![\"Woman](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-content.jpg?v=1683727145\")
Influencer marketing is a proven tactic to help companies reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and increase trust. If done right, an influencer marketing strategy can be one of the best ways to grow your business.
\nIf you run a business and know your audience, you can explore influencer marketing for your brand and productsâno matter your size. For new brands on low budgets, emerging influencers often offer competitive rates in exchange for promoting your message.
\nAhead, learn how influencer marketing can help you meet brand goals, with step-by-step instructions to set up an influencer campaign. Explore real examples from top online brands and get advice from the pros.
\nLearn about influencer marketing đŻ
\nInfluencer marketing is the practice of brands working with influencers to promote a company, product, service, or message to their audience. These are often paid arrangements that involve the influencer creating digital content in partnership with the brand. Sometimes compensation is also delivered in-kind, often in the form of free products, cash, or discounts on expensive products.
\n
Influencers are internet creators and celebrities who have built reputations around a specific niche or have built sizable audiences around their personal brands. Influencers create content across a number of platforms, including:
\nAs of 2022, Instagram still led the charge as the top platform for influencer marketing campaigns and is expected to hold the top spot through 2025.
\nInfluencer marketing is increasingly a popular and effective way for brands to reach potential customers authenticallyâthrough endorsements from trusted public figures. Itâs no surprise, therefore, that the influencer marketing industry grew by more than $15 billion between 2017 and 2022.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-customers.jpg?v=1683727185\")
According to one study, 87% of participants said, when choosing a product, they pick one recommended by an influencer. Influencer campaigns can help brands meet business goals like increasing sales, growing brand awareness, and building audiences. Here are a few other ways brands can benefit from influencer marketing.
\nInfluencers use authentic presentation and engagement to foster deeper customer relationships through their association with a brand. In recent years, this dynamic of brand âĄď¸ influencer âĄď¸ audience has become a solid staple of media consumption.
\nOf course, for deeper relationships to form, itâs a given that the influencerâs personal brand and your own need to match (values, industry, audience, etc.)âbut your business should also provide value to their audience for maximum impact.
\nAnother obvious benefit to influencer marketing is the potential of increased reach from tapping into a wider audience. While the number of social media users across platforms continues to rise, TikTok is one that has seen massive growth. Itâs expected that more than 955 billion people will use the app by 2025.
\nDespite this potential, algorithm changes, ad fatigue, and privacy concerns all contribute to lower return on investment (ROI) on some forms of advertising. Influencer marketing allows brands to reach audiences through creators that already have organic reach.
\nDepending on your goals, influencers can help you broadly reach more people (think large audiences) or reach very specific people (those with small, niche audiences). Naturally, higher reach also typically leads to increased social engagement.
\nGreater social engagement often also leads to higher brand awareness, since social platforms show posts your network engages with. Also, if your brand is seen to be well communicative, using the language of the audience, youâll often garner more brand advocates through influencer marketing.
\nIf engagement is one of your goals, choose your partnerships and channels carefully. One report showed the engagement rates differ across various platforms and influencer audience sizes. In particular, micro-influencers typically have higher engagement rates than their mega-influencer counterparts.
\nThe last major benefit of influencer marketing is the potential for higher earned media value (EMV). EMV refers to the ROI gained from third-party responses to marketing activities.
\nA higher EMV generally means youâre getting more social mentions and you have more meaningful social connections (which can lead to increased sales). When you involve an influencer in your marketing activities, you stand a better chance of increasing your EMV. One survey found businesses are making $6.50 to every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
\n\n\n
\n
Explore some of the companies that successfully work with social media influencers to reach potential customers and meet business goals. Get inspired by their tried and true tactics and apply their learnings to your own influencer marketing efforts.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/healthish.jpg?v=1683727236\")
Health product brand Healthish actively uses influencers to promote its products. To launch the brandâs signature water bottle, co-founders Emily Chong and Nathan Chan worked with Instagram influencers to promote the product.
