Brands are able to utilize various marketing methods to expand the awareness and reach of their products. Influencer marketing has brought about a method known as product seeding, which gives brands the opportunity to work with influencers to create and market content featuring their products. From a marketing perspective, it is important for a brand to build relationships with influencers to gain authentic marketing content.

What is Influencer Product Seeding?

Product seeding refers to a marketing strategy where a brand gives a product to an influencer or content creator to use, in order to facilitate the creation of content featuring the product.

Compared to traditional marketing where a brand pays a creator to make a post featuring a product, a influecner product seeding brand has more control over the message presented to the audience. A brand will look to identify a creator that aligns to their target audience.

Identifying the Appropriate Creators

Product seeding relies on the identification of the appropriate creator. Some factors to evaluate when considering a creator includes their audience’s level of engagement, the overall quality of the creator’s content, and the creator’s previous sponsorships.

Marketing Platforms to the Rescue

There are several marketing platforms that allow users to search and evaluate creators. Many of these platforms enable users to generate a list of creators that is tailored to a product seeding campaign.

Amazon’s Case

Amazon’s influencer marketing campaign would be able to utilize product seeding, as creators would be able to evaluate and experience a product prior to marketing it.

To create successful product partnerships, brands can look to creators whose audiences intersect with their target market. Project management systems can assist with organizing communication with creators and delivering product shipments.

 Product Seeding with Shopify

The Shopify platform also allows for product seeding. Creative content (ex. reviews, demonstrations, tutorials, etc.) can be generated by creators through product shipments.

In order for the partnership to feel meaningful to the creator and relevant to their audience, product shipments should be ordered based on the content the creator typically generates.

Using an Influencer CRM

An influencer CRM can also be beneficial in organizing and managing data collected during a product seeding campaign.

Through the influencer CRM, marketing teams can document and store data relating to creators (contact information, campaign history, communications, and product shipments.)

Long-Term Creator Partnerships

Product seeding campaigns, combined with an influencer CRM, can assist in forming and fostering long-term partnerships with creators.

A suite of marketing software can also assist with campaign management and organization.

Marketers using AI for product seeding can identify content creators using attributes including the subject matter of their content, the interests of their audience, and their interaction with the audience. Using AI for product seeding can save marketers time by automatically identifying relevant content creators.

 Measuring Results of Product Seeding

Brands are able to measure the results of product seeding by assessing the performance of the content created as part of the product seeding program. Examples of results to measure may include the interactions (e.g. likes, comments, shares) of the content, the reach of the content, the clicks the content receives, and conversions. In addition, product seeding results may include the responses of the content creators, and the results of other programs tied to the product.

 Results of a product seeding program provide Brands the opportunity to assess what product content received the best response of the audience. Results may also inform what content is most appropriate to use in a program involving influencers.

Product seeding programs serve to introduce a product to potential audience members, and may help establish a relationship with a content creator. In combination with other marketing and CRM tools, product seeding may help establish a system for marketing a product with influencers.