The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging Product Seeding in Your Influencer Strategy
Product seeding is a powerful marketing tactic that businesses can use to promote their products through influencer campaigns. Done right, providing the right influencers with free products can give your brand ongoing content and social proof to promote over and over again. Not to mention getting your brand in front of thousands of new potential customers.
The Benefits of Product Seeding
Obtain Authentic Endorsements: When influencers share their experience with the product, they provide authentic endorsements that can resonate with their followers and encourage them to try the product.
Identify Influential Fans: By providing products to influencers, businesses can identify influential fans who are passionate about the product and can potentially become brand ambassadors.
Reach New Audiences: Product seeding can help businesses reach new audiences that they may not have otherwise been able to connect with.
Generate Social Buzz: Influencers can share their experience with the product on their social media platforms, creating social buzz and generating interest in the product.
How to Create a Successful Product Seeding Campaign
Define Your Goals: Before launching a product seeding campaign, businesses need to define their goals. They should identify their target audience, determine the message they want to convey, and decide what metrics they will use to measure success.
Choosing the Right Influencers: It is essential to choose the right influencers for a product seeding campaign. Businesses should identify influencers whose followers align with their target audience and whose values align with their brand. Influencers with high engagement rates and authenticity are more likely to generate social buzz and authentic endorsements.
Develop a Creative and Engaging Product Seeding Package: To capture the attention of influencers, businesses need to develop a creative and engaging product seeding package. The package should be creative, made for content and where possible, have a low carbon footprint as you don’t want backlash. Be sure to include a personal note or a letter from the company, detailed product information, and a call-to-action. It is crucial to make it clear that there are no strings attached, and influencers are not required to post about the product.
Tracking Content and Results: Tracking content is crucial to determine the effectiveness of the product seeding campaign. Noting much of the earned content will likely be ephemeral like Instagram Stories, this may manually involve daily check-ups on the stories and feeds of the influencers however ideally you use software / have permissions to track content. Noting that resulting content is more often than going to be earned, you also may not be able to obtain actual insights from the influencer so be familiar with platform ‘true reach’ benchmarks to help you forecast reach. Where possible you can also use tracking links and unique discount codes, to track how many people clicked on the link or used the code to make a purchase. Analysing this data can help you determine which influencers had the most significant impact, which products were the most popular, and what changes they need to make in their future campaigns.
For the right businesses and by following the steps outlined above, product seeding to influencers can really level up your influencer marketing efforts, and of course – if you think this sounds right for your business, get in touch to see how we can efficiently execute successful seeding campaigns at scale.
Good luck.
