Influencer gifting campaigns can build awareness and help brands get influencer content at scale. Here’s how to send products to influencers with a gifting campaign.
Feeling generous?
Product gifting campaigns are a proven way to earn authentic posts from influencers.
The concept is simple enough: your brand sends products to influencers in exchange for content.
For brands that consistently do influencer gifting right, the benefits include more UGC, word-of-mouth and much-needed visibility versus competitors. That only scratches the surface!
And the more creators you have posting on your behalf, the more you can scale these results.
That said, getting influencers to post about your product doesn't happen by default. If you're gifting influencers in-house, the process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
Having sent tens of thousands of products to influencers, we know the legwork firsthand. 😉
This post digs into how to run an influencer product gifting campaign step-by-step.
Here’s the deal: influencer gifting (AKA product seeding) is more than sending freebies to creators.
If you want to earn authentic content that’s worth promoting, you need to approach the process with care. The legwork involved is no joke, especially if you want more than a handful of posts.
Below we highlight how to launch an influencer product gifting campaign step-by-step.
Simple enough: you need to decide why you want to do influencer gifting in the first place.
Goals matter for all marketing campaigns and gifting promotions are no exception. With an end game in mind, you can tie the impact of gifting to actual business objectives. This might include:
Justifying the time commitment involved with gifting starts by setting specific goals. Doing so will make your job easier and highlight the value of your campaigns to stakeholders.
Below we dive deeper into the sample goals for influencer gifting above.
Gifting influencers your latest release is a prime way to introduce your products to the public.
Ideally, you should send out products a few weeks prior to your official release. Then, instruct influencers to not post about them until the actual launch date. This requires some coordination.
This approach gives your influencers enough time with the product to provide an honest and meaningful review. Extra time often translates to more thoughtful and creative content.
Trust us: your influencers will appreciate the flexibility.
Below is a post from a Statusphere creator highlighting how sending influencers products is super effective for supporting product launches.
Our platform matched Workman Publishing with parenting influencers on TikTok to support the launch of Be the Dragon prior to the book’s official release. By the time the book was available in stores, the brand already had high-performing all over TikTok. This one video earned 23,000+ views!
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Source: @sierra_zagarri
Eager to build worth-or-mouth or tap into a totally new market?
Gifting influencers can make both happen. Given the new Instagram algorithm, creator accounts almost always have way more reach than brand accounts. The same goes for TikTok, too.
Below is an example of how creators can earn greater social engagement than brands for the same piece of branded content. Note that the brand here has 25x (!!!) more followers than the creator at the time of posting. Meanwhile, the creator’s post earned 20x as many comments as the brand.
How's that for awareness? This speaks to the value of influencer gifting collaborations at scale. Imagine taking the reach and results from this post and expanding it across hundreds of influencers.
And while this may not be realistic in-house, this sort of scale is possible with the right influencer platform.
Pro-tip: Be sure to work out a copyright agreement to avoid any issues when reusing influencer content. Check out our post on repurposing user-generated content if you haven’t already! On that note, brands that earn content using Statusphere have rights management built directly in.
Fact: 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people over brands.
And so a positive review from an influencer can translate to awareness and sales.
Your most popular products are a safe bet in terms of what you should send creators. Some brands also use influencer gifting as a way to get more exposure to their hidden gems.
Granted the product is relevant to your audience and represents a strong value exchange, both approaches are fair game.
Oh, and note that product gifting can also support your in-store retail efforts.
In this gifting campaign, Andalou Naturals was looking to promote their retail partnership with Whole Foods. The brand sent product bundles to Instagram beauty influencers who geo-tagged Whole Foods in their posts. Their captions served as a call to action to purchase products in-store.
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Source: @kissmyash_
See how that works?
That said, convincing a creator to go through the process of picking up a product is a huge ask for a gifting campaign. This highlights one of the limits of running gifting campaigns totally in-house.
If retail support is your goal, consider how Statusphere's platform can help. Our software programmatically matches brands with creators from our community of vetted influencers. As a result, our creators understand and agree to the steps involved with promoting the products they're paired with. This includes in-store promotions.
Product choice can be make-or-break for gifting campaigns.
You should send products to influencers that they'll legitimately love and want to promote.
This seems obvious, right? But gifted products especially need to make an impact on influencers since there’s technically no obligation for creators to post.
Spoiler alert: irrelevant products get ignored all the time. Influencers have the right to be picky for the sake of their audience and personal brand.
If you want to delight your influencers, your gifted products should tick the boxes below.
No surprises here. After all, the product you send needs to be worth the time and effort that goes into making a post. Products with higher price points are literally more valuable to recipients, too. You can't expect five-star, high-effort content with a budget offering.
Pro-tip: Product bundles are a smart move as they give your influencers more options for their posts. For example, eyeliner featured in your beauty bundle might be perfect for an influencer’s audience while your nail polish isn’t.
Trust us: fulfillment is one of the most time-consuming and tedious steps involved with sending products to influencers without a third party (or platform!) to do the heavy lifting.
