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!

Gifting 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.

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.

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.

SWC’s FASHION INFLUENCER & STYLE BLOGGER LIST

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 which is why we have pre-vetted 200 Fashion Influencer & Style Bloggers who work with swimwear, resortwear, and accessories. You’ll find engagement numbers for each contact across a variety of social media platforms including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

4. Measuring Success of Your Gifting Campaign

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.

Referral Traffic
Measuring referral traffic is one of the most effective ways to measure the impact of your influencer campaign. You’ll want to know exactly how many people your influencer drives to your website. Direct links and search engine traffic matter, but referral traffic from your influencer is the end goal.

Luckily, Google Analytics makes getting this information easy by allowing you to create custom reports for influencer campaigns.

Sentiment
Sentiment is one of two important KPIs related to brand awareness. It refers to the tone in which people talk about your products and services. Are they singing your praises? Or trashing you on Yelp? Either way, you’ll want to know about it.

Focus on measuring your positive and negative mentions in ratios. The higher your positive ratio, the better your influencer is at endearing your brand to their audience.

Frequency
The other aspect of brand awareness you’ll want to monitor is frequency; or more specifically, the frequency that people mention your brand. You can determine this frequency by finding the average number of times a person comes in contact with your brand over a given time period.

By measuring current content views and comparing them each month, you can reveal if your influencer’s content is reaching enough people within your specific niche to have a meaningful impact.

Engagement Rate Per Influencer Post

Engagement rate refers to the number of people who liked, clicked, or commented on your post, divided by the number of people who saw the post. Each time your influencer posts on your behalf, you’ll want to calculate the engagement rate and compare it with previous posts to judge the campaign’s momentum.

An influencer specific way to calculate your engagement rate is taking the number of people who engaged with a post and dividing it by the influencer’s total number of followers. This tells you whether or not your content is connecting effectively with the influencer’s audience.

KPIs can refer to almost any data pertaining to an influencer campaign. This makes knowing the proper KPIs to measure crucial to determining the actual success of your influencer campaign. Information is useless without context, so stick to the stats that matter.

You need to know how much traffic your influencer drives, whether they’re endearing people toward your brand, how often they mention you, and what portion of your total audience their following represents.

Keep this information in mind and you’ll have all the reliable marketing data you need to evaluate the success of your influencer campaigns.

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.