How to Launch Your Own Influencer Seeding Campaign

New brands that boast great products don’t always have a great marketing budget to match. A painful fact of life for some, we know.

It takes time, transparency and tactical nous to make a name for yourself and, in turn, build that magical pot of marketing money to support your endeavours.

One of the best ways to get your products in front of the right people without turning your profits in the wrong direction is a tactic known as influencer seeding.

It’s got nothing to do with gardening, but everything to do with finding your tribe and nurturing the kinds of relationships that’ll get your brand to where you want it to be (while saving a small fortune in the process).

Let’s take a good look at the phenomenon and how an effective influencer seeding strategy might take shape so you can start planning for the big time.

What Is Influencer Product Seeding and Why Is It Important?

Influencer seeding is a marketing tactic that involves brands distributing products to prospective partners with social media followers who could be interested in their offering.

It doesn’t necessarily demand anything in return—influencers are instead free to choose whether or not they post about the product, which they tend to do only if they love it.

Also sometimes known as influencer gifting (only with more focus on content reciprocation), it’s a cost-effective way of building awareness of products that might be new to the market or sold by brands that struggle to cut through the noise. It’s also good for niche products that might seldom see the limelight on social media.

Brands turn to influencer seeding as a tactic to work with micro-influencers rather than macro-influencers due to their comparatively lower levels of followers.

This makes for more mutual benefits because both parties are interested in (1) growing their social reach and (2) nurturing more personal and meaningful relationships with their followers.

It also means cold hard cash doesn’t rule everything around them because the free products can do the talking—macro-influencers with many thousands of followers often have too much on to concern themselves with projects that don’t pay. Micro-influencers, by comparison, are more likely to respond with positive, organic and genuine content if they love the product they’ve been sent.

Influencer seeding might be quicker than building one-to-one relationships with partners because you can send many products out at once, but that doesn’t mean you should rush into it for fast results.

The practice still takes some good old planning and strategising, so here are 10 proven strategies to help you get started on your own influencer seeding journey:

10 Influencer Seeding Strategies That Work

Whether you are strapped for cash or simply want to try something new, keep these points in mind as you build your plan:

Identifying the Right Influencers

It pretty much goes without saying that you don’t want to send your products to any Tom, Dick or Harry, but we’ll say it anyway: pick your influencers wisely.

The important point to remember here is that you’re not just picking influencers—you’re picking potential partners to market your products in the long run. Not every connection will work out this way, but you’ll want to studiously check audience metrics, content styles and tones of voice when compiling your list of influencers to target.

Building Genuine Relationships

This is the main reason brands should consider influencer marketing as part of their strategy. Forging meaningful connections with influencers means you stand a better chance of connecting with real customers who value your products, too.

Build personality into your approach and don’t just focus on reaching out to as many nano-influencers or micro-influencers as possible. Remember, it’s not about quick wins, this stuff.

Crafting Compelling Outreach

Building proper relationships relies on getting off on the right foot, so be sure to avoid a blanket approach to this one.

Everyone is different, so take a little time to work out how to approach the influencers you want to work with—trust us, they’ll appreciate the effort.

Strategic Product Selection

Just as you would for any shop window display on the high street, pick your products carefully before popping them in the post.

Don’t just pick the ones you need to shift from your warehouse to make space. Treat influencer profiles as social shop windows that have only a few seconds to convince prospective customers to come on in and find out more about you.

Setting Clear Expectations

The good thing about influencer seeding is that it takes a bit of the pressure off because you’re essentially sending a free gift to somebody and they’re not entirely expected to do anything in return.

Make this clear in your outreach and keep it about the relevance of the product to each specific influencer’s brand; otherwise, you’ll risk turning them off from the first contact.

Utilising Tracking and Analytics

That said, you’ll still want to track the effectiveness of your influencer seeding strategy, so monitoring social media for any mentions that come naturally is crucial.

At Gifta, we handle everything from the searching and gifting to the tracking and reporting for you, so you’ll know exactly how much of a splash you’ve made with your new gang of brand advocates.

Leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC)

Whether it’s from creators or customers, UGC is one of the fruits of your influencer marketing labour, so when it appears, you know you’ve done something right.

Again, try not to ask for it outright in your emails, but keep an eye out for the kind of content that’ll help you appeal more naturally to your customers and factor it into your own content strategy.

You can consider buying the usage rights to post it on your own channels afterwards, too, saving you valuable production pounds in the process.

Creating a Seamless Experience

You’ll want to make it as easy as possible for your potential brand partners to, well, be your partner, so the only thing you should be asking them for is their address at this stage.

It should also be obvious to them where they should point interested customers to, so get your website, your social channels and your online shop in tip-top condition before launching any kind of influencer seeding campaign.

Measuring ROI

As with everything in the marketing world, proving the point of any activity to the higher-ups is vital to winning more budget to keep on doing it. Influencer seeding is no different.

It’s speculative by nature, of course, so your ROI will come down to increased reach, engagement and brand awareness as a result of your tactics. Tracking these metrics will be crucial to proving the effectiveness of this part of your strategy.

Adapting and Evolving

Having such performance data to hand will also help you learn from the insights and adapt and evolve as a marketing outfit.

You might go back in for more with some of the same influencers if the relationships look promising. If uptake wasn’t what you expected, you might want to change tack and send different products to a different niche of influencers to widen your appeal instead.

However you decide to build your influencer seeding strategy, the most important thing to remember is to be methodical about it.

It’s more of a long-term mission than a short-term land grab, so take your time to build the right relationships from the off and you’ll be onto at least some winners.

September 10, 2024

Elevate Your Brand: The Complete Guide to Influencer Product Seeding | GIFTA