\nâWeâre in a fortunate position where the product is relatively low cost,â Nathan explains. âWe just send out [products] to many subsections of the market.â
\nHealthishâs influencer marketing strategy involves sending free products to relevant influencers like fitness vloggers, fashion influencers, and other groups related to its target market. These creators then share images and videos of its products onlineâbut only if they love the product. âWe donât even ask people to post if they donât want to,â Nathan says. âWe just say, âIf you love the products, weâd love for you to share it with your community or fans or audience.ââ
\nđ§ Listen: To learn more about the influencer marketing approach that turned Healthish into a million-dollar brand, check out the founders on the Shopify Masters podcast.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/nominal.jpg?v=1683727330\")
Nominal is a jewelry brand that blends culture and fashion to create meaningful accessories. Founded by business and life partners Lena Sarsour and Akram Abdallah, Nominal grew from idea to seven-figure business in a short period of time, thanks to influencer marketing.
\nâInfluencer marketing has been huge to us,â Akram explains. âFrom the very beginning, we, of course, had no budget at all. We couldnât afford anybody.â So what did Akram and Lena do? They gifted influencers free jewelry. If the influencers enjoyed the products and found them sharable, they would post about the brand on social media.
\n\n
\n
Nominal would even ask influencers if they could repost their content on the brandâs feed. âAlthough we didnât pay them, now we have [branded] content that a lot of people follow and see. We build that credibility through a famous person wearing our product.â
\nđ§ Listen: Learn more about Nominalâs marketing strategy by catching the founders on the Shopify Masters podcast.
\nExplore more influencer marketing examples from Shopify store owners:
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/video-youtube-tiktok-creator-music.jpg?v=1683727501\")
\n
Everyone uses slightly different definitions for influencer types, but they typically fall into five tiers of social media influencers: nano, micro, mid, macro, and mega. When developing an influencer marketing strategy, be sure to find the right influencer at the right level for your project.
\nNano-influencers are everyday people with emerging personal brands. They often have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers on social media. Their feeds arenât glamorous or polished, and photos are typically not edited. Being an influencer is not their full-time job.
\nHowever, nano-influencers are excellent to work with for growing ecommerce brands for two reasons:
\nData shows that nano-influencers have noticeably higher engagement rates than bigger accounts, averaging 5% per post compared to the average rate of 2.2%.
\nMicro-influencers are social media accounts with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. This group makes up 47% of all Instagram creators
\nMicro-influencers often have more compact and targeted audiences than larger accounts. They have a loyal following they engage with regularly.
\nMicro-influencers may be more expensive than nano-influencers, but they still provide the same one-to-one feel when it comes to promoting your business.
\nMid-tier influencers are those who have a community of between 100,000 and 500,000 followers across their platforms. Despite having hundreds of thousands of followers, mid-tier influencers have a well-segmented audience. For example, if you are a fitness brand, youâd likely collaborate with a mid-tier influencer for maximum exposure.
\nThis group is also more affordable and is easy to contact than bigger influencers. Sometimes when you work with maco- or mega-influencers, you have to contact them through representatives or agents.
\n![\"Two](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-self-care-content.jpg?v=1683727543\")
Macro-influencers are individuals with between 500,000 and one million followers. These influencers make great brand collaborators because they have a lot of experience in the space. They know their target audience and what they like, and they wonât jeopardize their followersâ trust by partnering with the wrong brands.
\nWorking with macro-influencers brings a handful of benefits:
\nWith all this experience comes a price tag that, depending on the platform, one source estimates to be between $1,000 and $10,000.
\nYouâre probably already familiar with mega-influencers. These are the social media celebrities with audiences of more than one million followers.
\nMega-influencers like Ryan Trahan, Mr.Beast, and Unnecessary Inventions can provide massive reach for your brand. These superstars also lend a level of credibility to your products because of their reputation. The cost to work with a member of this group on a single collab can run from $10,000 to six figures, depending on the influencer.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-entrepreneur.jpg?v=1683727579\")
Finding a social media influencer and agreeing on a collaboration with them can be a time-consuming exercise thatâs difficult to scale. For best results, use this process to stay on track:
\nThere is so much you can learn from other brandsâ influencer marketing approaches. Discover what works for them, get inspiration from the different types of content they post, and look at what types of content get the most engagement. Use a tool like Hootsuite, which lets you see metrics on your Instagram account and then compare it with others.
