shopping season kicks off with back-to-school deals that generally start showing up right after Independence Day.

You may have already noticed a growing selection of school uniforms at your local mega store. This time of year, they may be butted up against the swimsuits but they’re there, and their presence is a telltale sign it’s time to start mapping out your back-to-school 2019 marketing campaign.

Starting a Little Early This Year, Aren’t We?

Yes and no. Yes, it seems early. I’m actually penning this sentence on June 13th, which means… it’s the end of spring – not even summer yet. So, why am I harping on you about rolling out a campaign for a fall retail event?

Well, for a couple of reasons…

REASON 1: CONSUMERS ARE STARTING THEIR BACK-TO-SCHOOL SHOPPING EARLIER

Back-to-school shopping has gone the way of holiday shopping – it’s starting earlier. American families will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on school supplies before the fireworks ever light up the Fourth of July sky.

By mid-July, expect nearly 30 percent of that B2S crowd will already be knee-deep in school uniforms, shoes, gadgets and supplies. About one in four back-to-school and back-to-college shoppers head to stores at least two months before class actually starts, according to the National Retail Federation.

And since schools across the country will literally start in different months, brands and marketers would be smart to find out when school starts in the areas they’re targeting.

REASON 2: CONSUMERS ARE SHOPPING FOR A LONGER PERIOD OF TIME

It totally makes sense that the back-to-school shopping season is lengthy – as lengthy as the holiday shopping season. Not only are there going to be hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of kids starting school every weekday from mid-July to early September, but many B2S shoppers will stretch out their shopping plans so they can take advantage of seasonal sales.

It may surprise you to learn that for many parents, back-to-school shopping actually overlaps holiday shopping by about a month. That’s because students pick up the last few back-to-school items in early October (I’m thinking it’s college students doing last-minute add/drops), and early bird parents start their holiday shopping in September.

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@NRFNews reports 8 in 10 #backtoschool shoppers planned to take advantage of #PrimeDay sales in 2018. And 1 in 3 shoppers marked their calendars to check out similar #BlackFridayinJuly sales from other retailers. #backtoschool2019 #marketing @shelfinc https://ctt.ec/16dYA

REASON 3: CONSUMERS LOVE THOSE BIG, MID-SUMMER PROMOTIONS

The term “lazy days of summer” doesn’t just apply to my poolside vibe. Historically, mid-summer has meant slow retail sales. Summer is a time for kicking back (i.e. being at home in chill mode) OR grabbing new experiences (i.e. vacations). Over the past several years, however, a growing number of retailers have begun offering massive mid-summer promotions to combat the seasonal slump.For back-to-school shoppers, that means taking advantage of Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday in July sales.

In 2018, Amazon Prime Day was a 36-hour global shopping event in which Prime members in 17 countries were offered steep discounts on all sorts of products. Amazon reports that Prime Day 2018 was responsible for 100 million items being sold.

According to the National Retail Federation, 8 in 10 back-to-school shoppers planned to take advantage of Prime Day sales last year, in search of everything from school supplies to electronics. AND nearly one in three back-to-school shoppers marked their calendars to check out similar Black Friday in July sales from other retailers.

Timing is Crucial for Back-to-School Marketing

Here’s a piece of great advice for you if you plan to roll out a back-to-school campaign: keep one eye on the calendar. The Back-to-School season is replete with timelines that will determine what you should market to which audiences at which times.

TIMELINE 1: 50 FIRST DAYS OF SCHOOL

Students across the nation will be starting school on different days. When we did our cursory survey of public school districts across the country, we found entire k-12 school districts starting back as early as July 20 and as late as September 5. In Richmond, Virginia for instance, school starts back Sept 3rd. But the kids in Chandler, Arizona start July 23rd (sorry, guys).

TIMELINE 2: PINPOINT WHEN CUSTOMERS ARE SHOPPING

Another timeline you have to know is when your customers will actually start their shopping. One-third of B2S shoppers will be hitting the stores BEFORE mid-July. Forty percent of shoppers will start shopping in August. Of course, you have the early birds who start shopping as early as May… and the johnny-come-latelies who will stretch school shopping out to October.

TIMELINE 3: KNOWING WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE BUYING

Final timeline… back-to-school shoppers are buying different things at different times. Spending on clothing and school supplies peak in July. With the popularity of the mid-summer sales I mentioned earlier, many shoppers are waiting until mid-July to make purchases on electronics and devices so they can take advantage of those sales. BUT moms and dads are waiting until right before school starts to stock up on the snacks that will be so crucial during those first few weeks of school.

How to Map the Timing of Your Campaign to Get You In Front of Buyers When They’re Ready to Buy

So, we’re clear on the point that there are a few sliding doors to deal with when it comes to back-to-school sales and marketing. Let’s run down some tactics that will help you map the main touch points of your campaign.

Phase I: Run a Brand Awareness Campaign Targeting Gen Z First

I know marketers love to target moms, but 51 percent of back-to-school purchases are influenced by students, including where to shop and what to buy. There are benefits to targeting these young shoppers. First, cultivating a relationship with teenagers will directly impact how parents are spending this year. PLUS, you get the added benefit of establishing a connection that can easily extend into adulthood.

The first few weeks of your campaign focus more on boosting your brand’s awareness with the actual benefactors of this back-to-school shopping – the students. And I would recommend doing so on Instagram.

Sponsored posts on Instagram are a fast and affordable way to get young eyes on your brand. I would say sponsored posts over an influencer partnership at this stage because you can test messaging and images with sponsored posts to see what resonates with your audience before you bring in an influencer.

But just note that if you do plan to use influencer marketing this year, Phase I is also the time you want to start vetting potential influencer partners.

Gen Zers use Instagram for product discovery, much in the same way adult women use Pinterest for product discovery. Here’s the thing though: Teenagers scroll at fast-to-break-neck speed UNTIL they either find the account they’re looking for, glimpse an image that catches their attention AND that they’re willing to back-scroll to see, or they spot a colorful sponsored post where they may be able to score cool, affordable stuff that they can buy quickly and have shipped directly to them.

Unlike older users (Millennials and older), Gen Zers aren’t caption readers. So, the key here is to grab their attention with your visual asset, your tagline, and your offer, not really to tug at their heartstrings with a story.

Phase II: Run a Two-Tiered Traffic-Clicks Campaign to Promote Your Big Sales and Discounts

Discounts play an important role in back-to-school product selection. Deloitte reported in its 2018 Back to School Survey that across all income groups, price-sensitive retailers remain the top choice for back-to-school shopping. More than half of back-to-school purchases (51 percent) are influenced by deals and promotions; 57 percent of Gen Zers are involved in the purchasing decisions this time of year.

Starting in weeks three to five, roll out a discounts-fueled click campaign to get the word out about your promotions.

The goal is to hit households at a couple of different touch points so you reach moms (who are in the planning stages right now) and their teenage/young adult students.

Targeting Moms

Pinterest offers a few different ways to get in front of moms. We actually penned (not pinned) a post a few weeks ago on Pinterest marketing. Using Promoted Pins early in your campaign is a great way to start showing up in Mom’s feed while she’s still planning.

And yes, now is a good time to also incorporate micro-influencers. Partner with popular bloggers who have large followings on Pinterest to include your product as part of a piece of content about back-to-school preparations. That could be a blog post, a printable checklist, an in-store video or step-by-step tutorial to build or create something.

This is an in-store haul from Kieren of Thrifted Living. In-store video hauls are a great way to promote your physical location and give viewers and walk-through so they can see the selection for themselves. On YouTube.

If you take a quick look at the screenshot below of my Pinterest feed, you can see a lot of different verticals represented here. There are pins for educational printables, school supplies checklists, snack and lunch ideas, supplies kits, clothes, and a few other things that would naturally fall under the heading of back-to-school ideas.

BUT there are also topics you may not immediately recognize as back to school. For instance, half of back-to-college shoppers will be spending on furniture for on-and off-campus housing, to the tune of $3.5 billion. That makes total sense. But you may not know that 48 percent of moms also buy home organization items WHILE shopping for back-to-school things for their k-12 kids.

And you’ll notice there’s a pin on the far left that’s focused on home organization. There are tons of pins like this, both from bloggers and from brands. Bloggers will typically tell you how to do it while brands offer some visually-appealing inspirations for what to buy to get it done. You’ll want to be in both those categories.

With a compelling enough offer, you could also work the list-building angle. This one is really important because adding Mom to your email list will give you the chance to re-target her over the next few weeks when she’s actively involved in shopping. Send promo codes to her inbox. Forty-six percent of moms say they find discounts and promotions from brands for back-to-school shopping in their email inboxes.

Targeting Students

Instagram is the main place students will want to hear from your brand. That’s true for promoted posts and it’s true for influencer campaigns.

If you go through your kid’s Instagram feed, there’s a good chance you’ll find quite a few sponsored posts from brands offering steep discounts to these kids in exchange for that all-important Shop Now click. Gen Zers have come to expect that. But targeting is really crucial here. Facebook / Instagram has some pretty legendary targeting capabilities to make sure your yoga block lands in the feed of high school dancers and aspiring contortionists instead of in the feed of a 16 year-old boy who’s obsessed with cars.

FYI: The yoga block example is an actual purchase my teenager made from a well-targeted sponsored post on Instagram. It was likely based on her affinity for, and engagement with, flexibility influencers. But in recent weeks, she’s also bought a charcoal face mask and a Curology subscription from Shop Now links on Instagram.

And these exercise bands

And these temporary tats

And this phone case…

In her own words, “If I see it on Instagram and I like it, I’m buying it. About half the stuff I buy is stuff from Instagram.”

#shrug

Who knew?

Phase III: Optimize and Promote

Before we land on the very last phase of your back-to-school campaign, I want to stop here to tell you to optimize. I mentioned optimization (testing your message to see what’s working) in Phase I, and in reality, we like to run influencer marketing campaigns where we are continually optimizing the campaign from start to finish. That means always monitoring the performance of each piece of content and making tweaks to get things to work better.

This is super important because many social media marketing campaigns, including influencer campaigns, benefit from a concurrent PPC campaign… things like boosting posts and putting more resources behind content from influencers whose posts are performing well.

In addition, working with creators provides brands the opportunity to store up gorgeous, high-impact user-generated content that the brand could then reuse across its own branded channels.

Phase IV: Consider Adding Video for Views and Conversions

Video is an effective method for marketing brands and products… but it can be expensive. So, there are really a couple of ways you can go about using video to stay top-of-mind, demonstrate the value of your product(s), and help your audience come to a final decision.

Pre-Roll Ads

Video and pre-roll ads do VERY well on YouTube and Facebook. Unlike mid-roll ads, pre-roll ads are 3.5x less likely to be viewed as an interruption, according to a study by IPG Media Lab and YuMe.

Nielsen found that viewers who watched video ads for less than three seconds created up to 47 percent of total campaign value. Those who stayed tuned for up to 10 seconds accounted for 74 percent of total campaign value (72 percent for purchase intent).

Interestingly, even for pre-roll ads that were skipped, the impression of the ad still resulted in positive lift across several important metrics, including ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent.

B2S Hacks, Tips and Ideas

You can also partner with influencers to dream up some pretty creative back-to-school videos. For instance, I came across this from popular vlogger Wengie when I search “back to school” on YouTube.

Source: On YouTube

Now, YouTube videos will typically be one of the pricier options for an influencer campaign, especially if you’re partnering with a macro-influencer. But these kinds of short, personal videos can get tons of eyes on your product.

In verticals like cosmetics, hair care, box subscription services, and gaming YouTube typically is a go-to platform for people to create and view that kind of content. Gen Zers use YouTube to learn stuff, but also it’s their last stop before they hit the stores.

To reduce the cost of a sponsored YouTube video, consider including your product as part of a larger list of gift ideas or hacks rather than choosing to have an influencer make an entire video strictly about your product.

Another thing to think about is basically just unraveling the traditional idea of product placement. Your product doesn’t have to be in the foreground to drive brand lift.

Consider two scenarios: A back-to-school post where an influencer and her friends are seen loaded with bags but the entire piece of content is about how great your chicken is. OR a day of shopping in which an influencer and her friends are out having a ball at the mall, trying on clothes, dreaming up homecoming ideas then stopping off at the food court to have some AMAZING chicken (and a plate of delicious sides for her vegan friend) before heading back out for shoes and makeup.

Both posts would include your food, but the second one is far less sponsored-looking… and people don’t like or respond to content that looks ultra-sponsored. Besides… who wants to watch somebody eat chicken for minutes?

My point is this: low-key product placements that enable an influencer to communicate having positive sentiment TOWARD your brand without having to verbally promote your brand will still help you stay top-of-mind. And be far more affordable.

Conclusion

Timing your back-to-school campaign is about more than just knowing when school starts, though that’s a crucial part of the planning process. Whether you are planning to target students, parents, or both, there are steps you can take to structure your campaign for maximum success.

And, of course, if you need help dreaming up creative, high-impact ideas for your next campaign, you can leave the influencer strategy to us. We can help your team craft AMAZING campaigns that actually deliver.

The post HOW TO NAIL THE TIMING OF YOUR BACK TO SCHOOL CAMPAIGN appeared first on The Shelf.

How to Use Pinterest Marketing to Power Your Digital Strategy

Danielle Hayes — Tue, 14 May 2019 20:00:00 +0000

Bloggers may be clued in on something your brand is actually missing: Pinterest is an AMAZING product discovery tool. More, it’s basically a shopping list for about 55 percent of its active users. Pinterest itself presents a powerful marketing opportunity that can not only get your products in front of shoppers who have their wallets in-hand, but can also drive huge amounts of traffic to your website.

In this post, I’m going to help you build a Pinterest marketing strategy (you’re welcome) that will fortify your next influencer campaign.

Talk Topics for This Post:

A Quick Overview of Pinterest
Moms, Millennials and Men: Who Uses Pinterest
User Behaviors That Make Pinterest a Digital Marketing Goldmine
Tips for Making Pinterest Work for Your Business

A Quick Overview of Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual discovery platform where users can post (“pin”) their own visual content or repin (share) other users’ pins. post contains a title, description and a link to where the content being pinned lives on the web (usually a blog). Pinners must assign every pin a board (collection of pins) in order to pin it and assign any content they repin from another user to a board in their own collection.

So, for instance, with our Pinterest account we pin blog covers images to our board, From The Shelf Blog and pin our infographics to our Influencer Marketing Tips or Marketing Mojo boards. We may repin ideas we like from other pinners in one of several boards we have like Minimalist Bloggers, On the Streets, Summer Forever, or Weekend Style.

Imagine if Instagram and Google got together and had a digital baby. That’s Pinterest.

Pinterest is one-part social media platform, one-part search engine, and completely driven by visual content that can quickly travel across the site, and the world wide web to bring new visitors to your blog, website, or online store.

Pinterest Was Pretty Awesome Out the Gate

Pinterest launched in 2010 as a way to share cool ideas. When it first launched, it was invitation-only. Do you remember that – waiting to hear back from Pinterest and not even fulling getting what it was?

In spite of the invite-only setup, Pinterest ended up being the fastest site in history to reach 10 million monthly active users. Then, like now, it served as a great platform for the crafts and DIY communities, as well as various lifestyle verticals that are driven by visual content (and even lots of verticals – like personal finance – that aren’t super-interested in pretty pictures)..

Today, seven in ten Americans know about Pinterest. With more than 52 million mobile users, Pinterest is the fifth most popular social networking mobile app and the fourth most popular social network behind YouTube, Facebook and Instagram (third if you don’t think of YouTube as a social network).

AND you can find just about anything on Pinterest, from industry information – like how it’s overflowing with colorful marketing infographics like these…

…. to wedding ideas and wedding planning tips.

Pinterest isn’t in the top 10 as far as search engines go, but it may be of interest to brands and marketers that Pinterest is a popular search engine that 39 percent of female users and 48 percent of male users choose over more traditional search engines like Google or Bing, according to AdEspresso.

