The Complete Guide to Mastering Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce Brands

We launched our first ecommerce store with a product my sister made – a satin-lined cap, on September 1st, 2014. When we started, we were on Etsy and had just completed our website using a graphic designer. We were experimenting with several different types of marketing – Facebook ads, Etsy ads, Google ads, had hired an internet marketing firm to do our SEO/SEM, and were going to trade shows to get word of mouth. None of these things worked well for us. The one strategy that did work was influencer marketing.

Coinciding with our WooCommerce store’s launch (we eventually moved to Shopify) at the beginning of September, we contacted 32 YouTube personalities who had subscriber bases of 250k or higher, and asked them if they’d be interested in doing a review of our new product. It included who we are, what our solution was, and a link to a YouTube video message from my sister, the founder, asking them “face to face” for help reaching their audience that we felt would benefit from our product. (let me know if you’d like a copy of that initial email)

From September to October we didn’t hear anything back, which is why I had assumed the outreach hadn’t worked as well as the ads and other marketing efforts, and by mid-October only three of the 32 influencers that we emailed had even replied and only 1 actually made a video. The results were dramatic – her one video at the end of October built our business.

It drove more than 10k visitors to our store in the next 2 weeks and we sold out of all 1k units of our production run. It took us 4 weeks to replenish inventory and in that time we had 350 backorders from that video and another she did following. I’m certain that if we would have had more than 1k units in our MVP we would have converted more of those 10k visitors who came purely to buy, rather than having to put out a “sold out” shingle all the way through Cyber Monday!

We quit all other forms of advertising and marketing to focus on YouTube influencers and in that time we had 10 videos produced and sold over $60k worth of product in 2.5 months.

We then went on to grow that brand to multiple 7 figures when we added paid ads, using our influencer content, and catapulted the brand to the stratosphere.

That's been my experience, and I've systemized the process and repeated it with many other brands. Now, I've put that process into a course to offer to other entrepreneurs, like yourself, so you can implement the same strategies in your business.

Here's the thing about me: I don't just manage marketing, I manage operations. I'm not the person who will sell you on all the front-end hype, but leave you with a back-end mess. From product development to order fulfillment, I have experience managing the full life-cycle of ecommerce operations.

I'll teach you how to develop a reliable strategy to position your brand for long-term growth, not just a few tactics that will only work in the short-term.