\nItâs also a good idea to research other brands that are not your competitors but perhaps share a similar demographic. Say you run a watch brand like Shore Projects. You may keep an eye on backpack and accessory brand Herschel Supply Co. While the two brands sell different products, their customer base is similar. You can watch and see which influencer campaigns are working for the brand and pull inspiration for yours.
\nYour campaign will be more successful if you give the influencer creative freedom to produce content they know their audience will love.
\nItâs better to trust themâthe experts of their own audienceâto create an authentic and engaging campaign for you rather than assigning the exact image, caption, and hashtag list you want them to use.
\nHowever, itâs also important that your brand is still represented in the right way. Supply the influencer with an outline of your expectations, a primer of your brand, or even a mood board to inspire the campaign.
\nOnce you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, the next step is finding relevant influencers. Getting this wrong can be expensive, so itâs worth investing a bit more time to make the right decision.
\nThere are influencers within every market. Whether itâs fashion, lifestyle, travel, or fitness, you’ll likely find more than a few good options. One of the main ways to identify influencers that fit is doing an Instagram hashtag search to find the top hashtags in your market and look for the posts with high engagement.
\nA tool like Shopify Collabs is a great place to start your influencer marketing journey. You can find influencers who are open to collaborations with brands and search them by industry and other categories.
\nâA lot of people will make the mistake where theyâll spend money or send products to just about any influencer, anybody that has a lot of followers,â says Akram. âItâs not the best strategy, and also a waste of time and money.â
\nTo get a sense of the fit between your brand and an influencer, ask yourself these questions:
\nThe better the fit, the more authentic their endorsement will feel. And the more authentic the endorsement feels to the influencerâs audience, the more likely they are to follow that recommendation.
\nThatâs the power of a good fit between a brand and an influencer, like this example of a creative partnership between Tosh Snacks and popular nutritionist Amanda Holtzer.
\n![\"Screengrab](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-instagram_6ea90ea2-35a8-4704-8e5e-d2b65c2f6ea6.jpg?v=1683727643\")
Itâs not just about audience size. The influencerâs audience needs to be engaged. Genuine positive comments are a more valuable signal of a strong social following than likes alone.
\nThe biggest mistake a lot of brands make at this stage is not knowing how to reach out to the influencer or, if they do know how to reach out, not positioning their brand correctly in their pitch.
\nTo properly set up an influencer marketing deal with a macro-influencer, you need to work with their representatives, most likely their agent and their manager:
\nIf youâre not sure who to contact, there are celebrity contact info databases you can use to find out contact information for the agents, managers, and publicists of the influencers theyâre targeting.
\nOne of the benefits of targeting micro-influencers is that you can just reach out to them directly without going through their representatives. In fact, this direct access is one of the reasons why some brands prefer to work with micro-influencers.
\nOf course, because micro-influencers arenât as well known as macro-influencers, the challenge usually isnât knowing who to contact but finding relevant micro-influencers in the first place.
\nTo do that, try BuzzSumo, Shopify Collabs, or another influencer marketplace.
\nThese influencer marketplaces let you search for influencers based on keywords in their social media bios, and theyâre a great way to identify micro-influencers and narrow down potential matches based on interest, industry, and audience size.
\nThe best way to reach out to larger influencers is through agents or managers with a brief and concise email. If youâre reaching out to micro-influencers, you can usually do so directly or via a social media DM. Your goal is to answer all questions in one message so they can decide whether or not to discuss the opportunity further. Limit your first email to the key details:
\nYou need to show them that thereâs a good fit between your brand and the influencer. Remember, managers are focused on their clientâs long-term career, so be prepared to sell them on why a partnership with your brand is a good career move for the influencer.
\nBoth influencers and their representatives are busy, so if you donât hear back right away, donât get discouraged or assume theyâre not interested. Itâs perfectly OK to send a follow-up email to jog their memory.