That makes sense to me. Here’s why…

If you were to search for “short blond pixie cut” on Google then perform the same search on Pinterest, different results would show. More importantly (for searchers), Pinterest filters the results a little smarter for stuff like this.

In the two screenshots below, check out the filter options along the top of each picture (and the fact that Google results INCLUDE Pinterest pins).

Pinterest also does a better job of integrating sponsored content a little more naturally with your actual results.

Actually, let’s try it for another popular Pinterest topic – home decorating. The search term is “small bedroom ideas”. I actually had to scroll down a bit because the first row on Google was sponsored content / products.

Now, it’s not that people don’t want to shop on Pinterest. The truth is actually quite the opposite. Pinterest is the social platform users are MOST likely to choose when they are ready to spend money.

Ninety-seven percent of Pinterest searches are unbranded searches, meaning users are open to suggestions from brands. In fact, 78 percent of Pinterest users say they want to see branded content, and more than half of shoppers name Pinterest as their platform of choice for finding and shopping for products.

Source: Statista.com

Moms, Millennials and Men: Who Uses Pinterest?

There is a much wider diversity in Pinterest’s audience than you might think. One in three U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 49 use Pinterest, and one in four adults between the ages of 50 and 64 use Pinterest, according to Statista. Not to worry, those stats change significantly for Millennial users.

There are 265 million active monthly users

There are over 175 billion pins currently uploaded to the site
81 percent of users are female
Half of new user signups in 2018 were men
34 percent of 18-49 year old Americans use Pinterest
Pinterest is as popular an app with Millennials as Instagram

Pinterest is popular among Millennials, and especially among Millennial women. One in two US Millennials use Pinterest, and 7 in 10 Millennial women use the platform – that trumps both Twitter and Snapchat. Seventy percent of US moms and one-third of US dads also use the super-charged scrapbooking platform.

And people use Pinterest for a number of reasons. Most people use Pinterest to look at pictures (60 percent) and find/shop products (55 percent). It’s also a popular place to share content (24 percent) and watch videos (15 percent).

Source: Statista.com

So…

A pinner can easily have 1,000 people following her Wedding Ideas board

And 500 other people who are only following her Shoe Lust board

And 2,000 people following her Blogger Tips board AND her Passive Income board

And 900 people following her Bible Verses board who ARE following Passive Income and ARE NOT following her Shoe Lust board.

The possibilities are endless, both for Pinners and for marketers.

Let’s Talk About the User Behaviors That Make Pinterest a Digital Marketing Goldmine

Take a look at the picture below . It was captured a few days ago by Sorilbran, the editor of The Shelf blog who came across the poster at her local McDonald’s.

In June, McDonald’s will be sponsoring the Women’s Expo in Atlanta, GA. In case you’re wondering, Atlanta is a global destination point, playing host to the busiest airport in the world. It’s home to a sizable entertainment industry hub, with countless television shows and movies being filmed here (think Avengers and other Marvel Studios movies).

The celebrity lineup for the Atlanta Women’s Expo is nothing to sneeze at – reality stars, social media stars, movie stars… these women are famous.

But it’s not just McDonald’s that will be involved. To give you a better idea of the scope of this event, other sponsors include luxury brands like Chanel, Coach, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo and Dior, as well as retail heavyweights like The Home Depot, Walgreens, and Kroger.

Why am I telling you this? Because upon closer examination of the poster, you can see that one of the featured workshops for this event, which draws tens of thousands of women every year, is a Pinterest workshop. So, let’s talk about why that is.

Pinterest Has Cross-Generational Appeal

Whether Millennials or Boomers, adults love Pinterest. They love having a one-click storage place of awesome photos and cool ideas. They love having a place where they can build targeted audiences whose ideas and tastes align with their own.

Pinterest Time is Me Time

Pinterest is where people go to source and collect ideas to help them be their best selves. The fact that Pinterest is so heavily aspirational (with no PERSON in particular to be the target of anyone’s love-hate aspiration) keeps Pinterest from earning the same stigma as some of the other popular social networks. No reports of Pinterest-fueled depression or rage. It’s aspiration without the stigmas. It’s no real surprise (especially to anyone who actually uses the platform) that Pinterest users are twice as likely to think their time on Pinterest is time well spent.

Pinterest is a Positive Corner of the Internet

Pinterest gives all the feels. Pinterest is the platform that helps people feel more creative (73 percent), inspired (68 percent) and organized (62 percent).

Pinners are Planners… and They Plan Waaaay In Advance

Pinners are planners. While Pinterest users post about seasonal events year-round, there are noticeable spikes in engagement with holiday- and event-related content in the weeks before that holiday or event.

But if you notice, the posts start typically a few months ahead of the holiday. Pinterest users tend to start planning twice as early as people who use other platforms. Heck, Father’s Day ideas start circulating around the platform as early as March and interest in Halloween starts to spike in June.

Pinners also use the platform to plan life’s important milestones, like buying a new home, decorating your home, getting married, and going on vacation.

Pinners Are Purposeful

Pinterest users are more likely to use the platform for the intention of finding products and ideas, as opposed to just using the platform to kill time. Ninety percent of users use Pinterest to make purchase decisions.

Pinners Favor Mobile

Pinterest users heavily favor the app. Eighty percent of users access Pinterest on mobile devices and 85 percent of Pinterest searches are on mobile.

Pinners Use Pinterest to Source Ideas

Pinterest is the go-to spot on the web for people to discover new products and source new ideas, and part of the reason branded content is so effective is because Pinterest shows new content based on what people have seen and engaged with before. This personalization helps the platform naturally integrate product ideas and Promoted Pins in a way that doesn’t look like ads or make users feel like they’re being marketed to.

Pinners Can Buy Instantly

Most social media platforms are shoppable now. With Pinterest, every one of the images acts as a direct link back to the site, making it infinitely easier for companies with promoted posts to attract new followers and site visitors.

Half of all Pinners make a purchase after seeing a promoted pin. And, since so many Pinterest users are actively looking to make their next purchases, smart marketers can leverage the platform as a way to generate both traffic and revenue.

A Simple Process for Creating Your Pinterest Business Account

It’s true that you’re going to make a hefty front-end investment laying the foundation of your Pinterest marketing, but managing Pinterest is actually pretty easy (and a little addictive). Pinning and repinning takes up very little of your time, and in many ways, it’ll become second nature.

Here’s what you need to know about setting your Pinterest business account.

#1 Create a Business Account

You may have a personal account, but you still want to create a business account that you can use to run campaigns and monitor the performance of your pins. Pinterest is like most social media sites in that way – business accounts give you access to features you need to run successful marketing campaigns. Plus, you can start creating rich pins. More on those later – just know, they’re super important.

#2 Stay On-Brand

Once you’ve got a business account set up, you’ll need to get your branding in order. Of course, you’ll need the basics as well: A clear profile picture, business name, and bio are essential – just like on any other platform. You’ve got to put your best foot forward so people can see your awesome brand personality shining through.

#3 Create Keyword-Optimized Boards

Pins go on boards, so in order to add pins or repin anything, Pinterest needs to know where you want pins to go. This is a good thing because Pinterest is AI-powered, so it learns your preferences based on what you pin and repin and starts showing you more and more content like the content you’ve engaged with previously.

You’ll need to create keyword-optimized boards. For us, a lot of our boards focus on either blogger life or marketing strategies. So, you’ll notice we have tons of style and fashion boards, lots of infographics, a board that’s specifically to promote our blog posts, even boards on beauty trends and color combinations that look cool (we’re all about color).

Each board you create can be classified as either Public, Secret, or Group. Best practices indicate that creating 10 boards initially is a good way to start, with each board tailored to your target audience in order to attract them to your pins.

Pinterest serves two billion searches a month. As you can imagine, pinners will need a way to find your content. That’s where you keywords strategy comes in. Your keywords are going to be vital when naming and creating your boards. Choosing which topics to focus your boards on should be based on the keywords you think are most important to your brand.

#4 Design and schedule pins

Next, you’re going to need some pins creating for your content so you can get sharing, and start growing your audience. Canva is an easy-to-use tool that will help you streamline this. The platform is free to use (or you can upgrade to a paid plan) and it comes with templates… for the design-challenged pinner.

Pinterest is a visual platform, so creating pins that are eye-catching colorful and easy to read / understand is important for growing your audience. As soon as someone sees your pin, he or she should know exactly what the webpage you’re leading them to is all about.

To make sure your pinning strategy is as effective as possible, make uploading your pins a regular part of your content distribution schedule. Using a scheduling tool like Tailwind is a good way to do this, and also gives you access to Tailwind Tribes, where other users will also share your content to increase your reach.

#5 Make Pins That Convert

Possibly the most important factor in a successful Pinterest marketing campaign is how you build and design your pins. The huge focus on aesthetics on this platform means you need to be on top of your game when it comes to this side of the platform. We know how intimidating creating any kind of visual content can be if you’re not a graphic designer by trade, but Pinterest doesn’t have to be as difficult a task as you might think. I’ll walk you through it.

Let’s start with covering the basics of pin design. Without having these fundamentals down, no matter how fancy your design skills are, your marketing is going to fall flat.

Dimensions

Each of your pins should be vertical images, and according to Pinterest themselves, the ideal dimensions are 600×900, or any 2:3 ratio image

Image Style

Images that are high quality, light, and surprisingly, without faces receive more repins on average than others

Plain Image vs. Text

Depending on your target market and brand style, you may want to include text on your pins instead of just plain images. Both are viable options on Pinterest, and choosing which one to use should depend on your audience.

Of course, when it comes to design, there are a million and one ways you can go to make your pins stand out. From cool fonts to striking imagery, your pins are your chance to express your brand, so don’t be afraid to go a little wild.

Before We Wrap Up, I’ll Share Some Pin Design Ideas

When appearance really is everything, you need to be spending time designing the perfect graphics for your pins. So, for those who aren’t exactly the visual content type, let me show you some of the different ways you can go when building your own Pinterest designs.

Image only

If you have the ability to stage and capture stunning photographs or have an entirely visual product, then image only pins can be the best thing for you. People use the platform to create dream collections, so having high-quality images they can swoon over is perfect. Just remember to avoid including any faces, and keep your images as bright as possible for maximum impact.

Text over image

If you’re using pins to help promote blog posts or special offers on your site, then including a text overlay on your image is the perfect way to go. Having titles like the ones above on your pins helps to inform viewers exactly what they will see when they click through to your site.

Just make sure that your text is as easy to read as possible. The best way to do this is to place a solid shape underneath it so that it’s not affected by your background image. Also, take some time to experiment with fonts and see which styles and sizes are easiest to read both on a desktop and mobile view.

Infographic

One of the most popular forms of pin design is the infographic. These images educate and inform the viewer, allowing them to complete a project or plan a trip with added ease. People love to share images like these for future reference so can work as continual traffic for your site.

You have so much freedom with your design choices here as well, you don’t need to stick to the usual cookie-cutter style of infographic. If you take a look at the examples above, they all work in different ways, with very different styles. You can tailor yours to your audience and brand.

Rich Pins

If you’re linking your Pinterest strategy to a product, article, or recipe on your site then you need to be using rich pins. These special kinds of pins show more information on your pins to help inform viewers about what you have to offer. Not only do they look better than regular pins, but Pinterest will also sometimes amplify the reach of these pins so even more people will see your great content.

To make rich pins, you need to apply through Pinterest – this is entirely free to do, so every account can take advantage. Once your site has been approved, every pin you create, with the necessary data, will be shown as a rich pin.

Final Tips for Making Pinterest Work for Your Business

As with any social media site, the way the general public uses Pinterest, and the way businesses use it differ greatly. You can’t simply expect to put up a few boards, pin a few images to them, and suddenly attract loads of web traffic. You have to do things differently to get the best results.

Add Pinterest Save Buttons to Your Site

You want to be sure that it’s not just you pinning your content on the site. You want your followers, customers, and potential leads to be doing it as well. The best way to this, is to make it as easy as possible for them to share your content. By including a pin button on your site, you can increase the amount of content pinned from your site by up to 5x as much.

You can install permanent pin buttons to each image, or use hover buttons that only appear when a user moves the cursor over an image. The latter can often look cleaner and allow your pictures to maintain their visual integrity. But, by having a permanent button, you’re making it easier and more obvious for users to take advantage of the option.

Pin Consistently

Dumping all of your pins in one go is not recommended. Instead, you should aim to pin at least once a day, ideally in the evenings or at weekends if you’re working with the U.S. market. Spread your pinning throughout the day and week to help keep a consistent schedule going. As with any marketing – consistency really is key.

Plan Ahead for Holidays

When it comes to holidays or special event marketing, plan to start pinning around 45 days in advance. This gives your pins time to get traveling around the site and attract more attention.

Make Your Pins Accessible

For many of us, it’s easy to forget that not everyone who uses social media can consume the content in the same way as us. Pinterest is a highly visual platform, so this can be severely limiting for those with visual disabilities. There are ways you can make your content more accessible, helping to expand your audience even further.

For instance, if someone needs to use screen readers to access visual content online, text over images won’t register as text to them. This means that you need to incorporate proper pin descriptions to really make your pins work for you. Also, make sure that any fonts you choose to use are as clear and easy to read as possible. Finally, don’t forget to be conscious of your color choices. If you take the time to use color contrast ratios, not only will it make your content easier to read, it will also make it look more appealing in terms of design.

Promote Your Pins

If you have a marketing budget for social media, you should definitely consider plugging some of that cash into a Pinterest strategy. There are two different options when it comes to spending money on marketing your pins – promoted pins and shoppable pins.

Promoted pins work in pretty much the same way as promoted posts on any other network. You pay money to have Pinterest show your pin to people who you select through targeting. How many people see it will depend on your ad budget. They identify these posts with a small “promoted” button on the bottom of your image, and viewers can select that button to see more information about who promoted it.

The difference with using these promoted pins on Pinterest though, is that once a user pins your pin to their board, they begin to act like organic pins. This is why promoting on Pinterest can really help your budget travel further. In fact, according to Pinterest, brands who launch ad campaigns on the platform received an average of 20% more organic clicks.

Promote Your Pins

These pins are ideal for when you have multiple items to promote in each image. They appear pretty similar to promoted pins, but they have little dots over each product that you can click through and buy.

Pinterest recommends that you include between 4-6 buyable items in each pin to get the best results. Each link should go directly to the object when possible to make it easier for users to engage with.

It pretty much goes without saying, but these pins are optimized for generating sales, so if brand awareness is your goal, you’d be better sticking with the traditional promoted pins.

TL; DR – Pinterest is Effective AF

Pinterest is one of those great online tools that you can really get results from, even without spending a dime. It is still extremely underused by many businesses, so now really is the time to capitalize on the opportunity and get ahead of your competition.

Pinterest is visual discovery platform where users go to dream, get inspired, and perhaps most important to brands… users use Pinterest to plan purchases. More than half of active users open their apps in the store to use as a shopping list.

When it comes to your Pinterest marketing strategy, you can’t really phone it in. The returns will be better if you can get in there and do the work. Spend the time nailing your Pinterest marketing strategy. Design great-looking pins, schedule them out across the week, and build your boards around the best keywords for your brand. Do all this, and you’ll be winning.

The post How to Use Pinterest Marketing to Power Your Digital Strategy appeared first on The Shelf.

How To Do Blogger Outreach (Includes Email Templates)

Sabrina Fenster — Thu, 02 May 2019 18:00:00 +0000

How To Do Blogger Outreach, From A Blogger’s Perspective

Updated May 2019

When it comes to influencer marketing campaigns, blogger outreach is the first (and most important) step, but it can also be the trickiest to navigate. If you’re taking your blogger campaigns seriously, you’ll likely be vetting and reaching out to a ton of bloggers. And since finding the right ones to work with will make or break your campaign, you’ll want to master the art of blogger outreach right from the get-go.

As a blogger myself, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of blogger outreach. While some brands and agencies do a wonderful job of communicating, others blast full speed ahead without really thinking about it. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. Most bloggers see right through this so, I don’t recommend this quick and dirty strategy. It just won’t garner the responses you’re after.

