‘Is this good?’: Your definitive guide to Product Seeding in 3 easy steps

Posted on August 12, 2020

Wearisma’s new series ‘Is this good?’ will provide you with the key metrics to help you understand how to accurately measure the effectiveness of your Influencer Marketing activities and to check whether, well…if it’s good.

In the first instalment of the new series we gave insight into ‘what constitutes a good Engagement Rate?’. This week, we’re shifting our focus to product seeding or ‘gifting’ and answering the question ‘what is the right way to do product-seeding?’. Well, the answer lies in measuring performance. To effectively conduct product seeding you must have an acute awareness of who is performing well for your brand. Wearisma’s Activity Reports can make this task simple, telling you all you need to know about the performance of all your influencers! But, before we delve into that we’ll quickly go over what product seeding actually is, and why it’s good when done right.

So, what is product seeding and why is it good?

Product seeding is when a brand gifts products to influencers in the hopes they will create content featuring said products. It’s a great way to increase brand awareness and generate potential sales. Moreover, it can be considerably cheaper and less time consuming than other influencer marketing strategies such as event collaborations, and paid campaigns.

Source: Wearisma Activity Reports

How to do it right? – 3 Simple Steps to Product Seeding

Step 1: Pick the right influencers! (Based on 3 Crucial Questions)

Picking the right influencers is essential in ensuring your product seeding campaign produces the best results. You must answer the following 3 questions when selecting your influencers to make sure you’re picking the right ones. 

Question 1: Does this influencer match your brands DNA?

One way to build authenticity is to make sure that the influencer you choose to represent your brand closely align with your brands DNA. How do check this? First, use an influencer evaluation tool to do a qualitative analysis of their previous content. Does the look and feel of their content relate to your brand? Do they talk about similar brands in your industry? Have they created organic content featuring your brand before? Engaging in influencer selection with these questions in mind will enable you to select a range of brand advocates who are genuinely interested in your brand and who will create gifted content that appears authentic. 

Qualitatively assess if their content is on-brand.

Source: Wearisma Platform

Question 2: How has this influencer performed overtime?

The next step is to measure the performance of your chosen influencer to determine if they are achieving good metrics. Using an intelligent influencer evaluation tool will help you answer this question by showing you; if their Engagement Rate and Media Value are consistently higher than the average for their content category, for posts featuring your brand, similar brands and #gifted content in general. If these metrics are good, this heightens the chance that their audience will engage positively with #gifted content from your product-seeding activity, making them a perfect candidate.

@erikakamano average ER increased from 4.8% to 5.9% for sponsored and gifted posts. 

Source: Wearisma Platform

Question 3: Does your influencer’s audience match your target market?

Understanding the influencer’s audience is important. You must pick an influencer whose audience matches your target market. For example, if an influencer’s audience is largely based in a country that your product doesn’t ship to or whose interests are not aligned with your product category, chances are you won’t see a high ROI.

Source: Wearisma activity report

Now that you’ve selected the right influencers and have commenced seeding you have to measure the performance of your activity

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Step 2. Track and Measure the performance of your chosen influencers 

Product seeding is an ongoing process and should be monitored regularly to achieve the desired results. To do this you need to track and measure the performance of the influencers you have gifted. Tracking helps a brand determine which influencers are performing well and which are not. Manually tracking is a long and arduous task which is why we suggest that you…

Rely on Activity Reports to help you automatically track the performance of your product seeding 

Wearisma’s activity reports provide a keen insight into the performance of all the influencers in your product-seeding campaign, featuring the following metrics and more:

• Average Engagement Rate 
• Total engagement
• Number of mentions
• Number of followers
• Media Value

Our campaign summary page allows you to track the performance of your campaign by platform (Instagram (including automatic stories tracking), Twitter, YouTube, and Weibo) using all key metrics.

Source: Wearisma activity report

With these metrics, you can quickly identify which platforms are contributing the most value to your campaign, helping you determine which platforms you may want to shift your focus to in future product seeding activities.

See a detailed overview of your campaign 

Finally, our statistics page provides you with an easy overview of your campaign’s total performance, providing data on;

• Total no. of influencers engaged
• Total no. of followers
• Total no. of engagements
• Total no. of content produced by influencers
• Average ER
• Total no. of mentions

Also, our reports give you insight into the performance (covering all metrics) of each piece of content created by your influencers. These metrics will help you quantify the value your influencers are bringing to your campaign. It will also help you progress to the final step…

Step 3. Refine and Repeat

Now you how your influencers are performing you must use this data to decide who you wish to continue using in your campaign and those you wish to remove. Is one influencer posting significantly less content featuring your products than others, is one influencer achieving a lower rate of Engagements than the others? Use insights to replace influencers who are not performing well for your brand or not mentioning your brand enough with new influencers who are mentioning your brand organically.

Product-seeding should be consistently evaluated to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your investment. Decisions that are backed by intelligent insights are the key to successful product seeding!

With these 3 steps, you can accurately track the performance of your campaigns, allowing you to maximize the ROI of your product seeding strategy. With the help of Wearisma, one cosmetic brand identified and rooted out 25% of their influencers who were not posting seeded products. The results? Engagement in related content tripled in 6 months!

Do you want to achieve similar results? Let us help you! Contact a member of our team to discover how our Activity Reports can help you maximize the ROI  of your product-seeding campaigns.

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