Gifting influencers is a great way to earn extra exposure for your brand and has the added benefit of potentially earning yourself a new fan! Campaigns might seem really easy, but it’s actually the collaboration type we see brands struggle with the most. Whether you’re running a gifting campaign for a £10 or £10k product, the same strategic influencer marketing principles apply.

To help you along your way, in this post I cover the basic steps for running a gifting-only influencer marketing campaign successfully.

1. Influencer Gifting Campaign Planning

The planning phase should be at the beginning of every single influencer marketing campaign – product or paid. During the planning phase, you should identify who your target audience is and what your campaign objectives are. Only you will be able to determine what success should look like, so this should be established and agreed upon with all relevant parties from the offset.

Sample Influencer Campaign Objectives: Launch a product Increase sales Brand Awareness Generate content

Sample Influencer Campaign KPIs Uplift in sales Increase in web traffic Content generated Increase in followers

 

Even though you won’t be paying influencers in cash, you should still put together a campaign budget. For a gifting campaign this means, the total value of stock you intend to gift and the cost of the stock. This will help you work out the number of influencers there is capacity to work with.

2. Campaign Guidelines & Influencer Agreement

Biggest fail in gifting collaboration? Thinking you don’t need to put together an influencer agreement.

Your influencer agreement should outline what you expect from the influencer in return for the gift. You should include: expected deliverables, time-frame, hashtags and handles required. Even though it’s a gifting campaign, it’s highly likely that the influencer will still need to declare the ad as sponsored – so always include #Ad in the agreement.

What to Include In Your Influencer Marketing Agreement

You may also wish to include some basic campaign guidelines – for example, the image style / mood or caption guidelines. As ever, we’d advise you to be as hands off as possible when it comes to creative styling so that the post remains authentic.

3. How to Find The Right Influencers

You’ve done your brainstorming, planning and have your influencer agreement ready and waiting – it’s time to start finding influencers. Depending on the product value / coolness / desirability of your gift, you’ll need to think what is a suitable influencer size to approach i.e. gifting influencers diamonds has different value to a gifted lip balm.

ZINE’s Top 10 Gifting Influencers

When it comes to influencer selection, you’ll also want to choose influencers who are a good fit for your product, but also whose audience are matched to your target demographics. The core areas we suggest you look at, to determine whether or not to work with an influencer are:

• Audience demographics – is the influencers audience aligned with your target market?
• Average engagement – this will indicate the engagement you can expect for your images
• Monthly audience growth – negative growth can indicate an un-engaged audience
• Previous brand associations – does the influencer already work with brands similar to yours? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Finding the right influencers to work with can be time consuming without a tool like ZINE. To make things easy – we have launched The Brand Catalogue. Simply create your profile and campaign, then specify your influencer requirements. You’ll then receive applications from influencers browsing the catalogue, and can review their ZINE media kit which will give you a detailed view of their audience demographics, engagement and growth – you’ll even see engagement across Instagram stories (influencers must have Reach Insights activated). You can sign up for the brand catalogue for free here.

4. Measuring Success of Your Gifting Campaign

Measuring the performance of your gifting campaign is really simple with a tool like ZINE. Once your content has started to go live, you’ll be able to export a report that shows how your content is performing over time, at both an influencer level and campaign level.

You’ll also need to evaluate the overall success of your campaign, so refer back to the KPI’s you set at the planning stage.

5. Case study

From sourcing influencers and engaging with them, to negotiating deliverables, approving content and tracking results, O’Wow used ZINE in all its glory. O’Wow used the platform’s filters to identify influencers that matched their requirements. Their decision to approach both macro and micro-influencers allowed them to reach a huge, yet very targeted audience, with the majority showing immense interest in hair and beauty. O’Wow offered influencers a free product in exchange for promotion on instagram. 

Within the first 30 minutes of reaching out to 438 influencers via the platform, O’Wow quickly received positive responses from influencers happy to collaborate and create content for the campaign.

 

Top Gifting Campaign Tips:

• Allowing the influencer to tag other brands isn’t necessarily a bad thing! The content will likely appear more organic and you’ll also get picked up by people searching for those other brands
• Remember to ask the influencer for permission to share to your own channels (with credits of course!)
• For your campaign to be successful, you’ll need to commit. Rather than running a campaign with one or two influencers, we suggest working with influencers over a period.

 

Takeaways

In the run-up to Christmas 2020, it’s a great time to test the waters with influencer marketing. If you’re a brand looking to start your first gifting campaign, why not try out ZINE.

As part of your free trial on our platform you’ll get:

1. To work with up to five influencers for free

2. Save time searching for influences and let them apply to you instead

3. Monitor and track the result of your campaign.

Get started now!