If you’re guilty of blasting every blogger with a cold, templated email, it’s time for a new approach…and I want to help you. Let’s dig a little deeper and see what the good, the bad and the ugly look like…and how you can master the art of blogger outreach and win bloggers over, pronto!

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How To Do Blogger Outreach, From A Blogger’s Perspective – @Shelfinc: http://ctt.ec/2OicU+

Just to give you a little context, my name is Sabrina, and I’m the blogger behind StreetScout.Me, a Vancouver-based street style and fashion blog. I’ve seen all kinds of pitches from brands and PR agencies come through my inbox: some really awesome ones and some not so good ones. I’d love to pass this knowledge onto you so that you can have raving success with your own blogger outreach!

The Good (Use This Template)

First, let’s review an outreach email that really caught my attention. It was personalized and to the point, plus it included all of the necessary elements for me to understand what the brand was looking for.

subject line
We’re fans of your street style blog and would love to work with you

I liked that he referenced my blog and expressed interest in working with me right off the bat. At the very least, I found it intriguing enough to open his email. Bonus points for recognizing that my blog is about street style.

Hi Sabrina,

He referenced my name. I’m so glad he knows whom he’s talking to.

My name is [undisclosed] and I work for [brand]. I wanted to start off by saying I really love your blog. You take such beautiful street style photos.

A little flattery never hurt. I think our photos are pretty awesome too and I really appreciate when a brand recognizes that.

I was looking through your blog post on [clothing line] and really think you’ll love our brand too as we have a very similar aesthetic. It really suits your personal style and I think your readers would love it too.

He actually took the time to read at least one of my blog posts. He knows similar brands I’ve worked with and is familiar with my personal style. I really appreciate that he took the time to do his research and reached out to me because I was legitimately a good fit. This could be a sweet collaboration.

I love what you do on StreetScout.Me and would like to know more about your services. I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an article about [brand] clothing line and if so, what your rates would be for a 500-1000 word post.

Simple, to the point and I completely understand what he’s looking for – the content he needs, the length he requires and the fact that he realizes that this is indeed a paid service. Now it’s just a matter of a little correspondence to let him know my rates and what the sponsored post will look like. In fact, it really took no time at all to work out all the details and get this partnership rolling. Beautiful!

The Bad (Don’t Even Think About Using This Template)

Here’s an example that was not down-right terrible, but it lacked personalization, which is key when you’re communicating with bloggers. Most receive too many pitches to spend time reviewing the ones that lack personalization.

Subject Line
Fashion Inquiry

Ok, so the subject line is vague but that doesn’t mean I won’t open it. It’s an inquiry related to my topic of expertise, so I’m at least curious at this point.

Hi there,

Already doesn’t know my name. I understand if this information isn’t available but here’s the thing. It IS available and really easy to find on my website. Personalization DOES count.

My name is [undisclosed] and I found your blog because I was doing a little research into new fashion trends for spring. I really like your style and the different looks you put together. I was thinking you might be interested in a Style Challenge the company I work for, [brand name], is running. We’re a clothing brand focused on delivering great fit and a fun approach to fashion. [Brand] loves style and class, two traits you seem to radiate!

For our Style Challenge, we’re teaming up with a group of trendy bloggers, like yourself, to see what kind of outfits they would put together from our line. I was wondering if you’d like to be part of this exclusive group and post looks you create to compliment our new line on your blog?

Ok, admittedly this could be a cool campaign. And I appreciate the flattery but it will only get you so far if you don’t understand what I blog about. For that reason, I’m going to read on because I need to see if this campaign is a good fit for me or if he literally just blasted the universe with this email.

If you’re interested, I would be happy to send along some exclusive photos from our Lookbook for you to use in your post. We’ll give you a few different looks to choose from and then you can go from there!

Ok, this says it all. If you spend even 30 seconds on my blog, you will clearly see that I don’t publish photos from any brand’s lookbook. I’m not running Polyvore, I’m running a street style website. I only post original street style photography, and by original I mean WE take the photos. The photos are not supplied to us. I don’t cover the launch of someone’s clothing line unless it comes in the form of a street style shoot where myself or someone else serves as the model in a really relatable way. So, this campaign COULD have been cool if the style challenge involved picking our favorite pieces and physically styling them ourselves to for our blog. The campaign could also be cool for someone that covers clothing launches and other brand-focused stuff sans original photography. For me, this really misses the mark because he didn’t take the time to see that I was clearly not a fit. Why waste each other’s time? Wouldn’t it have been quicker to do a few minutes of research first? DUH!

The Ugly (You Call Yourself a Template?)

This one was just terrible. When emails sound cold like this, the response rate is going to be very low. No one likes a cold email.

Subject Line
Connecting Bloggers & Brands

Admittedly, as long as the email comes from a legitimate human being and is relevant to my industry I will likely open it. This subject line is pretty used and abused but it could be uglier.

Hey Blogger!

Ok, this is where it gets ugly. Did you just call me blogger? I do have a real name and this shows that you don’t care…or perhaps you just think that because I’m a blogger I don’t have any other identity. Come on!

I’m already so thrown off that there’s no point in reading the rest of the email but for our purposes, let’s read on.

Sign up on [blog name] and get a chance to receive products from brands and review it on your blog or other social media sites.

I don’t actually do product reviews on my site. Once again, if you spend just 30 seconds on there this will be pretty clear.

[Blog name] is currently in Beta but in the next couple of weeks more bloggers and brands will be joining the community.

I somehow don’t believe this. At this point, I’m done reading the email. It’s definitely not intriguing enough to warrant a response or an inquiry.

Now, I COULD get into even uglier. I was once asked to come along for a horror book tour…so basically be a ‘groupie’ or as I like to call it a ‘bookie’. I’ll save that gem for another blog post though.

6 BIG Epiphanies About Rolling Out Blogger Campaigns That You’re Bound to Learn

The main takeaway is that you should put yourself in the shoes of the blogger. Think about how you’d like to be approached and what type of email would catch your attention. And if that doesn’t help you enough…I recently stumbled across this super crazy-good roundup post that contained advice from 37 bloggers on how to do the most effective blogger outreach. And these 37 tips were actually whittled down to the very best (out of her original list of 300 bloggers originally approached about this)!

Tips for Cold Email Outreach to Recruit Bloggers for Your Campaign

Research

If you scan someone’s blog for even a few minutes you’ll get a good grasp of the topics they cover. Go through their navigation bar to see if you can identify categories, such as fashion, travel, food, lifestyle, or whatever it may be. Read at least a few blog posts to get a sense of the writing and style. Reference a previous blog post that you loved. If you can tie it back to your brand, great. If the blogger covers similar brands, she will most likely be interested in yours, so feel free to bring that up. For example: “I saw that a number of your looks have a real vintage flair. I especially liked your last post about that Modcloth denim jacket. We have a number of items that would look great with that very jacket.”

Targeting

Blasting out every blogger on the planet won’t bring you the results you’re hoping to achieve. You’re better off using your time to properly vet the right bloggers to reach out to. While some bloggers might be interested despite the fact that your products don’t match her style, most will either turn you away or not respond at all if they don’t see a match. It’s always worthwhile to do a little research upfront so you don’t find yourself working with bloggers that have zero fit with your brand.

Personalization

Always address the blogger by her first name. If you don’t know it, you can usually find it on an About Us or Contact page. If it’s not there, click into a blog post and scroll down to the bottom. Look for either a bio or a signature. You also might find it at the top of the post where there’s usually a date and an author name. And if you still don’t have any luck, check her Instagram. Her name DOES exist somewhere online. However, if you want to avoid playing Where’s Waldo, our influencer marketing platform, The Shelf can really help you out! Our site does all the research for you so you never have to go on these wild goose chases while assembling your outreach spreadsheet.

Flattery

It goes a long way. Don’t be afraid to tell the blogger how much you LOVE her site…and why. This might sound a little cheesy but you chose that blogger out of the millions of bloggers out there, for a reason. What was that reason? Do you like her photo style? Do you like her personalized approach to writing for her readers? Do you like her personal style or outfit pairings? Do you like the posts where she includes her dog, kids or husband? You get the idea.You know why you chose that blogger, so just take a few more minutes to let her know the reason why!

Credibility

Bloggers get bombarded by pitches so it’s important to establish credibility right from the start and even provide a little backstory. For example, we’re the husband and wife duo behind [brand name]. We sell very high-end luxury goods that are sold online and at luxury retailers, such as Nordstrom and Holt Renfrew. Our handbags have been seen on high caliber bloggers, such as [insert names] and we think you’d really love our brand as well.

Clarity

Be clear on why you’re emailing the blogger and don’t make it difficult for the blogger to understand what you want from her or how she should even respond. If you want to be somewhat vague in your first email, that’s okay, but at least make it clear that you want to work together. Oftentimes pitch emails are way too vague or just lack a call to action all together.

For example, I once received a pitch from a PR agency that detailed how much they loved my blog and that I would love some of the brands that they represent. Unfortunately, there was no call to action beyond telling me they loved my blog. For this reason, it was very unclear if they wanted to collaborate, do a campaign, or perhaps gift me items. It would have been helpful if they included more info from the get-go.

Benefit

How will this collaboration benefit the blogger, not just YOU. All too often brands and PR professionals go into great detail about how the blogger will help them raise awareness, add credibility to their brand or improve their ROI. But, have you taken the time to outline why this collaboration will benefit the blogger? What’s in it for her? Will you be sharing her sponsored content across your social channels, thus exposing her to a new audience? Will the collaboration add credibility to the blogger’s portfolio? It’s just like a job interview in the sense that if you’re pitching a collaboration you need to show the benefit to the blogger as well.

A/B Split Test

Once again, don’t just blast out the same email to every blogger. Test out two different subject lines to see what gets a higher open and/or response rate. You can track this with a tool like Yesware, or when using an outreach tool like ours! Perhaps try one subject line that is super clear versus one that is more vague and intriguing. Once you’ve established which one works better, you can do an A/B split test on the message too. Do note, personalizing at least the opening paragraph of your email is ESSENTIAL.

Bonus Points

if you take the time to follow them on Twitter or Instagram and engage with their content. Get on their radar! This tactic can be used before and after you send your cold email.

Why Bloggers Charge for Sponsored Posts (and why you should be okay with it)

Wrapping It Up

Through my own experience I’ve noticed a lot of brands and PR agencies blasting out a whole bunch of emails to see who bites. Power in numbers, right? Not exactly. The challenge is that this is much less targeted so the hit rate is also much lower. To that end, usually the bloggers that respond to cold, untargeted emails are not of the caliber that will help you grow your brand. I have blogger friends that receive 200+ emails a day. 200 A DAY! That’s a lot! So, with that said, you need to make sure your email is personalized and stands out among a sea of cold ones that they get every day. If you don’t give bloggers the time to personalize an email, they certainly won’t give you the time to respond to it either. Don’t underestimate how busy bloggers really are!

An addition thing to consider is what other variables might be affecting your outreach. Here’s a great infographic on ecommerce emails that walks through the ins-and-outs of what to tweak when it comes to email campaigns.

If you’re getting ready to get started with your blogger outreach, and you find yourself in need of some help, SCHEDULE a 30-MINUTE DEMO! Our site streamlines each part of influencer marketing. You’d start off with our search engine in order to find bloggers that mention brands that are similar to yours…or bloggers who mention your competitors…or bloggers who talk about certain terminology that is relevant to your brand (e.g. “vegan leather”). After that you can do all of your necessary research, followed by sending out your targeted emails. We’ll give you info about what posts to mention within these emails so that you can really plow through your outreach in a quality and personalized way. And remember: don’t be afraid to work in a little flattery, so they know you’re interested in THEIR blog, not just any blog. This is so highly personalized that it not only makes the blogger feel great, but it also ensures you find the perfect bloggers for your campaigns.

What tactics have you found work well with blogger outreach? Let us know in the comments!

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Download the Blogger Outreach PDF Checklist

If you’d like to download a PDF of the Blogger Outreach Checklist, just fill out the form below.

Email Address

Brand URL

Hey! Are you working with influencers yet?

Well, do you want to?

There’s no time like the present to implement marketing strategies that work… but we get why you may be dragging your feet. The planning, the strategy, wooing influencers, shipping products, monitoring campaigns… IT’S A LOT! The Shelf platform streamlines and automates most of the headache-inducing aspects of influencer campaigns and takes the guesswork out of the influencer marketing process with patent-pending ROI-prediction reports that are jargon-free and easy to understand. You’ll know right off rip exactly who’s representing your brand and whether or not your collaboration with them will pay off. PLUS we have a pretty cool team of hipsters, cool kids, and marketing savantes who will make your influencer campaign easier to handle… and crazy profitable.

Seriously, we’re all about that ROI.

SCHEDULE A 30-MINUTE DEMO

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(212) 655-9879

The post How To Do Blogger Outreach (Includes Email Templates) appeared first on The Shelf.

How to Vet Potential Blogger and Influencer Partners

Lauren Jung — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 20:00:00 +0000

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Updated April 24, 2019

If you’ve been following The Shelf Blog, you’ll notice that we are BIG on metrics – from using actual data to separate the influencers from the fakers to making sure the campaigns we run for our clients actually deliver measurable returns (ROI) beyond earned media value. You know… stuff like clicks and follows, and shares…

Last year, the concept of vanity metrics ROCKED the influencer marketing space. Big brands screaming about fake followers. Social media platforms started deleting social accounts by the millions. To many, it looked like influencer marketing was dead, or at the very least headed for a sh*tstorm, but things actually mellowed out a bit.

The truth is vanity metrics negatively affect both bloggers and brands. So, in this update of one of our epic pillar posts, I’m going to show you exactly how to go about vetting bloggers and influencers for campaigns.

By now, most social media marketers know there are lots of techniques influencers can use to inflate their numbers. In this post we’ll review the criteria you need to look at when selecting influencers that will help you achieve the best ROI.

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How to find the RIGHT bloggers to work with, sans vanity metrics http://ctt.ec/qHXc8+

A Simple(ish) 7-Point Plan for Finding the Right Bloggers and Influencers for Your Campaign… without the Fancy Software

“Let’s say you have 10,000 fans and 9,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you tweeted about it. Well then that sounds really valuable. On the other hand, let’s say you have 10,000 fans because you bought them on some weird website when you were trying to be cool. Then you post something and it gets zero engagement, because nobody gives a rat’s ass. I would say that’s less valuable, wouldn’t you?”

That quote from this classic classic post by Josh Staubin dives into real examples of turbo-influencers who get overlooked by popularity-focused marketers because their follower counts aren’t skyrocketing. The entire post is a really nice read for anyone interested in the topic.

Vanity metrics sort of suck because they lead marketers to make bad decisions and they’ve turned influencer marketing into more of a gamble. Brands wind up partnering with influencers who don’t (and can’t) deliver at all. And in many cases, these marketers overlook actual influencers who could really launch their brands into orbit because those influencers refuse to play along with the vanity-metric-game.

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Vanity metrics sort of suck because they lead marketers to make bad decisions. http://ctt.ec/6AC9U+

Since vanity metrics are so misleading, the process for vetting your potential influencers is one that should not be taken lightly. Marketers who put a little more effort into making sure they choose the right ones to work with will see huge long-term benefits – ROI and otherwise.

I’ll now walk through our seven step process, which I encourage marketers to use when vetting influencers. This process takes away a pretty hefty amount of risk when it comes to working with the right influencers and seeing real results.

How to Work with Bloggers and Influencers When You’re Bootstrapping It

1. Use Creative Demographic Matching

Before you even start looking at metrics, the most important thing to consider is whether or not the influencer is a perfect match for your brand and demographic. You need to be crystal clear on who your specific audience is because it might not always be who you think.

For example, many companies come to us with incredibly specific blogger targets. Like, “I’m selling underwear, therefore I need to use your platform to find bloggers who talk mainly about underwear.”

Here’s what you have to get: The fact that they’re selling underwear is irrelevant. What’s more important is what TYPE of person would wear their very specific style of underwear.

Is it casual and comfy? Maybe they should target bloggers with a more laid back style, like this post with Styling My Life.