\nJust make sure you time it correctlyâif you send it too soon, youâll risk seeming pushy, and if you send it too late, itâll seem like youâre not all that interested in working with that influencer.
\nA good rule of thumb for following up is five to seven business days after your first email; if another week goes by and you still havenât heard back, move on to the next influencers on your list.
\nIf youâre partnering with a macro-influencer, their agent will handle the contract. With micro-influencers, youâll usually work with them directly. In either case, assuming youâve clearly communicated what you expect the influencer to do and what theyâll get in return, the paperwork should be straightforward.
\nOnce youâve found the influencers you want to work with youâll need to reach out to them and agree on a collaboration structure. There are typically six key aspects youâll want to negotiate around:
\nGet additional value out of sponsored Instagram content by repurposing it for other channels. Here are three ways you can maximize influencer content value:
\nThese best practices ensure you donât get burned when working with influencers:
\n![\"Close](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-contract.jpg?v=1683727694\")
Letâs look at the most common payment structures and considerations for influencer endorsements on social media.
\nThe standard format for an influencer marketing campaign is for the influencer to post about a brand or product on their own social media account. You might think that you own the rights to that post, since your brand or product is featured in it. However, itâs actually the content creator who owns it.
\nIf an influencer made a post on their account promoting your brand, you may have to pay a licensing fee to reuse their content on your own social media account. It may be possible to work out a deal that gives your brand ownership or unlimited use of the content.
\nThe most typical payment arrangement is known as âpay per post.â With these deals, you pay the influencer a certain amount of money for a set number of posts. The pricing for these deals can fluctuate based on a few factors, with the biggest one being the size of the influencerâs audience.
\nThe cost per post can also vary depending on what kind of post the influencer is creating. For example, a travel blogger with more than 100,000 followers charges $1,000 per âstaticâ (no video, no slideshow) post on Instagram, but only charges $200 for an Instagram Story post.
\nIf youâre not sure whether you can afford a traditional pay-per-post deal, a temporary post can be a cost-effective option. But you get what you pay forâsince Instagram Stories last for only 24 hours, odds are your campaign will have less visibility with your influencerâs audience.
\nWith link-in-bio deals, the influencer includes a link to your brandâs site in their social media bio, which stays pinned to the top of their account page, or on their profile, and can drive direct traffic to your site. You can set up your own custom link page to display in your social bio using Shopifyâs Linkpop.
\nThe pricing for these can be difficult to predict, but since a link in an influencerâs bio increases the visibility of your campaign even further, most influencers charge up to 40% more for that add-on.
\nIf youâre targeting an influencer with a large following on multiple social media platforms, you should also consider a multi-platform campaign, where the influencer shares one post on all their social media accounts. This can increase your visibility, and many influencers offer bundled pricing for a multi-platform campaign.
\nThis arrangement typically takes more effort to set up because not only do you have to find an influencer who you think is a good fit for your brand, you also have to find one who genuinely likes your products. Most larger influencers expect payment and will not accept in-kind-only offers.
\nAnother option is to pay the influencer a commission, which usually comes in the form of pay per sale, pay per lead, or pay per engagement. So instead of paying a flat fee for access to their entire audience, you only pay if their endorsement leads directly to a sale, a new referral, or engagementâwhatever metric youâve decided to use to measure success.
\nThe commission structure helps ensure that youâre only paying for results, but most influencers prefer not to be paid on a commission basis. The way they see it, why put in the effort to endorse a brand without a guarantee theyâll be compensated for their work?
\nFinding the right creator partners remains one of the biggest challenges for brands that run influencer marketing campaigns. As influencer marketing became more popular, companies and apps to help simplify the process continue to pop up.
\nMany offer additional features like affiliate program management, marketplaces, analytics, and relationship management software to run campaigns better.
\nHere are a few of the best platforms for finding influencers that are a good fit with your brand:
\n![\"Screengrab](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-shopify-collabs.jpg?v=1683727733\")
The platform offers a range of tools to help you build authentic relationships with creators. You can send them products and discounts right from your Shopify store and create unique discount codes and referral links to track sales driven by creators.
