Social commerce is big today, and it’s set to get even bigger. According to EMarketer, U.S. social commerce sales will surpass $100 billion this year.
What’s the key to brands building a social commerce strategy that works? Influencer marketing.
My agency has worked with hundreds of brands and influencers, and I’ve seen how the latter fuels success in the social commerce space by helping brands get the right messages to the right audiences and spurring them to buy. Here are five tips to fuel your influencer marketing success.
1. Pick The Right Influencers
When you’re seeking to build an influencer partnership, you have plenty of options. You don’t need to work with the biggest influencers to get the best results. Instead, experiment with what works for your brand. Often, smaller influencers have much higher engagement levels than celebrity endorsements. The higher engagement levels often come from the extreme specificity of nano-influencer content and from their ability to engage personally with followers.
When you’re evaluating an influencer, follower size isn’t the only thing that matters. Ensure the influencer you partner with aligns with your brand’s voice, values and personality so their content will resonate with the people you want to reach. Choose influencers who are thought leaders and who are innovating in your space or with the audiences you wish to connect with.
2. Help Influencers Tell Rather Than Sell
Anyone can create a list of your product’s top features. The value in partnering with influencers is making it possible for people to see the product and to visualize how it might fit into their own lifestyle. There’s a big difference between seeing a shirt or dress on a plain white background in an Amazon ad versus seeing an influencer trying it on, telling you how flatteringly it fits and highlighting how soft and silky the fabric is. The second approach makes the shopping experience much more personal.
When you work with an influencer, make sure they understand what your product is—all the nuts and bolts of it—but also give them the ability to showcase the product in context and tell their audiences why the product makes a difference. Brief the influencers on how it works, and then brainstorm with them about why it matters. Make sure they understand the secret sauce that makes your product stand out.
3. Give Your Influencers Freedom
Influencers are experts at their craft, and they’ve developed strategies that work. They know their audiences, and they know what appeals to them. They are more than just social media talking heads. They are savvy business professionals who spend time analysing social media content and then figuring out how to make it applicable to their own accounts and audiences.
Once you’ve found an influencer and vetted their audience, trust them. When you know you have a strong influencer supporting your brand, it’s to your benefit to let their strategic thinking and creativity shine. Instead of asking them to share your talking points and having them sound like an extension of your corporate marketing—which Gen Z can spot (and will skip) a mile away—they’ll sound authentic and true to the voice and aesthetic they’ve cultivated.
4. Repurpose And Reuse Content
When developing partnerships with influencers, ensure that you discuss whether you have rights to continue using the content after the initial partnership ends. Then, you can continue to leverage content that you know has performed well. For example, if an influencer creates a great piece of content for your brand, you can get more than one use out of it and increase its visibility by using it for paid social.
This is a great potential win because you already know that the content is engaging to the people you want to attract to your brand, so you can get a second chance at reaching new audiences. As platforms increasingly deprioritize organic content and serve up paid posts, this also allows you to maximize the potential of being seen and heard, and ensure you have high-quality content to do so.
5. Make The Purchase Process Seamless
You can have all the best tools enabled, but if your purchase process is complicated and buggy, you may see people drop out before finishing the process. Watch your metrics to see where people fall out of your marketing funnel. If they’re engaging and making it near the end of the process, but then not closing the deal, spend time investigating how to make your process better.
You can also automate emails or messages to send to potential buyers about abandoned cart items or offer win-back discounts. Consider implementing post-purchase surveys as well to find and fix pain points and increase potential purchase success for future buyers.
Social commerce is strong and growing stronger. With U.S. sales on TikTok Shop growing by 120% from 2024 to 2025, and global social commerce revenue expected to reach over $1 trillion by 2029, now is the time to design your influencer marketing strategy so you can be successful during the social shopping revolution.
Feature image credit: Getty
By Ismael El Qudsi
Find Ismael El Qudsi on LinkedIn and X. Visit Ismael’s website.
COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based). Ismael El Qudsi is Co-founder and CEO of SocialPubli, an award-winning influencer marketing platform with 500,000+ opt-in influencers. Read Ismael El Qudsi’s full executive profile here.