One of our all-time favorite examples of creative targeting was a campaign run by HP. They were selling tablets and they really wanted to highlight the photography features. Instead of running straight to tech bloggers (as one would expect for an HP Tablet campaign), they partnered up with fashion bloggers.

Why?

Evidently HP has some marketing geniuses working there! They were smart enough to see that if they partnered up with tech bloggers, their tablet would get lost in a sea of other tech products.

HP Tablets created the perfect recipe for their blogger campaign by partnering up with fashion bloggers:
1. The bloggers used it to take their blog photos.
2. They talked about how great it was for taking those photos.
3. They walked through how to use it in order to take great photos.

After all is said and done, you can imagine that their fashionable, selfie-loving audiences would be drooling over this HP Tablet! AND because these bloggers are mainly focused on fashion, their audiences aren’t being inundated with competing tablets.

So, the lesson here is, when targeting, you need to think in terms of what characteristics define your audience. Not what you’re selling.

Let’s run through one more example. Imagine you’re selling healthy homemade meals delivered right to your doorstep. Yes, you’re selling food, but does that mean you need to hunt down food bloggers to work with? No, probably not. Food bloggers are usually talking about food they make themselves and their readers probably make their own food, too.

Instead, your audience might be busy people – people who don’t have time to cook. Perhaps mommy bloggers who clearly have a lot on their plates (excuse that pun) or even interior design bloggers who can use the service to complement their decor. You could even get more specific by zeroing in on people who are health conscious.

The bottom line is that you need to find the exact fit in terms of targeting. Our platform is super awesome for this sort of thing. Using our search filters, you can get hyper-specific and narrow down to the right influencers.

For example, you can easily search and find maternity bloggers living in New York who wear vintage clothing and shop in high-end stores. You can even narrow down to the posts where they talk about the specific aesthetic, products, or brands you’re searching. That’s pretty powerful when it comes to gauging the success of those posts and finding the right bloggers to work with.

How to Do Blogger Outreach (Includes Templates)

2. Look at Follower Counts… But Be Aware of Who your Ideal Influencer Actually Is

Through our platform, I’ve noticed a lot of brands come in and use our search engine to set threshold requirements for high follower counts on EACH of the social networks. The brands who are newer to influencer marketing always go sort of nuts with these follower-count filters. They’ll look for influencers who have 40,000 followers on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram…and many of these people don’t want to compensate anyone for an endorsement.

If this is you, check out this post about why influencers charge for sponsored work and what to expect in terms of pricing.

The problem with setting super high follower requirements on EACH social network is that you pretty much eliminate everyone from your potential list. We’ve seen that most influencers (and I seriously mean MOST) will only focus on one or two social networks max and ignore the rest. If you think about it from their perspective, it makes sense. It’s entirely too painful to keep up with all five or six networks, AND run a successful blog on top of that. I’m sure that most of you only focus on one or two social networks, too. In those first few years, our company ditched Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest in favor of just maintaining Twitter and LinkedIn. It was more manageable and that’s where we’ve seen the best return in terms of new customers. Only in recent months have we added Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to our SMM arsenal. Bloggers and influencers are the same way. They focus on the social networks that will bring them the best returns.

I’ve copied some of our growth-tracking charts to better illustrate this point. Each color represents a social network. In the below example, you’ll see the top two focus on Facebook, the middle two on Instagram, and the bottom one on Pinterest.

Instagram, by far, has the most attention from influencers in the fashion/beauty/lifestyle space, followed by Facebook. There were a select few who really put effort into Pinterest, too. The one that was really lagging behind was actually Twitter.

As much as I’m ragging on vanity metrics, follower counts are obviously important to a certain degree. After all, you want there to be an audience, otherwise what would be the point?

So rather than completely disregarding follower counts, I’d encourage you to keep an open mind about follower count requirements. You might find a blogger whose follower count is significantly lower than what you were originally shooting for, but whose engagement is just off the charts AND a demographic that’s on-point. Just because a blogger is popular doesn’t necessarily mean she can influence purchase decisions for your brand. Arik Hanson explains this beautifully.

What Makes Them Buy: Millennial Women and Moms

WHAT MAKES THEM BUY: MILLENNIAL MEN

WHAT MAKES THEM BUY: GEN X

WHAT MAKES THEM BUY: BABY BOOMERS

3. Do Some Fact Checking

If you’re putting together campaigns on behalf of a large brand, you probably have a decent budget to allocate toward influencers. If that’s the case, you might not need to get into nitty-gritty fact-checking quite as much (time is money, after all). Besides, when you run lots of campaigns, you are probably more concerned with the aggregate results, as opposed to the results of each individual campaign. Yay for large marketing budgets!

On the other hand, if you’re a smaller brand and you have more time than you have money, I’d recommend putting on your best internet-stalking game-face and channeling your inner Nancy Drew. With enough research, you can place very sound bets when it comes to selecting your influencers. It just takes a little more effort from the get-go.

If you’ve already validated the demographic match of an influencer, as well as confirmed that she has enough of a following to warrant consideration, the chances of her working out are pretty high. The last thing you need to deal with is weeding out the false positives, like the influencers who look awesome but might not be as great as they seem due to vanity metrics.

As we reviewed in Post #1 of this series, there are tons of ways to fabricate metrics:

Buying followers on any social network
Buying engagement (likes, retweets, comments) on any social network
Buying YouTube views
Buying (quality) blog post comments
Buying website traffic
Rapidly growing social followings via the follow/unfollow technique.

If you know what to look for though, there’s no reason that you should ever be fooled by one of the above tactics.

WHY VANITY METRICS MATTER LESS THAN YOU THINK

4. Detect Fake Followers

Detecting fake followers is actually really easy. You’ll need to go onto an influencer’s social accounts and scroll through their followers. For this, you’ll need to go pretty far down, because no one is buying followers every day. For that reason, bought followers will usually get covered up by the real ones.

Look for blocks of odd profiles because these fake followers will show up as one big group.

Find recognizable signs of fake followers, like Russian descriptions (for some reason a lot of these fake accounts are from Russia) and default egg-profile pictures. Yes, some people really do live in Russia BUT if you come across an influencer with 20% egg-followers, then you’ll know something is up.

Detect the higher-quality fake followers too. Higher quality means that most of the fake followers will have a profile picture and an English description. It’s still pretty easy to detect fakes though because description text (while in English) will usually just be random words that don’t make sense. AND, while most of these higher-quality fake followers actually do have a profile picture, most of them don’t have COVER photos.

Use our platform to review charts that track daily growth of follower counts across the various social networks. If you see abnormally large follower jumps, you should be weary.

Look at the relevance of those followers. If they’re entirely composed of randos (plumbers, Caribbean vacation rentals, uptight businessmen, fake-follower-companies…) then you know that something is amiss. And even if that influencer isn’t doing anything wrong (and they just managed to attract totally irrelevant followers), it’s still pretty safe to assume that your product isn’t going to get a great response from their audience because of the untargeted nature of those followers.

Note: Everyone is going to have SOME random followers. This is unavoidable. What you want to avoid is people who have more than 30% randos.

5. Next, Detect Fake Engagement

Straight-up faking engagement seems a little less common than follower-buying, but it still happens, so there are some things you might want to look out for when you’re evaluating an influencer.

While it’s more difficult to identify fake engagement, it’s not impossible. If you see someone with intensely sporadic engagement on social posts, then that’s probably the best indicator because when someone purchases engagement, they usually have to specify ONE of their posts that will receive the engagement (rather than spreading the engagement out across posts in a more natural way. If someone is getting no engagement for most of their posts, then all of a sudden there is one post with 1,000 retweets, you might want to go ahead and question that.

Take the time to scan through blog comments instead of just looking at comment counts. I’ve seen some bloggers comment like 37 times on their OWN posts without any REAL engagement, so it’s pretty easy to detect.

Check for spammy comments that are totally irrelevant to the conversation. “My cousin makes $10,000 a week by filling out surveys….” Or “Check out my homemade Viagra… ” While most bloggers have put up spam filters to keep out all the random viagra-peddlers, you’ll see some bloggers that have unusually high amounts of spam comments. So again, it’s important to just glance through the comment section for each blogger to make sure that the engagement is legit.

See if hordes of smaller influencers are leaving comments for the sole purpose of sending traffic over to their OWN sites. Many of these comments are half-hearted and irrelevant, like: “Nice post! Here’s a link to my blog: www…” These comments certainly don’t indicate that there’s anything wrong with the original blogger (it’s just something that starts happening once a blog reaches a certain size) but you’ll want to ensure that there’s some genuine engagement too.

6. Suss Out Fake Traffic

Detecting fake traffic is actually kind of difficult. As we discussed in our previous post, some influencers will actually buy traffic, in which case their Google Analytics will back up their claims. I’m happy to report that this tactic is pretty uncommon among the influencer crowd but there are still some tactics you can look out for.

You’ll want to figure out if they’re just presenting the metrics that make their site look the best (and keeping the less attractive ones to themselves). For example, they might be getting tons of traffic, but their bounce rate could be close to 100% and time on site might be seconds instead of minutes. Or they might provide metrics that occurred during a spike in traffic, like when they received press coverage. If they only present stats to you that represent the spike, it’s certainly not painting a realistic picture of what their traffic normally looks like.

You should inquire further about the metrics that really matter, like the average time on site for all non-bounced traffic and how many monthly unique visitors a blogger gets vs. individual page views.

Professional bloggers will be able to provide you with a media kit. According to Allyn Lewis, if you can’t find the media kit on their website, you can just as easily inquire for one. If it’s not clear in the media kit, you should ask whether or not the stats are current. Asking is always helpful, and if someone isn’t forthcoming, then you might want to move on.

Depending on what vertical you are in, you can use traffic estimators like Alexa and Ahrefs. These are great if you’re in the marketing or tech space. These are way less accurate though if you’re looking for fashion, beauty, lifestyle or mommy bloggers.

7. Lastly, Our Secret Weapon

Look back through a blogger’s posts and take note of which brands they’ve worked with in the past. Are any of those brands repeat customers? If there are a few repeat customers, you’ve found the real deal. Get yourself on the books with that blogger!

Our philosophy for that is there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are many marketers who have come before you and paved the way. They have done due diligence on these people and put their money into campaigns with them. And after analyzing the results of these campaigns, they’ve decided to double-dip. This is a great signal for you to use as a guide when assembling your own campaigns.

If you find a brand in your space who’s going nuts with influencer marketing and putting more money into that than their other marketing efforts, then it’s also a good idea to follow them and really analyze their strategy. We see this all the time in the fashion space. There are some brands who have practically written the book on influencer marketing (we have, too – one holiday-themed one on Influencer Strategy and another on setting real goals for influencer campaigns). And they’re putting enormous amounts of energy into their influencer strategy. Old Navy, Target, Lulus, InPink, Ruche, Alice & Olivia…these are all companies that you can learn from if you’re in the fashion space.

To that end, you can use our platform to track all brand mentions made by influencers on any blog or social network. Many people use us to keep tabs on influencers who mention their own product. Some are using our site to track competitors. Some are just studying the brands who have run their influencer marketing in really creative ways.

HOW TO MEASURE THE ROI OF INFLUENCER MARKETING

Conclusion

Here’s the thing about influencer marketing: Its effectiveness is directly related to selecting the right influencers for your brand. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the influencer needs to be the right match, with the right size following, and have the right demographic of followers.

If you’re careful with who you select, you’ll be blowing past your ROI goals so fast that everyone’s heads will be spinning! Need help with your campaigns? Give us a shout!

Hey! Are you working with influencers yet?

Well, do you want to?

There’s no time like a brand new year to implement marketing strategies that you KNOW work… but you may be dragging your feet on doing. I mean, the planning, the strategy, wooing influencers, shipping products, monitoring campaigns… IT’S A LOT! We get it. But we also have a pretty cool platform that will streamline and automate most of the headache-inducing aspects of influencer campaigns PLUS we have a pretty cool team of hipsters, cool kids, and marketing savantes that will make your influencer campaign much easier to handle and also crazy profitable. Seriously, we’re all about that ROI. In fact, our influencer marketing platform takes away the guesswork and comes with a ton of our patent-pending ROI-prediction reports that are jargon-free, easy to understand, and will help you sleep well at night. You’ll know right off rip exactly who’s representing your brand and whether or not your collaboration with them will pay off. So… contact us if you want to make a ton of money from your marketing efforts. (How’s that for a CTA?)

Get Started Today!

Or give us a quick call : (212) 655-9879

The post How to Vet Potential Blogger and Influencer Partners appeared first on The Shelf.

6 Mother’s Day Marketing Strategies to Boost Foot Traffic

Lira Stone — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 14:08:14 +0000

Mother’s Day is one of THE MOST celebrated holidays on earth. There are something like two billion moms around the world, 85 million of whom are in the United States. Most people (84 percent of them) are going to be celebrating their mothers in just a few weeks, so we crafted this post for marketers who are inevitably targeting the daughters, sons, hubbies, grandkids, and partners who will be making their way to stores between now and May 12, 2019. Friend, it’s time for some Mother’s Day marketing… and right here is where you’re going to find some really dope strategies. But first…

Here Are the Mother’s Day Stats That Matter to Marketers

Mother’s Day is now the second biggest gift-giving holiday, after Christmas. At least as far as gift-giving goes, moms receive more honor than dads. During the months of May and June, 30 million more greeting cards are purchased for Mother’s Day than for Father’s Day.

According to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, 2018 Mother’s Day spending was the second highest in the survey’s entire 15-year history!

Consumers spent $494 million on media (books/music/etc), $813 million on greeting cards, and $956 million on housewares and gardening tools.

The spending only increased from there: Twenty-four percent of those who bought Mother’s Day gifts splurged on personal services like massages, manicures and pedicures for a total of $1.8 billion. For tech-savvy moms, another $2.1 billion was spent on consumer electronics. Fashionable moms received $2.1 billion in clothing while many honored the woman who has everything by grabbing gift cards. This amount totaled $2.5 billion.

Now, this last bracket is where the big bucks are generally spent (like, every year…). Jewelry, special outings, and flowers account for $4.6 billion, $4.4 billion, and $2.6 billion respectively (totaling $11.6 billion). Of these, the most popular item given is in the floral category. So, in addition to Mother’s Day being the second biggest gift-giving holiday of the year, it’s also the day the most flowers are sold all year long.

Greeting cards also have been proven essential, as 80 percent of Mother’s Day consumers purchase greeting cards. Year after year, greeting cards, flowers, and special outings are the top three ways shoppers show love to Mom on this special day.

It’s Not Gonna Be Your Typical Mother’s Day This Year

With millions of consumers spending billions of dollars on Mom, it’s no wonder brands compete to get in front of ready buyers in the days and weeks leading up to Mother’s Day. Expect this year to start a years=long shift in how we celebrate Mother’s Day. Here’s why I say that:

Gen Z is in full effect… This year, Gen Z and Millennials will undoubtedly lead the charge of kids gifting moms, which paves the way for some pretty cool influencer marketing opportunities this Mother’s Day.

In-store shopping can make a strong comeback… Generation Z shoppers prefer in-store shopping. This probably has a lot to do with their age (the older Gen Z shoppers range in age from 11 to 22 this year). Younger shoppers typically don’t have wallets overflowing with plastic. Also, their preference for shopping in brick-and-mortar locations is because they use shopping as a way to socialize with friends.

Experiences are the new black… There are a couple of important things driving this trend. First, Millennial and Gen Z gifters are more likely than older generations to share their gift ideas, shopping experience, and even the actual presentation of the Mother’s Day gift on social media (to Snapchat and Stories, of course). So, the gift – whatever it is – needs to be gram-worthy.

Second, it’s not unusual to find it difficult to shop for Mom because Gen Xers and Boomers have typically accumulated more physical possessions. This makes it increasingly hard to shop for a Mom who may indeed have everything… at home and in storage.

Finally, Millennial and Gen Z shoppers tend to be more waste-conscious. You can expect them to be more thoughtful about the types of gifts they buy this year.