Stylish. Share-worthy. Perfect for piggybacking on social media trends.
That’s what we mean by having a “cool” factor.
Influencers want to be on top of the next big thing when it comes to trends and their latest purchases. Gifting products with a cool factor makes creating content seamless for them.
Let’s look at a cool gifted product in action. Check out how beauty influencer @chloeandcos shows off Lottie London’s new stamp-on eyeliner set she was gifted.
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Source: @chloeandcos
Drawing identical wings on both eyes is a challenge but this product solves that problem by creating the perfect wing in a single stamp. She shows off all the creative ways to use the product and then asks her audience which eyeliner they would try.
Because of the product’s cool factor, this feels more like an organic post than sponsored content. That’s the power of influencer gifting done right!
Pro-tip: if you gift a product like this to influencers, ask them to show themselves using the product and give a positive review. This will help illustrate to their followers why they need to try it.
Here are a few final points to consider when choosing products for a gifting campaign:
Pro-tip: Think about shipping a few small extras to encourage influencers to post about your product. This might include sample sizes of other products you offer or personalized packaging. For example, sending a handwritten thank-you note can help you stand out from the crowd. These small extras show appreciation to your influencer beyond your campaign.
Based on what we’ve seen firsthand, about a quarter of influencers ghost brands after receiving a product to promote.
Ouch! That’s why it's essential to pick the right influencers for your brand. Much like choosing products, you have to put serious thought into your outreach candidates.
You need to find people who will actually care about your product once it's in their hands. That means reaching out to influencers with an audience that reflects your own.
Think about it. Asking a yoga lifestyle blogger who doesn’t have children to post about cloth diapers doesn’t make much sense, right?
The better the match, the better your campaign’s performance and UGC.
This illustrates the impact of Statusphere's unique matchmaking algorithm. We pair brands and creators based on 250+ unique, first-party data points. Granular details make for stronger matches and yield better content as a result.
Check out this example from Curlsmith’s creator campaign through Statusphere. The brand focused on beauty micro-influencers on Instagram with content centered around curly and wavy hair.
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Source: @being_frugal
The micro-influencer campaign above generated 40,000+ likes, 4,400+ comments overall and 1,500+ pieces of unique content.
The takeaway? Relevant creator matchmaking goes hand in hand with strong results!
Without matchmaking, finding influencers to send products to is a full-time job by itself. This is especially true if you want to get products into the hands of more than just a few creators.
That said, here are some considerations for a small-scale gifting campaign:
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Source: @taytenlanae
Note: Brands streamline fulfillment by using an influencer marketing platform like Statusphere. We provide a creator-first fulfillment experience with beautiful packaging, customized creator instructions and timely updates on the status of the products our creators receive.
Assuming that your products are in the influencers’ hands, you need to make sure all of the work you're done above results in actual content.
After all, that’s the whole point of a product gifting campaign.
Source: @allthings_giselle
If you don’t hear from your influencers immediately, you might get nervous. That's understandable. Don't be surprised if you need to follow up more than once.
Here are some tips for following up without being too clingy or aggressive:
But let’s say your influencer has gone silent even after following up multiple times.
The reality? It happens. A lot.
With no contract or legal obligations, there are no guarantees that influencers will post. This is an obvious downside of running an influencer gifting campaign yourself or using an influence marketing platform that doesn't guarantee content. That said, if you're focused more on scale and getting products into creators' hands versus guaranteed content, pure product seeding can work.
Before you get knee-deep into a gifting campaign, let’s quickly talk about time.
By now you’ve probably gathered that the time required to do product gifting is no joke.
We’ve sent countless products to influencers ourselves even prior to building Statusphere's platform. Also, we've spoken with 100s of brands who’ve done it the DIY way with poor results.
Here’s a breakdown of the average time required to run an influencer gifting campaign:
And so you’re looking at 70+ hours from your schedule (and that’s being generous) for a handful of posts that aren't even guaranteed. Even if your goal is pure awareness and you're not concerned about hitting a specific content threshold, that's still massively inefficient.
With these steps in mind, you know exactly what to expect to run an influencer gifting campaign.
The effort and attention to detail involved represents a lot of time, not to mention risk given that content via gifting campaigns isn't guaranteed.
That said, some brands are understandably eager to earn as much authentic branded content as possible. If you're looking for a time-efficient way to earn authentic posts from influencers at scale, Statusphere's platform can help.
Our platform was built specifically to eliminate and streamline the most intensive steps of getting products into influencers' hands. This includes matchmaking, fulfillment, analytics and content rights management. We automatically match brands with creators using 250+ first-party data points, requiring no outreach or vetting on your end.
Unlike influencer gifting campaigns done in-house or with a database, we actually guarantee content since we only send products to our vetted community of creators. We've already generated 75,000+ pieces of authentic content for 400+ brands.
(And if your brand is interested in pure product seeding, our platform can help there as well!)
Want to learn more about how our influencer gifting platform works? Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can maximize your influencer marketing ROI with guaranteed content at scale.
This article was first published in February 2019. It was last updated August 1, 2024.
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