\nShopify Collabs allows you to find creators who align with your brand and invite them to apply to your affiliate program. Creators can also apply directly from your application page. With easy-to-understand analytics, you can track the performance of your affiliate program and keep tabs on the creators and products that are driving sales.
\n![\"Screengrab](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-grin.jpg?v=1683727767\")
Grin offers relationship management tools to nurture authentic relationships with influencers, as well as everything from reporting and analytics to content management and payments. It also integrates with Shopify to handle shipping logistics for sales made through influencers.
\n![\"Screengrab](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-upfluence.jpg?v=1683727789\")
Upfluence also helps you identify influential customers and fans. It collects data when a visitor is shopping on your site, analyzes their social data, then adds them as affiliates for your campaigns. Whether youâre a large or small business, Upfluence will help you run campaigns more efficiently and maximize your influencer marketing ROI.
\n![\"Screengrab](\"https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/influencer-marketing-creator-co.jpg?v=1683727808\")
Creator.co is a newer influencer marketplace with more than 500 million influencers to choose from. Itâs known as an automation software for young brands to connect with the right influencers online.
Creator.co offers a self-service option where you can find influencers manually. It also offers a âhands-freeâ option where you define your ideal influencer and campaign, then its automated system finds the best fit.
\nThereâs no doubt that influencer marketing can benefit your business. It can help find potential customers and influence purchasing decisions to drive sales for your business. Influencers can also build your brand image and make your products desirable to a target market.
\nWith this guide in hand, youâll be well on your way to growing your follower count across social networks, building traction for your brand, and growing your business online.
\nhttps://www.shopify.com/blog/influencer-marketing
\n\n
\n
\n
A new AI service for âparsingâ music tracks.
\nThe Mikrotakt neural engine can split any track into vocals, instrumentals, bass, drums, and other audio tracks.
\nIn addition, you can upscale vocal tracks to clean up the voice and adjust the pitch. This feature is ideal for musicians and content makers.
\nThe new Chinese model DeepSeek-V3 becomes a competitor to ChatGPT:
\n – registration requires only your email and password
\n – the neural is quite fast: answers are generated in seconds
\n – Thinking mode, where AI turns into an academic on any topic
\n – the model can read diagrams and generate any texts
\n – files of different sizes can be uploaded
\n – the neuron is good at working with code
\n – absolutely free
\nHailuo AI from China can clone any voice without censorship in a few seconds. Its library includes more than 300 voices in different languages and intonations. The model also allows for full customization: you can change the tone, speed, and timbre and add sound effects.
\nThe Chinese have released a worthy competitor to ChatGPT.
\nThe Qwen2.5-Plus chatbot provides accurate answers, can read documents and images, and is completely free of charge.
\nKrea allows rotating models in its âPhotoshopâ
\nKrea developers have come up with an incredible feature for their neuro-Photoshop: you can drop any object and edit its position in 3D space.
\nThe Upscayl neuron has received a 16x upscale, so now it can save even the most hopeless photos. The download is free.
\nThe Wegic neural network has become even cooler.
\nNow websites are generated in seconds, and all your edits can be made with simple queries.
\nYou just throw in a promo and you have a perfectly(?) designed website.
\nA working AI meme generator.
\nThe Brainrot neuron follows trends, selects relevant images, and produces memes that are even funny to read. And all this is free.
\nGoogle has released a top free guide to AI agents.
\nIt contains everything: basic knowledge, tools, architecture, training methods, and a step-by-step recipe for creating agents on LangChain and LangGraph.
\nIt is a cool service for learning languages with an AI interlocutor.
\nThe Lingocat neuron imitates the native speaker, gives feedback, and has tasks to improve skills. And all this is free of charge.
\nThe free neural from the Chinese outperforms(?) ChatGPT.
\nA new model called R1 has been released that outperforms the best version of ChatGPT. R1 is twice as powerful as the previous version and it has literally everything you need: programming, math, rewriting, and everything else. It’s worth noting that if you look at the graph of how it âoutperformsâ, it doesn’t encourage you to switch from OpenAI to the Chinese neural.