Mushy sentimentality is back… Sentimental gifts are becoming cool for young adults to buy Moms. They have greater emotional impact, and let’s face it… a blood-sweat-and-tears self-portrait from Grandma’s hard-working high school senior granddaughter isn’t going to end up in the donation bin like the riding boots we got her two years ago that she never really used. Especially if her exact words when she unboxed them were, “To ride what?”.

Family portraits got a very public upgrade… Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have been sort of flooded with people snapping family pics at socially-optimized pop-up locations that are created specifically for social media pictures. Expect this trend to up the ante a bit on the traditional family photo.

Social media is ultra-shoppable… Social media is a powerful, almost MATCHLESS sales tool for spring holidays like Mother’s Day. Not only is social constantly changing the ways in which consumers shop… social is also changing consumer expectations… and changing what they buy, how they buy, and why they buy.

What’s In This Particular Mother’s Day Marketing Post

We’re at a time in digital marketing when close to 40 percent of ALL consumers check social media for reviews before making a purchase (it’s higher for younger buyers). Having a relatable social media presence and strong engagement are more essential than ever before. If you can get those basics down, you’re in a good position to get that content in front of your audience as often as possible (without triggering ad blindness).

In this post, we’ve put together a list of six strategies that will help retailers craft Mother’s Day marketing campaigns designed specifically to boost in-store foot traffic.

Yeah, foot traffic.

Currently, two-thirds of Mother’s Day shoppers are doing so in-store. So, they just need a compelling reason to take that $14 billion in Mother’s Day spending to your store, right?

Right.

To grab that attention, you’ll need to offer them more than just great ads. Storytelling is going to be HUGE for brands this Mother’s Day… as will creating experiences that help shoppers streamline and simplify the process of gifting Mom and Grandma something AWESOME.

The typical buyer is looking for something completely different than what they may have gifted in the past. The key to leveraging Mother’s Day gift giving as a marketing strategy is to create the supply of experiences, special gifts, and rare items that will meet the demand for something awesome that mom will love.

One in three shoppers make their Mother’s Day purchases online, and a growing number of these shoppers are opting to gift experiences and sentimental gifts rather than, say… another pretty hat.

6 Strategies, 16 Tactics and a Couple of Cool Ideas to Help Your Mother’s Day Marketing Campaign Boost In-Store Traffic

Strategy 1: Video Marketing

Target Shopper: Gen Z and Millennials

There are lots of ways brands can use video in their Mother’s Day marketing strategies. Honestly, I think three of our most recent five posts had something to do with video marketing. There’s this one on YouTube user stats, this one on video marketing strategies, and video was included in two of the 2019 marketing trends.

Zeroing in on Generation Z and Millennials shoppers with a video campaign is smart because Gen Zers – the 11 to 22 crowd – defers to YouTube for product recommendations and to help them make final purchasing decisions. More than half of Millennials (54 percent) check YouTube daily. Their content of choice includes things like product unboxings, hauls, tutorials, and content that’s quick, fun and entertaining.

TACTIC #1: Branded insider videos

The #EveryMum Mother’s Day Campaign from Blue Illusion

To watch this video, it wouldn’t be immediately apparent what Blue Illusion is – the video isn’t at all about the stuff it sells. The only hint is that Nicole, daughter to Lisa and one of the company’s apparel buyers, was included in the video.

Self-proclaimed curators of personal style, French-Inspired Australian fashion boutique Blue Illusion is dedicated to selling clothes that showcase the modern woman’s spirit, pursuit of style, passion for life, and generosity of heart.

The company’s #EveryMum Mother’s Day campaign on YouTube was a sweet but candid look at mother/daughter relationship, and how valuable the family is to Blue Illusion’s company’s culture by featuring employees who were mother and daughter.

These kinds of videos are often endearing and tug a bit on the heartstrings. More important, they immediately humanized your brand and give it a face… Actually, this video gave the brand eight faces… all of them believable and relatable.

There was dialogue in the videos between mother and daughter, where both mum and kid revealed interesting things… like Esther isn’t great at picking out clothes for her daughter Lexi.

Totally relatable.

TACTIC #2: Mother’s Day gift ideas and guides

Another effective way to use video marketing for Mother’s Day is to partner with influencers who can create great gift idea vlogs.

Now, YouTube videos will typically be one of the pricier options for an influencer campaign, especially if you’re partnering with a macro-influencer. Like, add-a-zero pricey. But these kinds of short, personal videos can get tons of eyes on your product and get ears listening to the good things about your product.

To reduce the cost of a sponsored YouTube video, consider including your product as part of a larger list of gift ideas rather than choosing to have an influencer make an entire video strictly about your product or products.

The challenge with sponsored videos is to partner with an influencer who can disclose that the video is sponsored without the whole thing seeming like a big, fat sponsored video. Here’s a GREAT example of an influencer who’s great at that.

Fleur de Force x L’Occitane

Lifestyle vlogger Fleur de Force (on Instagram @fleurdeforce and here’s her YouTube channel) put together a Mother’s Day video that was published on March 17th, and seven days later, it already has more than 44k views.

If you have never seen one of her videos, they are very well done. Fleur de Force is easy to understand, personable, refined, and gorgeous. What’s cool about the way she does gift idea videos – and this one in particular – is even though it’s a sponsored video partnership with L’Occitane (which she noted in the video description and the title), the video itself really is full of good Mother’s Day ideas that feature lots of other brands.

In addition to L’Occitane gift sets, she talked about jewelry and modeled some comfy pajamas. She also noted in her video that after polling the moms in her life, she discovered most of them just want some time off, time to themselves, which gave way to the idea of creating a relaxation basket for moms that include things like books, bath salts, nail polish, a scented candle (which was a collaboration between Cowshed x Scamp & Dude), and those pajamas… She talked a bit about subscription boxes as well.

Here’s the important part: L’Occitane was featured in the video, yes, but it wasn’t a L’Occitane commercial in the eyes of her viewers, and THAT’S what’s powerful about a video haul or gift idea video like this one.

TACTIC #3: Hauls

Mother’s Day gift hauls are entertaining to watch. These informal discovery videos come in all types and are done by bloggers from all over the world who have audiences of all sizes.

What makes hauls so valuable to brands is hauls provide prospects with an easy discovery method as they are already knee-deep in Mother’s Day gift research. This is great for holidays like Mother’s Day when shoppers are more deliberate and thoughtful about the kind of gifts they buy. Gift cards are more popular at Christmas time than they are for Mother’s Day, and that’s because Mother’s Day is an appreciation holiday the Moms 84 percent of people are setting aside time and funds to honor.

Another thing that’s cool about hauls is they come across as authentic because they’re usually loosely-scripted or completely unscripted. They’re not over-produced.

If you watched a bit of Fleur de Force’s video, you saw the lighting in her bedroom changed, probably affected by the cloud cover outside. That sorta thing doesn’t negatively impact haul videos.

Now, I’m not saying that production isn’t important at all. I’ve actually skipped haul videos that looked interesting because the vlogger’s messy bedroom in the background was distracting and I quickly realized that mess would influence my view of the products she found in her haul. What I am saying is no one’s winning an Oscar for a their holiday hauls.

I think the key element that makes hauls compelling is the same thing that drives Instagram videos to grab so much attention – it’s the opportunity to engage with the video’s creator and to engage with other viewers about THEIR experiences with the brand.

Another thing about haul videos is that timing is important. Mother’s Day in the UK is just a few weeks before Mother’s Day in the US, and there are lots of Mother’s Day videos from bloggers in all those countries (and Australia).

As we’re writing this in mid-March, most of the new content we see is from UK vloggers preparing for UK Mother’s Day on March 31st. Keep that in mind when planning your campaigns.

Shopper Mandy Luxury Haul

So, one of the more produced hauls we found was by a popular vlogger named Shopper Mandy (get her YouTube channel here and you can find her on Instagram @shoppermandy).

Okay, you’ll notice even from the screenshot below that Mandy’s video has been produced a bit. She puts the products featured in the haul in a little white box on-screen so viewers can see the actual color of the product, unaffected by her lighting and movements. Smart.

Shopper Mandy also includes in the description section beneath her video beauty and fashion affiliate links to the products in her posts.

Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing work well together. According to Rakuten, 80 percent of advertisers run affiliate programs, and you would be hard-pressed to find a micro- or macro-influencer who didn’t participate in affiliate programs.

For instance the link for the Yves Saint Laurent ‘Volupté’ Lip Gloss Trio goes to the Nordstrom product page for that set. It’s sold out.

Go Team Fam! KyleandCourt | Bath & Body Works Mother’s Day Haul

Another way to do hauls is to sponsor an actual branded haul. Go Team Fam! is a family YouTube vlog channel from Kyle and Court Hale and their kids. Now, I don’t see any indication that this is actually a sponsored post, but… for Bath & Body Works fans, this would have been a legit win because of the Mother’s Day promotions that were going on in-store.

(Just an aside… Bath & Body Works is a BOSS at reaching customers where they are and driving traffic into the store, from their end-of-summer clearance sales (never miss ‘em) to their free holiday gifts, and those break-apart cards that come in direct mail promoting different time-sensitive offers for 30- and 60-day periods… this company knows how to drive foot traffic).

So, here’s what really grabbed me about this particular haul…

Tactic #4: In-Store Mother’s Day Promotion… At the very beginning of the video, we find out that this haul video was compelled by a great in-store buy. Court went into the store and discovered there was also an in-store Mother’s Day promotion going on that allowed shoppers to get a large zippered navy or bronze tote in a chevron weave.

Tactic #5: The Free Gift… Shoppers who spent $50 could get an additional box of products valued at $100+ for just another $30. It’s possible to buy for Mom and yourself, or buy for Mom and Mother-in-Law, or Mom and Grandma or your best friend who’s a new mother…

Tactic #6: Digital Coupon went Out to Subscribers… There was also a coupon available (list-building opportunity) to Bath & Body Works email list that gave them another $5 off their purchase. So, Mother’s Day shoppers paid $75 and got $167 in product + a tote.

Tactic #7: Easy Returns and Exchanges for Moms… FINALLY, scents (even those given as a gift) were eligible to be exchanged for other scents. That means Mom could get her gift and go back to the store to swap out her fragrance and be upsold by a perfume, spray, scrub, or lotion with the same scent for layer.

(Coincidentally, I went to their site immediately to be signed up for upcoming email offers… even though I know I got direct mail Bath & Body Works offers that also send me running to the stores.)

Strategy 1 recap

Video marketing is legit, especially if you’re incorporating influencers into your strategy. Video gift guides and hauls really can come in all shapes and sizes. But remember, YouTube videos can get really pricey, especially if you want the entire video to focus exclusively on your products.

If the price of a branded video is too steep, consider including your product as part of a larger haul that includes complementary products from other brands.

Last thing to think about is timing. The UK vloggers and US vloggers produce tons of Mother’s Day content, but Mother’s Day in the UK typically falls a few weeks earlier than in the US, so plan to publish and promote videos starting in March for the UK and April for the US.

Strategy 2: Create Experiences Outta Nowhere

Target: Adult children buying for Mom, adult children with families, free-spirited Gen Xers and Boomers (birds of a feather, you know…)

EXPERIENCES SELL. For social media users (which is literally half of all Internet users at this point), cool-looking experiences are Instagram fodder. Avid social media posters are ALWAYS on the hunt for cool locations to shoot pictures. ALWAYS.

TACTIC #8: Fanciful pop-up backdrops

Grammers’ insatiable appetite for phenomenal backdrops has opened the door for companies like Supercandy Museum and the Museum of Ice Cream to create these types of socially-optimized interactive art exhibits where Instagrammers visit and take pictures. But creating a cool backdrop isn’t just limited to novelty companies.

Winky Lux’s Winky World

New York cruelty-free cosmetics retailer Winky Lux is currently trending on Instagram with 4,476 posts hashtagged #itsawinkyworld from grammers who visited the Winky Lux’s Manhattan store and Winky World, the company’s own version of colorful interactive space that’s perfect for snapping great pictures.

This post from @iamtarawallace was snapped in the company’s Manhattan shop. Notice in her post (that doesn’t say it’s sponsored, by the way) that this particular influencer included the store’s address so people can find the Winky World exhibit.

There are also stores in Chicago…

…. And Tyson’s Corner Center, Virginia

…. And the company’s newest store opened this month in Nashville, and with it a pop-up, socially-optimized experience room. I grabbed this screenshot from the website.

TACTIC #9: CREATE experiences in, around and through your store

Bass Pro Shops Does It All

Creating in-store experiences isn’t a new strategy. But it’s one that has helped retailers like Bass Pro Shops grab mall foot traffic from shoppers who may have had no intention of visiting the store, but who go into the store simply because of the forest-themed spectacle.

Source: Newlyweds photographed in the entrance of a Bass Pro Shops store that was posted to Instagram . Adventure really does start here.

The company’s retail locations are humongous stores full of outdoorsy things (totally a scientific term), equipped with a 25-cent shooting range (not real guns), a fishing pond, full-sized stuffed wildlife, and one of my kids’ personal favorites, the in-store mountainside stream (the stream part is really just a gigantic aquarium) that’s gotta be like 20feet high.

Bass Pro Shops does a great job at translating the wonder and majesty of nature into an awe-inspiring in-store experience for visitors. The store’s team members are knowledgeable and accessible, with younger and (thank goodness) older team members ready to be engaged when you need them (translation: they don’t stalk you around the store).

But BPS doesn’t skimp on seasonal photo opportunities either. We were doing a quick search for an inside shot of the store in the company’s official Instagram feed and came across a family pic from podcaster Matt Drury (on Instagram @mattdrury81). We flipped through his pictures and found a nice one of BPS’s holiday setup of Santa chillin’ in his holiday wonderland with Matt’s daughter in the foreground.

Source: On Instagram

Another thing Bass Pro Shops does well is create opportunities offsite with special events to engage with customers. I screengrabbed this digital flyer that was on the company’s main website. This sorta segues into my next tactic, which is creating experiences that Moms can do with other people.

TACTIC #10: Create experiences that Mom can do with her BFF, not her family (Referrals!!!)

One of the cool things about experiences is they pave the way for referrals. Fleur de Force mentioned in her video that many moms want some time to themselves for Mother’s Day. The flipside is, often moms who have adult children are game to do some activities either with their kids and grandkids for Mother’s Day, or share in experiences that allow her to still have a day off, but maybe spend it with whomever she chooses.

This is where things like gift certificates, paid reservations, open travel plane tickets, and accommodation / hospitality gifts can come in handy. These sorts of gifts compel Mother’s Day shoppers to buy “in pairs” so Mom has someone with whom she can share the experience.

Here’s the thing though: It’s smart to create experiences that she will want to share with a friend instead of a family member. I came across an interesting factoid in Mention-Me.com’s Referral Success for Luxury Brands report.

“As a rule of thumb, women share more than men & under 30s share more than 30+. However, whilst older ages share less, the shares they make tend to convert better.”

Strategy 2 recap

Think about creating Instagrammable experiences that kids can share with Mom like Museum of Ice Cream, create in-store experiences that drive people to want to come inside like Bass Pro Shops, and create referral-worthy buddy experiences that Mom will want to do with her own friends.

Strategy 3: Go Narrower; Find the Outliers

Target: Gen Z teens, kids of 30-something moms, friends of Millennial moms

TACTIC #11: TAP INTO MOM’S UNIQUENESS (“It’s a vegan, cruelty-free, no-waste, upcycled, circular movement naked cupcake. Proceeds go to save the Whatevers…”)

Interestingly enough, the generations only look completely different from one another until they have kids. That’s when the youngest generation of parents start to adopt (and finally “get”) the principles and values their parents and grandparents were working so hard to instill. There are still marked differences in parenting styles form generation to generation, but it’s not oranges-to-apples differences… they’re green-apples-to-red-apples differences.

As parents age and start to deal with the non-snowflake moments that come with having kids (temper tantrums, busy middle school schedules, mid-terms, moody teens, weird things happening with grades, dating, crashing the car, missing curfew, dirty bedrooms, messy closets…), parents all start to sort of blend together.

