does influencer gifting actually grow your brand

does influencer gifting actually grow your brand is it a waste of money if you're a small brand these are all my thoughts on influencer marketing i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and i think where people are getting it wrong is they have the wrong expectations going into influencer marketing or like gifting a product to an influencer the way that you need to think about gifting to an influencer is this is a brand awareness thing this is getting your brand out there and getting exposure getting a lot of impressions it's not necessarily something that's going to convert to a purchase right away it could which i'll get into in a second but i think on the whole influencer marketing is more brand awareness but we feel like it should be conversions and so we're like on my gosh i spent all this money on this influencer or i gifted this influencer and they posted and i saw no sales or i saw 10 sales coming it's kind of like an an ad on tv like super bowl ad for example if you see super bowl ad you're not gonna go right away and like by pepsi it's a brand awareness thing the second thing it is is credibility you see a lot of brands using an influencer's post and pinning it on their page as a form of credibility here's kind of the flow big influencer posts about you that's your first impression maybe you do some like performance marketing like ads and people start to come to your page and then they say see that pin post they see the credibility again oh wow yeah this influencer posted this is like a legit brand and then they go on to purchase now all that aside there are instances like alex earl for example she moves product she does get people to convert not every influencer will do this but there are a lot of influencers that actually do push product and get conversions and so the way that i think about this is i wanna be gifting a certain amount of my stock to influencers because it's kinda like putting your name into the lottery you see this all the time with brands they pop off and there's like a turning point when a big influencer post about them like odd muse is an amazing example of this heaven mayhem also good example they were put on the map because of a big influencer and then like obviously they have a great products and the rest of their marketing is fantastic so the way that i kinda think about it is like let me buy my lottery ticket like with every drop i'm gonna put aside 10% of inventory and seed it to influencers if one of them posts that could be my big break as a brand why would i not buy that lottery ticket but knowing the expectation that this is likely more brand awareness play with a hint of credibility which would then lead to a conversion down the line not an instant conversion okay so how do you get an influencer to actually post your product without having to pay tens of thousands of dollars the way that i think about this is seeding and gifting and i think there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do it first off like how many influencers are you seating and gifting i would say as a small business i can maybe put aside 10% of my inventory for seeding and gifting the way that i think that you can pick an influencer to increase the chances that they actually post about you is picking an influencer that's actually aligned with your brand someone who has the aesthetic of your brand someone who's 99.999% likely to wear the outfit that you give them because they're so aligned with your aesthetic it's a no brainer it's something they would actually want to wear then i would increase the chances by personalizing it it shows that you're hand picking someone you're not just like sending this to the masses influencers get so much pr but if you're sending something like so personalised to them it cuts through the noise who doesn't love receiving a very thoughtful gift that is personalised just to them the last thing here is to really build a relationship don't expect like just because you send them the product they're gonna start posting you on day one continuously seed them more products with every drop build a long term relationship with the influencers that are super aligned with your brand i also think picking an influencer that's very aligned with your brand not only will increase the chances that they post about you but will also likely create a higher conversion because the person who's following that influencer has the same aesthetic so overall just picking an influencer that's super aligned i think is key i also have some thoughts on gifting to community versus gifting to influencers but that's a whole other video let me know if you wanna see it anyways i hope that helps bye