\nUniversal AI photo editor.
\nGenerating, replacing, or deleting details, styling, changing the background, and upscaling – and this is not the whole list of functions of the new and free Dzine neural.
\nPrompt generator for ChatGPT
\nPromptEngine works according to the official recommendations of OpenAI. The service also supports other language models: Claude, Gemini, LLama, and Mistral, which can be selected from a list.
\nOpenAI President showed a feature for the o1 model.
\nAccording to Greg Brockman, the o1 model works a bit differently than other types of AI, and to achieve high performance, you need to follow a certain plan in writing promos:
\n the goal, response format, warning, and context.
\n(The Anatomy of an o1 Prompt attached an example image)
\nChatGPT can now write first.
\nThe neuron will remind you of important things like a real assistant. For example, in the morning, it can provide a ready-made excuse for being late for work, and in the evening, a convincing explanation for a deadline shift.
\nSo far, only 10 regular tasks are available, but by the end of the week, all paid users will receive the new feature.
\nOpenAI offers free tokens for ChatGPT.
\nHowever, there is a caveat: in exchange, they ask for permission to use your promos to train models.
\nThe offer lasts until the end of February. Pro users can get up to 1 million tokens per day, and mini-version users can get up to 10 million!
\nTrump has canceled Biden’s decree on control over AI development.
\nThe document, signed in 2023, required developers to share test results with the government to reduce risks. However, Republicans insisted that this restricted freedom of speech and hindered progress. Now, AI development is unrestricted again.
\nChina will organize a competition between robots and humans
\nIn April, China will host the world’s first half marathon where people will compete with robots. The race will involve 12,000 runners and dozens of androids. Technology versus biology is a real race of the era.
\nAI tokens soar after the Stargate project announcement.
\nOn January 23, Trump announced a $500 billion investment from the private sector in the development of AI infrastructure in the United States. As part of this project, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle will create a joint venture called Stargate. Immediately after this announcement, the AI and big data token market showed significant growth:
\n – AI16Z and AI Rig Complex (ARC) grew by 30% per day
\n – GRIFFAIN and ZEREBRO tokens doubled in price
\n – MetamonkeyAi (MMAI) showed an increase of 152.25%
\n– FLock.io (FLOCK) – by 57%
\nThe smartest o3-mini model will be free!
\nSam Altman said that this neural will be able to solve complex problems in programming, math, and data analysis – all for free.
\nFeatures of o3-mini:
\n – advanced analytical abilities
\n – accelerated data processing speed
\n – ease of use for everyone
\n The release is planned for the near future.
\nOracle founder supports AI totalitarianism
\nBillionaire Larry Ellison stated that the total surveillance system with artificial intelligence based on cameras, drones, and police recorders will force citizens to âbehave in the best way possibleâ.
\nOracle has recently entered into a partnership with OpenAI and Softbank. Digital dystopia is becoming a reality.
\nThe first Chinese base for robot training was opened in Shanghai
\nThey will learn to help around the house, play football, and assemble cars.
\nThe data obtained in the process will be shared with various companies.
\nCurrently, the center has more than 100 androids and plans to expand to a thousand by 2027.
\nChatGPT can now create any kind of application – a new Canvas feature has been released that runs the code right in the browser.
\n – There are no limits to ideas – we invent and ask AI to draw up a detailed project description.
\n – Copy and paste the request into the chat with the neuron, but add the â/canvasâ command at the end.
\n – AI will produce a fully working application in React and HTML in a second – you can test it right away!
\n – There are no limits or restrictions – you can even clone YouTube in your browser.
\nThe feature is free.
\nTop 5 promos for working with any amount of information – the neural will squeeze out all the âwaterâ from the source and give you only concise, verified facts:
\n![\"\"](\"/static/f0c3865203f0eb84451f04f5379021f7/85b06/A-weekly-inspirational-newsletter-1080-x-1080-px-1920-x-800-px-3.png)
![\"\"](\"/static/11ec55989bfb8fbe249559f786b70c9c/85b06/AI-NEWS-2.png)