#sorrynotsorry

But in those early years, when Mom still has enough energy to kick butt and take names… OR if you want your brand to remind her how much of a boss she STILL is (especially when that kid of hers drops and breaks his third phone iPhone this year). Mother’s Day gift choices that reflect her uniqueness, fire and strength are always winners.

Lush Honors the Super in Moms

Lush Cosmetics is known for its vibrant, beautiful, vegetarian cosmetics line. The company prides itself on living by six principles: the freshest cosmeticas, 100% vegetarian products, ethical buying, homemade, naked (unpackaged), and the charge to fight against animal testing. During its Mother’s Day campaign, Lush offered special gifts for the SuperMom.

What’s cool about Lush is the company has a very strong social media presence, and there are multiple Lush accounts on Instagram alone. The one below is for the Australia / New Zealand Lush stores.

Here’s another thing you probably didn’t know – Lush has naked stores.

Yeah… naked.

Tactic #12 is just be as bold and outrageous as you can… while still being on-brand. Lush’s Naked stores aren’t about being helped by naked sales associates. These are actually the company’s packaging-free stores. The naked workers thing just sort of drives the point home (and the traffic in).

Think that drives in-store traffic?

Lush also created a pop-up exhibit of its own to promote the #NakedRevolution called the naked rainbow. Notice how none of the products have any packaging.

Source: On Instagram

Lush has been around since the 1980s, but it remains a staple for young, environmentally-conscious adults, regardless of their defined generation.

Strategy 3 recap

Help kids and friends find ways to remind Mom of who she was before motherhood consumed her (it’s totally an all-consuming type of thing…). Remember the movie Avatar… and how audiences made a big deal of the way they greeted one another? Well, instead of saying, “Hey, how are you?”, they greeted each other, “I see you.” Help kids see their moms again.

Bold, tongue-in-cheek, quirky products can grab the attention of shoppers and help them align the intention behind your product with their mom’s personality. And having marketing collateral that aligns with Mom’s sense of humor, her college days, her fearlessness, or her time as a singer/songwriter can trigger the connection for shoppers.

Strategy #4: Target Non-Mom Moms (because everyone is a mother of something)

Target: Friends of older Millennials, friends of Gen Xers

Fun fact: Moms are liable to get gifts from just about anyone. Mother’s Day shoppers don’t just buy for the woman they call “Mom”, they buy for moms in general – significant others, daughters, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, other family members, and friends.

But there are non-traditional moms out there who also get Mother’s Day love.

BarkBox celebrates Dog Moms

Okay. This didn’t drive traffic into a store, but it was a great idea from BarkBox to kinda loop non-moms (and her friends and family) into the Mother’s Day shopping.

The web-based subscription took Facebook by storm as it dared to redefine the traditional idea of motherhood. #DogAnthem didn’t target all moms, just dog moms. As the two performers rap about the popularity of their fur babies, it’s almost impossible not to get this tune stuck on your head: “If you’re a dog mom, put your hands up. This song’s for all the ladies who provide for their pup. When you’re a dog mom, it’s just what you do. ‘Cause they say you’re not my baby but I know it ain’t true!”

Dog Mom Anthem

Strategy 4 recap

Widen your market by not taking yourself (and Mother’s Day) so seriously. If you don’t have traditional Mother’s Day stuff to sell, create a message that will resonate with non-mom moms.

Strategy #5: Take the Straight-Laced Out of Luxury Gifts

Target: Significant other, adult children

We came across a pretty neat little Mother’s Day haul video from popular luxury YouTuber Sonal Maherali (you can check out her channel here). Now, the set up of this haul is that Sonal is opening Mother’s Day gifts that she received from her husband, who was traveling on Mother’s Day.

(FYI: We didn’t include this video at the top with the other haul because this one targets a different buyer).

TACTIC #13: The gift-opening haul

Sonal Maherali’S Super-Luxe Haul

The video opens with Sonal sitting next to a set of black Chanel gift bags and a fourth big bag in the back. The first gift she opens is a genuine leather passport holder with a super-cool illustration on the front, featuring leopard print Christian Louboutins.

Other than that AMAZING passport holder, here’s what’s cool about this video – as she proceeds to open the rest of the gifts, there are times when she doesn’t know the name of a shoe and other times when she does… and she’s seen the shoe before online… but has never actually touched it.

She’s trying to describe each item as she sees it, instead of having scripted keywords that she had to use for the video. She comes across as really sincere, and the gift haul seems authentic.

It’s sort of a backdoor into a haul video that would make for great, low-key product placement.

Another thing that’s sort of clever about this particular type of haul is that for the products she doesn’t know well, that could have been a great opportunity to follow up the video with a blog post of her modeling the shoes and reviewing the products.

She didn’t do that, but what did happen in the days, weeks, and months that followed was that as people watched the video, other users chimed in with information about the products and their experiences with those and similar products.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving. And here it is two years later and we’re checking out this Mother’s Day haul as well.

PS. Sonal is extremely likable.

Strategy 5 recap

Gift-Opening hauls are a great way to foster YouTube engagement from viewers – solid engagement like comments and sharing experiences, and talking candidly about your brand and your products. It’s also a great way to source insights about the level of knowledge her followers have about your brand. And, of course, it presents a great opportunity for your team members to chime in organically about your products.

Strategy #6: Teach a Man to Fish…

Targeting: Husbands and sons, brothers, dads and kids, daughters only

Our final strategy caters to the sentiment motivator for picking gifts and that’s DIY tutorials on or around Mother’s Day. Of course, there are tons of cool DIY and handmade videos, Pinterest boards, and blogs from everyday users.

TACTIC #14: Handmade gifts anyone can do

Handmade Gifts from If You Want It D.I.Y.

If You Want It D.I.Y released a Mother’s Day Gift Ideas video that provided step-by-step instructions for four different DIY gift ideas in under 10 minutes. Brilliant.

The video is detailed enough for viewers to follow along and see the types of products being used. But it’s edited in a way that speeds up the video so it’s easy to follow but doesn’t take a lot of time to initially digest all four ideas.

Now, my original thought with the DIY angle was for a brand like The Home Depot or the local hardware store to create a series of detailed step-by-step tutorials targeting dads and sons who could work together on an outdoor DIY project for Mom in the days leading up to Mother’s Day. A tutorial.

TACTIC #15: DIY big project tutorial FOR Mom

Why a Tutorial? Well, tutorials are crucial for the YouTuber. In our post on YouTube user stats (this one), one of the things we talked about was how Gen Zers and Boomers use YouTube as a learning channel. Baby Boomers are big on watching tutorials to decode tech-related stuff. And, of course, who fixes cars anymore without having their phone nearby to reference the tutorial that’s walking them through the task they’re doing? Nobody. That’s who.

Tutorials and DIY videos are powerful marketing tools for brands because most viewers will try to adhere to the tutorial as much as possible to recreate the results they saw in the video. So, this provides a good opportunity for brands to partner with DIY influencers for natural-looking product placements.

It doesn’t have to be a video though. Pinterest is a HAVEN for this kinda stuff, a virtual library of beautiful backyard projects from super-simple stuff to more complex large backyard projects. Plus, Pinterest is great for SEO, showing up in search results, and especially Google Image search results, which means shoppers don’t have to be pinning fanatics to find your tutorials on Pinterest… they only have to be using a search engine.

In the screenshot below, the content on the far right is sponsored by TimberTech, and the one below it is sponsored by The Home Depot.

We penned a post at the end of last year (this one) on how HUGE Pinterest is for home decor and DIY brands. Let me just recap one piece of that info here:

In summer 2017, Pinterest reported there were 11 billion home decor pins on the platform and 2.3 billion home decor searches and saves per year. Pinterest alone reaches 40 percent of the people who have made home furnishing purchases within the last six months, and users say Pinterest is THE MOST influential platform for home decor and home design inspiration.

User-wise, Pinterest doesn’t have as many monthly active users as Facebook or Instagram. At the end of September 2018, the platform had 250 million monthly active users. But unlike Facebook and Instagram, 93% of Pinners use the platform to plan for or make purchases. Sixty percent of Pinners have used Pinterest to actually MAKE purchasing decisions for home decor.

Home decor is one of the three most popular search categories on Pinterest as well as one of the top shopping categories that lead to purchases.

Now, a large DIY project (like building something in the backyard) is probably going to require a longer campaign to get the attention of dads, sons, and daughters, AND give them time to mentally plan how they would do it without Mom finding out, AND to buy materials, AND to do the work.

The key is getting them to finally DECIDE to do the project… which retargeting ads can help with nudging them toward a commitment to do the project and the subsequent purchases required to do it right.

So, the process could go this way – YouTube pre-roll ads for Mother’s Day targeting different shoppers. The brand grabs viewers’ attention in those precious first five seconds with an on-screen message. Here’s what I’m thinking as far as targeting goes…

To Mom from All of Us

To: Mom… Love, the boys

To: Mom… Love, Your Favorite Son

Here’s a Mother’s Day Project for Kick-Ass Daughters (I imagine this one in an Alec Baldwin / Will Arnett type of voice)

TACTIC #16: DIY project to do WITH Mom (hear us roar)

Darbin Orvar’s Backyard Gazebo for Her Dad

Darbin Orvar created a step-by-step video for building a small, low-cost gazebo in her dad’s garden that is actually targeting people who aren’t carpenters… or may not be great with their hands. She uses hand tools in the video – not HGTV-grade super tools that need their own area of the yard to operate. Just something simple.

The video includes a trip to the local Lowe’s Store. She also talks about her hammering skills (great opportunity to teach, share techniques, recommend gloves, hammers, and maybe even something to combat the calluses that will inevitably result from spending one day as a construction worker).

Take a look at this video because it also has a sponsor mentioned in the beginning, GAF, the company that provided the shingles for the roof of the gazebo.

The Smoaks Vlogs (they’re just so darned charming!)

Okay. I think this may be as unscripted as it gets. But, this video is a great example because The Smoaks Vlogs are laid back but really captivating.

In this particular Mother’s Day video, it’s Mom who wanted to clean out the barn and build a new kennel for the pups (looks like they have 7 or 8 dogs), so they head out to the stores and pick up supplies.

What’s cool about this video is actually Shawn Smoaks’s narration. The couple goes to The Home Depot and Tractor Supply Co and loads the flatbed of their pickup with supplies. Another easy way to incorporate products.

Strategy 6 recap

Like HAULS, DIY videos and tutorials can provide a natural product placement opportunity. I think the primary difference is it’s a little easier to zero in on grabbing men with DIY videos, compared to hauls.

One thing I didn’t mention is a lot of these home improvement project videos have natural spots in them for objective product reviews… like this drill works on this, but not on that. You may have heard Shawn Smoaks talking about the capabilities and limitations of his Milwaukee drill in his Mother’s Day video. Those types of objective reviews resonate with men and Baby Boomers who would much rather have the facts and make their own decisions about the product than an editorial. Just an FYI…

For larger projects, give your campaign more lead time because there’s a good chance you will need to incorporate retargeting as well as sponsored posts across multiple platforms (like, reaching Boomer husbands on Facebook, targeting sons on YouTube and Snapchat, getting to Millennial husbands on Facebook and through retargeting and emails).

Wrapping This Up with a Pretty, Pink Ribbon

It’s vital to get your product in front of the right people. And with Mother’s Day right around the corner, it’s really time to pull those campaigns together. If this post provided you with your game plan, awesome. We see you.

If it made your blood pressure shoot up and you had to take a Honey Bun break, you probably need our help. Don’t sweat. We’re cool, we’re creative, and we stay on top of trends and tactics that convert. Call us to set up a demo.

Hey! Are you working with influencers yet?

Well, do you want to?

Get Started Today!

Or give us a quick call : (212) 655-9879

The post 6 Mother’s Day Marketing Strategies to Boost Foot Traffic appeared first on The Shelf.

6 Video Marketing Strategies to Up Your Social Marketing Game

Danielle Hayes — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 16:36:52 +0000

Video has fast become one of the most effective marketing tools brands can use to attract, engage, and convert new customers. Forget the old days of TV commercials where all your money, time, and effort went into one 30-second spot, the days when you lived or died by your time slot. Now, with YouTube standing firmly as the second biggest site on the web, video has a new format.

Video Has the Power to Convert

Video can be a powerful tool for converting views into sales. According to a survey by Google, more than half of the shoppers they spoke to said that online video helped them decide which specific brand or product they wanted to buy.

That said, it’s time to start thinking of your video content like a funnel. Grab their attention to stop them scrolling, deliver real value with your content, use video to pitch, and convert viewers into customers with your call to action.

If you read our last post, YouTube User Stats by Generation, you’ll probably notice that across generations, how-to videos and product reviews are among some of the most popular forms of video content. People love to learn new skills and pursue their passions through online video. These are both great opportunities for brands to showcase their own products in a value-driven way to attract new customers.

People may not be heading to YouTube with the intent of purchasing anything, but ninety percent of people say that this is exactly how they discover new brands and products, and 80 percent include video when researching which products to buy.

Tips for Creating Video That’ll Make Your Social Marketing Efforts More Effective

#1 Make your video native to the platform

Making a video “native” to a platform has to do with two key things: The video needs to be suitable for the platform, and the video needs to be published directly to the platform.

Video content takes on very different forms across the different social networks, so you should plan to adapt your strategy depending on where you plan to post video content. Which platform you choose for your videos should depend primarily on your target customer. The good news here is that pretty much everyone uses YouTube. Outside of YouTube, audiences can vary wildly.

What Makes Them Buy: Baby Boomers

If you want to market to more mature audiences like Baby Boomers and Gen X, create multimedia content for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Younger audiences like Millennials and Gen Z have a soft spot for Instagram, Snapchat, and Musica.ly.

“Can’t I just create one video and put it everywhere?”

Uh… you could… but what translates well on Facebook may hit a brick wall on Snapchat. It’s not necessarily because people aren’t interested in your brand or your product, but because by skipping the part where you repurpose and tweak your video, you will inevitably end up posting a video that sticks out like a sore thumb if you post it to the wrong platform. Or worse, people go completely blind to it, which happens a lot with sponsored content that’s not tailored to the platform.

For YouTube…

The first thing I want to clarify is that YouTube IS a visual search engine. It’s owned by Google, so the search capabilities are phenomenal! So, it makes sense put some thought into how your video and the descriptions show up in people’s YouTube feeds.

Yes, keywords are important. Yes, content quality is crucial. And yeah… titles matter. What are we getting at here? For search purposes, it’s important that you treat your YouTube video content with the attention you would treat blog posts and articles where SEO is concerned.

More than just the video’s title and the description below, the actual scripts for YouTube videos should be keyword optimized. Ever notice how drug commercials repeat whatever afflicting condition the drug is treating over and over again these days?

“Blah, blah, blah, recurring mid-to-lower burning back pain…”

“A treatment that heals your recurring mid-to-lower burning back pain…”

“To keep your family from having to deal with your recurring mid-to-lower burning back pain…”

“So you never have to deal with recurring mid-to-lower burning back pain again…”

Those commercials are keyword optimized… to the point of making you roll your eyes. We certainly don’t recommend you just lift keyword phrases from Google if they don’t sound natural, but you do need to be strategic about how you’re going to use your keywords in a post. That’s important.

Last thing about YouTube: The description box underneath the video gives you ample space to link to outside sites such as your sales pages or other social media profiles as well.

For Facebook…

A lot of the video consumed on Facebook is done so within the feed itself, so videos can be viewed with the sound on or off, depending on the user’s preferences. Compared to a platform like Instagram where videos are viewed with the sound on. This part is important: If you want to maximize both views and impact, include subtitles with your videos. On Instagram Stories, 60 percent of video ads are viewed with the sound on. In comparison, only seven percent of Facebook video ads are viewed with the sound on.

