Shane Barker

Shane Barker is a writer for INC, Forbes, HuffPost, Entrepreneur.com. He is also the Host of “Influencer Marketing with Shane Barker”.

Shane has helped one of his fitness clients sell 1.6M in fitness e-books through influencer marketing. He was also a judge for BigCommerce’s Innovation Awards 2017.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Shane’s success

Launching products through influencers marketing

Result if you follow the steps in Shane’s session

Find the right influencers from the beginning and find out which influencers move the needle when it comes to sales and ROI

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So what is influencer marketing, right?

So the idea of influencer marketing is that you’re partnering with people who have a large loyal following on social media and using them to introduce your product and so they understand the benefits of what they’ve got to their followers, right, and just gotta make sure that’s a good fit. And we’ll talk about a little further in presentation.

So, how to make your product launch successful with influencer marketing is really important to define your goals, like, what do you want to do? Is it, do you want to increase awareness? Is it sales? Is it, you want to increase your followership? What are your goals?

You get to make sure you have to with anything, any campaign any marketing campaign you do not, just at once, a marketing you got to set those KPIs up ahead of time, you gotta identify who your audience is, who’s your target audience. Extremely important.

Finding the right influencers, that’s probably the biggest thing that I see people fail at when they do some kind of product launch or do something on Instagram or any of those, any of the social profiles is you’re dealing with the wrong person. If I put up a Facebook ad, it was the wrong ad going to the wrong audience. You’re not gonna have any success creating a content strategy behind that.

So once you actually go live with it, content, how, you know, what you can do to push that out to get further bang for your buck, they’re launching your campaign, how you do that and then tracking and measuring your results.

So one of the biggest things is identifying your target audience like who are your users? Like, who will benefit from your product? Right? Who is that core audience that you want to go find? What’s the age group, the locations gender? You know, do they belong starting to groups and forums? How do you find those people?

And then once again, which social media channels do they use often, right? That’s going to be really important. There’s so many different channels out there and there’s more being created each day. Where do you think you’re going to find that audience and how you going to test market to see where that that perfect audience is for that perfect social media platform?

Finding the right influencer, once again, biggest thing that I see, issues with when people do campaigns is not finding the right influencer. That’s so key to this thing. So one thing you want to look for is obviously a high engagement rate that’s not just likes. Anybody can do a bot and get tons of likes, like at comments, right?

So there’s actually an equation that we use, you got to look at likes and comments and then also look at the audience. The people that are writing comments, see what kind of comments are being written. Make sure that makes sense for your brand, right?

If they’re getting 500 comments, that’s awesome. But what happens if it’s just people that are writing weird stuff or bad stuff, or they’re saying odd stuff, or it’s a bot or whatever it is, you have to look into this kind of stuff, you know, you have to make sure you spend that time.

And are they good storytellers? I mean, the whole point of Instagram is to tell that story, right? The idea is you want to get somebody that can go in and talk about your product and talks about it in a very authentic voice. And that’s going to bring sales, that’s just hands down. That’s how you do it.

And they want to be active in the niche, you know, once again, make sure that it makes sense that you know, if you’re doing fitness, you know, fitness product, if it’s a fitness person, that makes sense. If you’re going after yoga person that makes sense. If you’re going after a person, that’s a jet setter, now, that might make sense. If you’re going after somebody that does something totally different, not fitness, it probably doesn’t make sense.

We have found some cool stuff where we have done things that may be like work with an influencer, we didn’t think was a perfect fit and it was a home run. So there’s other ways to look at that as well. But once again, make sure it’s a good fit.

Some of the products that we use, actually find them a brand, probably one of our most favorite, Insightful, Hyper and Buzzsumo, that I would recommend to go take a look at. All of them have different features that are pretty awesome when it comes to this.