Brands and merchants are always looking for ways to turn everyday customers into brand ambassadors and evangelists.
Indonesia’s largest online marketplace, Tokopedia, has already created a way to convert customers to affiliates. Its ByMe program enables customers to add their favorite products to their social profiles and earn commissions for sales they generate, without having to join an official partner program.
For the growing number of aspiring social influencers, the ability to create their own brand sponsorships without friction is game changing. Combined with the livestreaming capabilities of Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat, anyone can create their own unboxing videos, get-ready-with-me, outfit-of-the-day, DIY tutorials, product reviews, and more to grow their following.
Opportunities for Influencer Marketing 2.0 - Tapping into the long tail of influence is a major opportunity for brands and merchants. Democratizing performance marketing and making it accessible to anyone makes dollars and sense
Naturally, the larger a customer’s social network, the more sales they can drive. The greatest traction will come from users who aspire to become larger influencers. Giving these creators the ability to self-sponsor and monetize content without working through traditional affiliate networks or influencer agencies also reduces your own influencer marketing overhead.
However, you will need the same checks and balances in place as any affiliate or performance marketing program. You need to track multi-touch and cross-device conversion and give influencers a dashboard to track their statistics. You must factor conversion windows (for example, 30 days) and reversals for returns. You may need a way to withhold taxes from cash payouts. And you must have mechanisms to identify and prevent abuse.
You need to determine what or how influencers will earn. Cash? Store credit? Loyalty points? Free product? Will you pay for audience reach, even if posts do not convert to a sale? Will videos earn more rewards than photos or text content?
Why microservices for Influencer Marketing 2.0? - Building your own innovative influencer platform can get complex. Data lives inside and outside your systems, and you need to orchestrate your own capabilities with social network APIs. You may even need to build new microservices to handle unique requirements. Microservices facilitate communication between every essential component, and provide the new functionality required to reward customers and creators for content and conversions.
Embrace the trend - Infosys Equinox can enable each of your influencers to have their own site – with data and digital assets from your CMS / DAM to ensure enhanced brand loyalty programs.
Download -the complete e-book to explore how Infosys Equinox, with its agile and adaptable microservices architecture, can enable your business to adapt to global consumer trends, new platforms, and novel business models, no matter what is on your digital roadmap.
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