Facebook is also a plagued by constant scrolling, so short videos are ideal. Unlike Instagram where most people are checking it in their downtime, Facebook is often used as a pleasant distraction during the workday with engagement actually peaking between 10AM and 3PM EST

Source: Mashable

Facebook recommends keeping posting videos with run times between 5 – 15 seconds for optimal performance, and plan to woo them in the first four seconds of video if you want them to keep watching.

Part of making video native to the platform, especially as far as Facebook is concerned is creating the video to upload directly to Facebook. You get better video performance (by as much as four times) by sharing your video directly to Facebook as opposed to uploading it to YouTube and sharing the link or embedding the video on Facebook.

Also, be sure to caption your video with a description (some short-form content) so people know what the video is about and have a good idea of the backstory for the video. If you have a great script for your video, you want to further drive home your point with great copywriting in the caption.

LinkedIn isn’t always the first platform marketers think of when planning a video content strategy. But, when you’re targeting older professionals or the B2B market, LinkedIn is incredibly effective at getting your product in front of businesses. Eighty-four percent of people who have used LinkedIn video as part of their strategy have found it to be effective , so more people and companies are using it.

LinkedIn really favors video in its algorithm right now as well, so by sharing content like this, you have a much better chance of it getting seen at the top of people’s feeds. This is also a good platform for longer content than most other social networks, with recommended video length falling between 30 second and 5 minutes.

Twitter

Twitter is possibly the fastest moving social platform around, so executing a video strategy usually isn’t high on marketer’s lists. One of the most effective ways you can win over the platform’s speed scrolling users is to create your own GIFs to upload and share.

If you go the more traditional video route, most of the same rules apply here as on other platforms. Tutorials, storytelling and live video are all killer tools to boost your account’s engagement. Bear in mind that 93% of the videos on Twitter are viewed on mobile devices, so preview your content on these screens before posting, and include subtitles where possible.

Instagram

Already well-known as a visual-focused platform, it’s no surprise that video on Instagram has become key to running a successful marketing campaign. Because of this, one of the most important factors, when uploading video content, is ensuring your content is super high-quality.

Videos on Instagram are automatically played without the sound, so it benefits you to invest in adding subtitles to your video. Instagram in-feed videos are limited to 60 seconds of content. So be quick to get to your message. Stories, on the other hand, give you much more freedom. Your content doesn’t need to be as polished, and you can go live to share longer content.

How to Do Visual Marketing (even if you suck at design)

Snapchat

In 2016, Snapchat viewers were watching more than eight billion mobile video views each day. Snapchat rivals Facebook in terms of reach, and the majority of the platform’s video views come from the younger audiences. Content on this platform is sharp and snappy and speaks directly to the user.

Sales-focused content will flop massively here, so you need to include some more subtle tactics instead. Creating your own customized geo-filters can be a great way to get your brand noticed without feeling too “salesy”.

Musica.ly

If you’re wanting to reach Gen Z, then Musica.ly is the quiet challenger to traditional social media platforms. Most brands haven’t explored the power of this platform yet, but with top influencers working on campaigns with the likes of Disney – it’s clear that they should be.

As the platform starts to become more popular with those of us over the age of 18, we’re seeing influencers start to become more creative with their content as well. It would seem that for best results, partnerships with these influencers is how you’re going to crack this platform.

14 Gen Z Influencers Who Have Mad Sway Around the World

#2 Front-load Value

With the amount of video content being shared online every day, you have to provide value if you want to engage your audience. Unless you’re terribly entertaining, skip editorials that don’t really provide value… other than you getting stuff off your chest.

Gary Vaynerchuck is a great example of how this strategy works. Gary uploads video content every day (multiple times a day), and each upload is packed with advice, tips, and the kind of insights business stakeholders and makers are typically willing to pay to get.

Here’s what’s cool: Gary is known for his approachability, his plain-talk strategies (without the high-brow marketing jargon), his uncanny ability to see trends in everything from social media to rap music, and his unrelenting drive to work smart enough and hard enough to eventually buy the New York Jets.

So, if you take a look at his content, he talks about A LOT of different things, but everything he puts out falls into one of those four categories – his life and thoughts, strategies, trends, or motivational content to push people to work harder and smarter.

Gary Vaynerchuk has built his career on the video content he produces, and audiences eat up the information he shares because he front-loads value into every piece of content he puts out.

Fun Factoid: Did you know that 70 percent of people actually report feeling motivated or confident after learning something new from a YouTube video? By providing great content, you’re making your audience members feel good about themselves. Creators like Gary Vaynerchuk can create millions of raving fans because in addition to delivery tactical strategies… he makes people FEEL good.

Here’s the takeaway with this one… At this point, creating video content that isn’t jam-packed with value is probably going to be a waste of time. Gary Vees of the world have already figured this out. Remember in our last post, we found out that all four generations (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z) relied on YouTube to learn new things and to be entertained. The only difference between the generations was the kind of content they sought to learn and the kind of entertainment they preferred.

#3 Include Influencers in Your Video Marketing Strategy

I mentioned a little earlier in this article the kind of power influencers can have to boost your video content on Musica.ly. Now, let’s explore some of the other platforms, too.

Of course, influencer marketing is what we do, so we’re always game to lay some influencer strategies on you. But that’s because it works. There’s no denying the effectiveness of influencer marketing across social media. For every article on effective video marketing, there’s one on extolling the benefits of influencer marketing.

Not all of us are blessed with the personality and confidence that top YouTubers and other influencers have in such abundance. That’s why partnering with influencers to produce video content (they specialize in creating content, after all) can help boost your credibility and get eyes on your brand and product. If you don’t have a production team of your own, then working with influencers to review your products or vlog from your event are really the next best thing for boosting brand awareness AND generating some awesome user-generated video content.

Of course, you’ll need to make sure your influencer partners include the necessary disclosures and follow all the necessary legal guidelines.

#4 Create a Legit CTA

Calls to action aren’t limited to sales pages and landing pages. So, don’t forget to include a call to action in your video content. It seems simple, I know, but so many marketers leave this out of their video marketing and it isn’t helping them to forget the CTA.

Simple phrases like “Click the link below to find out more”, or “Comment your favorite NFL team below”, or “Make sure you subscribe to see more videos just like this” can often be the thing that compels viewers to take an action. It helps them if you tell them the kind of action you want them to take after watching the video.

#5 Make Your Video Content Pop

You don’t need access to film studios and extensive editing software to create killer video content anymore. Smartphones are able to record HD video at just the click of a button, and with a little research online, you could reasonably “master” the basics of editing – at least enough to make your video pass the muster.

Doing it all yourself can seem daunting, but it is possible. Of course, you could always use tools like Promo to access stock video footage.There are all sorts of high definition clips available that are entertaining, interesting, engaging in lots of verticals, moods, and film styles. So, if you’re more of a one-trick pony, mix it up with professional stock videos.

#6 Generate Clicks with Great Thumbnails

When you upload a video on YouTube, you can have YouTube generate a thumbnail from your actual video. This will just be a still shot snapped at some point during your video… usually at a point when your mouth is agape and your eyes are mid-roll.

You don’t want that.

Instead, take advantage of the option you have to upload a custom thumbnail that will stop YouTubers scrolling.

A great thumbnail should showcase exactly what your video is all about. Include the title right there in the thumbnail (even better if it’s tweaked a little to make it more interesting than your keyword-optimized meta title. Use a high-quality photo taken in the same style of your video to keep a consistent theme.

( Madelaine Petsch )

Speaking of… your video title is another area you’ll need to concentrate on getting right on YouTube. It needs to be clear, concise, and include your chosen keywords. This is no time to get clever with wordplay or post something funny – you need to say exactly what your video is about. The clearer the title, the easier it is for Google/ YouTube to categorize the video, and the more people will be sent your way.

Finally, the length of your video should be tailored to your audience and their preferences (i.e. attention spans). In most cases, a shorter video will work better…

…. ALTHOUGH Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a four-hour Super Bowl mega-vlog that got something like 36k views in 12 days. So…

But for the rest of us who aren’t Gary, shorter usually outperforms longer videos that can tend to include a bit of rambling. You want your video long enough to capture your audience’s attention and short enough to hold it. Get to your point, deliver some value, and get out of there.

Also remember as you’re creating content that you’re creating it for different platforms that may have specific content length rules.

A Few Content Creation Tips

So, I know you’re waiting with bated breath to know the number one tip I have for new video creators. And it is this:

Practice, practice, then practice some more.

Film, edit, and upload a bunch of content and see what sticks. It’s free to do it, and as long as you’re not filming offensive or low-quality video, it won’t harm your brand as much as you might think. Take heart. Most of us suck at it in the beginning… including television shows.

Everyone starts somewhere and people appreciate honesty in a world filled with filters, so take a deep breath and…go!

Always film in HD.

Technology is too far advanced and too easy to access for you to be filming in with your grandma’s shaky, old Camcorder. If you have a budget, do invest in a tripod and a microphone to improve your quality even further. Keep your editing simple, this isn’t the latest Avengers movie and you probably don’t need special effects to promote your brand.

Be yourself on camera.

Your audience will spot a fake personality a mile away and instantly switch off. Don’t try and make your videos look like someone else’s. Take inspiration, yes. But nothing more. Dive in head first, test different content options. Forget about A/B testing. You’re probably going to have to test the entire alphabet.

Go. Create.

Hey! Are you working with influencers yet?

Well, do you want to?

Get Started Today!

Or give us a quick call : (212) 655-9879

The post 6 Video Marketing Strategies to Up Your Social Marketing Game appeared first on The Shelf.

Tips for Updating an Online Store to Boost Conversions

Guest Post — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:18:00 +0000

The New Year is a time to start afresh, put your best foot forward. In the digital world, one of the most important ways to start afresh is to update your website so it better reflects your brand AND compels customers to take action. This is especially true for brands running online stores.

It’s critical your site administrator stays on top of changes in the digital landscape to make sure they keep up with app changes, have the latest security and encryption, and continue to provide a safe, positive experience for users. When your site flows, is optimized, and wows with crisp product images, you’ll feel ready to take on the new year. As you prepare to make the necessary updates, keep the following ideas in mind.

6 Quick & Easy Tips for Updating Your E-commerce Site to Make More Sales

[Finally!] Start Blogging

Okay. Okay. This may seem very 2001, but most business owners – especially small business owners – intend to start and maintain a blog but…

Blogging may seem time-consuming, and it usually is. BUT your blog is a powerful way of driving leads and generating sales. If you’re thinking, “Well, I post on social media, and that’s enough” think again.

In the guide, How to Promote a Product, e-commerce experts Selz make an important point: “Social platforms can limit your access to customers if you don’t pay for boosted content and ads, so moving leads and existing customers to a blog post with a call-to-action is a smart way to reach your audience without spending money for their attention.”

The key is providing value to your readers in the form of actionable solutions to real problems. If you make it a habit to deliver (and over-deliver) on value, site visitors won’t mind you working your products into the content in natural and helpful ways. Selz continues, “This can be as simple as a post exploring the benefits of the new product and the needs that it can meet, then including a button or widget that allows your customers to easily to buy it.”

I’ll give you an example. If you’re releasing a new morning face cream, you could write a blog post titled, “5 Ways to Boost Your Morning Routine in 2019” and introduce your product as a solution to specific challenges your readers actually face addressed in your post.

Test Discount Opt-Ins

You need to catch the attention of a potential buyer right away. In our highly competitive online shopping world, consumers have so many options. Your product is probably going to be one of many, or if you’re lucky, one of several. A good way to get eyes on your brand is to incentivize your offers with opt-in discounts.

It’s a simple idea: A visitor lands on your website and within 3, 5, or 10 seconds—or as they’re exiting your site (called exit-intent), a pop-up flies in with a discount or offer. To get that offer, the user only needs to enter and verify his or her email address and become a valued subscriber to get the offer.

See an example from Alex and Ani below:

Opt-in discounts work because, in exchange for the opportunity to build a subscriber base that you can stay in contact with all year long, the user gets to save money in your store. Who hasn’t spent money (or more money) to save money?

Update Your Site’s SEO

This is a big one. SEO may feel very technical—and it can be—but you can make small SEO updates on your own, with little to no SEO knowledge. To update your store in the new year, keep these simple optimizations, from Search Engine Watch, in mind:

Update your site to HTTPS. You can do this with your hosting provider; they can likely even do it for you. This update is ensuring your site’s security; in today’s digital world, you want to provide customers with a secure experience.
Optimize category and product pages. If you have a WordPress site, Yoast SEO is a plugin that can help you in this area by making recommendations on how to better optimize every page on your site.
Remove any duplicate content between product and category pages. Google will penalize your site for that. Search Engine Watch has another great guide specifically fixing duplicate content on your e-commerce site.
Don’t remove product pages if the product is out of stock—you’ll miss out on important traffic. Instead, just add “Out of Stock” to the product headline or somewhere on the page. You can make this happen dynamically via your e-commerce platform or plugin.

Align Your Social Media Posts and Site Content

Keep your website content and your social media conversations aligned and complementary. Typically, social media posts are included as part of the overall content strategy to ensure what goes up on social is on-brand for your company. Keeping both your social media posts and website content aligned also ensures that when you share your site’s content to social, it’s still topical and relevant for your audience and network.

For brands, this area can be a minefield because the impulse is to post nonstop about their products and services. But people don’t respond to constant pitches – at least not in a positive manner.

Think of social media as more of a long-term branding tool than a transactional / sales tool. You go there to build relationships, grow your community, and let your audience get to know what you’re about. It’s the place you go to get eyes on your brand, and you do this by publishing interesting, relevant content that’s native to (or appropriate for) the platform to which you’re posting.

There are creative ways to include your product in your posts without every post looking like a product pitch. This post from Compartes Chocolatier (on Instagram @compartes) is a great example of this. Compartes has found a way to make product placements of its gourmet chocolate bars look like art instead of a product shot. Notice that Compartes included a link to their Avocado Toast Chocolate Bar in its Instagram bio, so the opportunity to make a sale is still there.

FYI, this post achieved more than four percent engagement, which is about the engagement typically generated by branded content.

Another thing many brands don’t always recognize is the connection between social media and your SEO strategy. Influencer marketing is actually a great way to support and even fortify your SEO efforts because inevitably, the goal of influencer campaigns is to drive traffic back to your site from social media, YouTube, or the influencer’s own blog.

Use ONLY High-Quality Images

Keep your image game strong. Low-quality photos don’t cut it anymore. If your site has them, get rid of your low-quality images and replace them with great-looking pictures.

You can bet a substantial number of your customers will be accessing your site from their phones, not a 19-inch LCD monitor. Customers expect high-quality imagery, and grainy, dark or poorly taken product images can totally kill your credibility. Think about it: the customer can’t touch or feel the product when shopping online, so you need to emulate that experience as much as possible.

Not to mention, when your images are crisp and high-quality, your business benefits. Sheila Dahlgren, SVP of marketing at Scene7 explains: “Customers are three times more likely to buy online when retailers offer rich imagery with the ability to zoom, pan, and see color options and alternative views of the merchandise, along with the products presented in context or on a model.”

That means now is the time to find a photographer and update your product photos. Another option is to hire a photo editor from a site like Upwork who can make your current images look brighter, more crisp—whatever is needed.

Don’t forget about Dahlgren’s suggestion to add the ability to zoom, pan and see color options. Add those features through your e-commerce software if they’re not available to your customers yet.

Update Old Stock Images

(even if you already paid for and still own that old license)

Stock images go out of style. No kidding. Since we essentially use the images we post on social media to communicate with one another, you sort of have to stay up on th lingo. If you happened to post a generic-looking office photo a few years ago, you did the right thing. Then. If it’s still up today, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s making your site look like it was created by a web designosaur.

You can refresh your stock images by subscribing to low-cost stock image sites, or hiring your own photographer + designer to get fresh images that can be put on your site.

The Wrap-Up

If you want to capture as many sales as possible in 2019, your website may need a refresh. Use these ideas to prep your online store and make it your most profitable year yet.

Jessica Thiefels is founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting, a content marketing agency. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications like Forbes and FastCompany. She also regularly contributes to Virgin, Business Insider, Glassdoor, Score.org and more. Follow her on Twitter @JThiefels and connect on LinkedIn.

The post Tips for Updating an Online Store to Boost Conversions appeared first on The Shelf.

How to Improve the ROI of Your Holiday Influencer Marketing

Danielle Hayes — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 22:32:35 +0000

5 Simple Tips for Getting Better Results with Your Influencer Campaign This Holiday Season

One of the big questions brands and marketers have about the effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign is how to achieve a high enough return on investment to justify the expense of running the campaign. It can be tough to tell a traditional marketers how effective influencer marketing can be. Many brands are coming into influencer marketing without knowing how to quantify the results they get.

Now that influencer marketing is becoming more and more popular, more brands are using it to reach their target audience and boosting their online sales. According to Bloglovin’s Marketers Survey 2017, six in 10 marketers surveyed planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets. That figure has only grown over the past year. And it’s grown for one reason and one reason only: Influencer campaigns work.

In 2017, brands saw an ROI of $6.78 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. That number climbs to more than $11 for every $1 spent for beauty brands. Of course, not every brand sees those kinds of results.

The Shelf blog is basically about…

The BEST STRATEGIES brands can use to roll out killer influencer campaigns
How to get AMAZING UGC by partnering with the RIGHT INFLUENCERS
How to AVOID MISTAKES that commonly lead to crappy campaigns
Step-by-step plans for rolling out SUPER COOL INFLUENCER CAMPAIGNS
Which signals you should to track to MAXIMIZE and MEASURE ROI (you know… instead of vanity metrics)

Fact is, if you run your campaign effectively, you’ll see the results you really want. And, we’re here to help you do just that. So let’s take a look at how you can maximize the ROI of your next influencer marketing campaign.

The 3 Benefits of Influencer Marketing

#1 Better targeting for better customers

With influencer marketing, you’re working with an audience that has already been targeted by your chosen influencer. By working with the right person, you’re able to tap into an existing community that already cares about the kind of product you’re trying to market.

With traditional digital marketing, you’re hoping that the right people see your posts, open your emails, and eventually make it to your website. But, with influencer marketing, you know that they’ll be listening, and you know that they’re likely to be interested.

#2 Trust and credibility by association

Word-of-mouth still works. Getting a recommendation from a real person is the best way to establish instant credibility (via social proof) with potential customers. Ninety-two percent of people will trust personal recommendations over brand messages – even if they don’t actually know the person making the recommendation. Having an influencer talk about why they love your product is a great way to utilise this for your own business.

#3 Accessibility

Around the world, most Internet users are also social media users. In fact, the majority of users on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are outside the U.S. It’s not always easy to build a dedicated following on social media, but that’s the value of partnering with an influencer – many of them have mastered the art of creating and curating content that moves people to take an action. The right influencer partnership will give you access to thousands, and possibly even millions of new buyers.

111 Influencer Marketing Stats That Actually Mean Something to Brands and Marketers

5 Tips for Seamless, Profitable Influencer Campaigns

#1 Find the perfect influencer

As effective as influencer marketing can be, if you’re working with the wrong influencer you’ll know it by your results. The biggest benefit that comes from working with an influencer is being able to tap into his or her dedicated audience, an audience the influencer has worked to grow and cultivate. So it benefits you to work with influencer who have built the kind of niche following that matters to you and your brand.

Following Size

More followers means that more people will see your product on their feeds. The influencer will likely have a bigger reputation, and will be able to introduce thousands, or even millions of people to your brand. But, bigger isn’t always better. Having a larger following often means an influencer’s demographic is more diverse. Not everyone will be as into your product as you’d like.

Instead, you might want to consider working with influencers will slightly smaller followings – enough to make an impact, but not so many that your message gets lost. These micro-influencers create a connected community who really listen when they speak. You’ll also see some much higher engagement rates here – how many of their followers are actually engaging with the content they put out there. And tracking engagement rates is often a better indicator of influencer quality than follower size.

Niche Audiences

Niched-down audiences can, in many cases, convert better than larger audiences. So, finding an influencer who has sway in a niched-down version of a wider audience (like Muslim mom influencer of school-aged kids or a body-positive, plus-sized fashion influencer) allows you to narrow your product targeting and refine your message so it resonates better with your influencer’s audience.

A growing trend in the influencer space in partnering with who VaynerMedia calls unfluencers – social media users who have fewer than 3,000 followers to reach lots of smaller audiences with more targeted messages.

Previous Partnerships

A pretty good indicator of an influencer’s future success with your campaign is their past success in campaigns similar to yours if an influencer has them. If you can see their past successes, you know that they’re an influencer brands like to work with – especially if they’ve worked with the same brand more than once.

On the other hand, you can also spot which influencers to avoid if their previous attempts at paid partnerships have fallen flat. Not everyone who wants to make it as an influencer has the skills and abilities to do so, and it’s important to remember that when searching for the right person for your campaign.

The Macro Guide to Micro Influencers

#2 Set clear goals and objectives

Possibly the most important factor for any marketing campaign, influencer or otherwise, is making sure you set clear goals and objectives before launching. Your campaign goals determine almost of every other aspect of your campaign, from the types of influencers you enlist to the types of content they create for you.

Remember: Influencers are influencers because they’ve figured out what kind of content moves people to take actions. By telling your influencer partners what you hope to achieve with your campaign, you enable them to craft content that will help you meet your goals.

Use SMART Goals

If you’ve read any of our other posts, then you’ll know how much we love SMART goals – these are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive. Take a look at these two example goals, and you’ll soon see why we love them:

“I want to get more followers”

“I want to increase our following to 5,000 through a targeted influencer marketing campaign, using three micro-influencers over a period of 1 month.”

With the first goal, there’s no real way to measure the success of your campaign. You might attract 100 new followers, or you might attract 1000 – either way, you have no benchmark to measure your success against.

In the second example, you’ve set out exactly what you want to achieve, by when, and how you’re going to do it. Goals like this allow you to track your results with much more accuracy.

#3 Lock down your budget

Something that many brands and businesses struggle with when they first dive into the world of influencer marketing is setting and sticking to a budget. Knowing how much a partnership with a specific influencer is worth can be hard to lock down when you’re just starting out. There isn’t specifically an industry standard yet for influencer pricing, and individual quotes can vary wildly, even in the same industry and with the same following.

It’s a tricky game to get right for both sides of the negotiations. Influencers know just how valuable their content can be for businesses nowadays, and they feel that they deserve to be compensated accordingly. Forty-four percent of influencers don’t think they’re getting a fair shake when it comes time to negotiate their service rates with brands.

Working with micro-influencers instead of macro- and mega-influencers tends to cost less per influencer, but you’ll probably need to work with more than one micro-influencer at a time. Fair warning, though: Their rates aren’t as low as you would expect.

There are mega-influencers who are charging $250K for a single YouTube video (not kidding – this was a real quote from an influencer we contacted for a campaign recently – and that rate didn’t include UGC rights), and you have micro-influencers who will do a single blog post for a few hundred bucks. It depends on the influencer there are several important factors that affect influencer rates.

What about free products? Well, you may be able to negotiate free products for small influencers, but… usually, you won’t be able to guarantee positive UGC without monetary compensation.

How to Get Amazing User Generated Content from Your Campaigns

#4 Communicate

A “set it and forget it” mentality doesn’t work in this business. The landscape changes to quickly. So, you need to maintain open lines of communication before and during your campaign. In the build-up to the campaign launch, you should be constantly checking in with them to make sure everything is in place, and that they fully understand their position in the partnership. They need to feel comfortable enough to ask you any questions, or bring up concerns as they arise. If you keep the lines of communication open, you can watch your campaign to make sure you can address issues before they become problems.

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5 Simple Tips for Getting Better Results with Your Influencer Campaign This Holiday Season @shelfinc
https://ctt.ec/y1P52

Another thing many brands are considering is building long-term relationships with influencers. Keep influencers in the loop to let them know the results of their campaigns and get feedback from them about their side of the campaign as well. Influencers are full of good ideas. It’s also good to gather feedback on your process… Was everything laid out clearly for them? Did they feel valued as an influencer? Would they work with you again? All these things can help to inform future campaigns, and can help maintain a good relationship with the influencer if you decide to work with them again.

#5 Track and measure

As with any form of marketing, not every campaign and idea that you run with will bring you the same level of success. Some ideas will tank, and so will some influencer marketing campaigns – that’s just the way that life goes. But, a failed campaign isn’t a complete waste. There is so much to learn from it, more so than a successful one.

By tracking and measuring your results throughout your campaign, and diving into a deep analysis after the fact, you’ll have a wealth of information right at your fingertips. You’ll be able to figure out exactly how and why your campaign tanked, and how you can change your methods in the future to stop it from happening again.

And, by tracking as the campaign is running, you’ll also be able to sidestep a lot of these issues as they are happening. Keeping a close eye on the analytics throughout the run can help you spot any problems the second they arise, and resolve them before they have a bigger impact on your campaign.

Conclusion

The effectiveness of a marketing campaign is everything. It’s true for TV ads and it’s true for influencer campaigns. In this post, we laid out an abbreviated version of a solid influencer campaign, along with links to some content you can use to roll out a more sophisticated campaign for better results.

Hey! Are you working with influencers on your holiday campaign yet?

Well, do you want to?

While we hate to be negative Nancys… the holidays are HERE. It’s time to get working on your holiday campaigns, like RIGHT NOW!! The Shelf is an influencer marketing platform that takes away the guesswork. With our patent-pending, ROI-prediction reports, you’ll be able to understand exactly who’s representing your brand and whether or not your collaboration with them will pay off. Contact us if you want to make a ton of money from your marketing efforts.

Get Started Today!

Or give us a quick call : (212) 655-9879

The post How to Improve the ROI of Your Holiday Influencer Marketing appeared first on The Shelf.

7 Classic Social Media Campaign Ideas That Work

The Shelf — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 17:18:00 +0000

7 Types of Throwback Influencer Marketing Strategies That Work. They Just… Do

Updated September 2018

Just like there are 7 cosmic stages, 7 pillars of wisdom, 7 colors in the rainbow, and 7 daughters of the Egyptian god, Ra, there are 7 principal kinds of blogger campaigns. Each type of campaign has it’s own set of pros and cons. What’s important is to be able to distinguish what your ultimate goal is in order to pick the right campaign for you. Here, we give you the SparkNotes edition of our 7 blogger campaign ideas!

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7 Types of Throwback Influencer Campaigns That Work. They Just… Do
@shelfinc https://ctt.ac/Uue57

NUMBER 1 : Gift Your Duds to Your Favorite Blogger

This is one of the most popular campaigns and undoubtedly boasts the best bang for your buck. Getting a blogger, who aligns with your brand’s aesthetic, to wear your goods is an amazing way for readers to see your products in context of “the every day”. PLUS bloggers usually wear sponsored clothes and accessories more than once, especially if they LOVE them. Which means, you could potentially get more impressions than the cost of one sponsored post. Win-win.

How to Vet Bloggers and Influencers

NUMBER 2 : A Good Ole-Fashioned Product Review

While this is a favored choice for makeup and beauty brands, product reviews can be utilized across many different verticals, which is important because 90 percent of consumers say online reviews influencer their buying decisions, and 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as their trust the recommendations of their friends!

Still, product reviews aren’t immune from the disclosure rules outlined in the FTC’s endorsement guidelines (Danielle penned a recent post on the rules of engagement here). That said, it’s important that brands make it crystal clear to their influencers that readers need to know – in no uncertain terms – about the influencer – brand partnership.

Bloggers have high conversion rates because their readers trust them. An honest review can do wonders. On the flip side, a negative review could be very destructive. A word of caution, do NOT send out your products without contacting (and contracting) bloggers first and agreeing on specifics. If you do not contact them, you run the risk of not getting any coverage at all…bummer!

NUMBER 3 : Drumroll…GIVEAWAYS

We love free stuff. Who doesn’t? To sponsor a giveaway, simply contact a blogger and agree on what type of goodies you want to giveaway on their blog. Bloggers might charge you a certain amount of money for the post PLUS the cost of the Giveaway. Remember to factor that in when you are budgeting out costs!

Giveaways are often loose-ended because you ultimately want the winner to pick their special something. Popular choices for giveaways are gift cards, or a new item you are trying to promote, i.e. pick a pair of boots from our Fall 2018 collection. Readers will need to accomplish specific tasks in order to enter.

How to Work with Blogger and Influencers When You’re Bootstrapping It

Just be sure to choose tasks that’ll help you reach your actual business goals. Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be arbitrary. Are you looking for more newsletter signups? Make the giveaway available only to new and existing subscribers of your weekly newsletter (and word the terms something to that effect because the EU is seriously enforcing GDPR when it comes to collecting personal data). In search of a larger social media following? Ask an entrant to hashtag with your brand specific hashtag or follow you on Facebook. Whatever your goal is, craft the entry process for in a way that ensures you arrive at the desired outcome.

NUMBER 4 : Group Giveaways

What is better than one giveaway? A group giveaway, duh! Group giveaways involve having 10-20 bloggers post a sponsored giveaway on the same day. All entries are entered into the same contest – GROUP GIVEAWAY!

This type of cross promotion reaches an audience up to ten times what it would with a single influencer. The only downside is that this type of giveaway has to have a GROUP GIVEAWAY worthy prize, which could be not the most budget-friendly option.

However, if your brand is planning to do multiple giveaways, this is more cost and time effective in the end than paying bloggers for individual posts. Plus, as an added bonus, bloggers get more exposure. Always a good thing.

NUMBER 5 : Pin-It-to-Win-It

A fun little twist to a basic giveaway is a Pin-It-To-Win-It Campaign. You can opt for a simple approach where a blogger’s readers pin images of your products to their Pinterest Boards in exchange for an entry in the giveaway. OR you can do something a little more sophisticated like have participants create themed board on which to post your products.

Just be sure to create a unique hashtag for your campaign to make it more searchable! #EasyPeasy

NUMBER 6 : Sponsored Ad Space

There are two paths you can take with buying ad space: Either you can buy space via an ad network or you can buy ad space directly from a blogger. With buying space from an ad network, you get less say on which blogs you show up on. You run a greater risk of being afflicted by the Mix-Match Epidemic. In all fairness, AI has really improved how your ads show up now. Gone are the days when you’re watching Tony Robbins on YouTube and a video vixen splashes across the screen as part of an ad for the latest Hip-Hop video.

Things aren’t perfect. Brand safety is a still a huge concern for marketers, but the algorithms have smartened-up on when it displays ads and is much better than it was when we originally published this post in 2014 at tying relevant ads to the right content.

How to Measure the ROI of Influencer Marketing in 2018

When buying ad space directly from a blogger you get more say (and sway) on which blogs display your ads, and you can monitor how well your ad is doing. The benefits of using an ad network include less stress because you’re not doing the footwork to find the right publishers or renewing ads or contacting publishers.

Additionally, you can use The Shelf to find the right bloggers within your demographic to reach out to in order to cut down the manual process. Either way works.

NUMBER 7 : Last but Certainly not Least, Blog Competitions

Sometimes a brand just needs to roll up its big, branded sleeves and get creative! A blog competition is a great way to do that.

Essentially the way this type of contest works is you invite stylish bloggers to compete for a chance to win things like an exclusive partnership with the brand, a chance to be the new face of the brand, travel to various countries promoting the brand, etc.

Because bloggers need viewers to vote for them, they will really push the contest, especially just before the deadline. These contests can run for a couple of weeks and they’re a great way to insert your brand in front of your audience across multiple platforms.

AND a blog competition is not only beneficial to you, but beneficial to the blogger as well!

The Big Wrap-Up

If you use the ideas we’ve included in this post as launchpads for your influencer campaigns, you have a pretty good chance of getting strong returns on your investment. These are time-test methods for generating traffic, raising brand awareness and converting total strangers to raving fans.

Of course, if you need help getting everything done, influencer marketing is our area of expertise. It’s where we shine. And getting started with The Shelf is as simple as a phone call.

The post 7 Classic Social Media Campaign Ideas That Work appeared first on The Shelf.