When you think of the top marketing strategies, one of the first things you think of is probably endorsements from influencers or celebrities.
Influencer marketing is especially popular with dropshipping sites. At a glance, you might be thinking, “what’s not to love?”
By using an influencer, you’re tapping into their follower base that could be in the thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions (in some cases). When you look at it that way, it can be easy to see why so many dropship sites spring at the opportunity of getting an influencer on board.
But what if we were to tell you that’s not a great way to build your online assets?
In this post, we’re going to give you 3 reasons why influencer marketing for Shopify dropshipping doesn’t work. We’ll also tell you what you should be doing instead.
Watch the video below or keep reading for the full guide…
Reason #1: It’s Not Scalable
The first problem with influencer marketing is that there’s a limited number of good influencers that are applicable to your business.
As an illustration, consider yoga pants. If you’re dropshipping yoga pants, there’s only a certain amount of yoga influencers out there that are relevant to your product.
But that pool of possibilities gets even shallower. Among those yoga influencers, some will be too big for you to reach out to, and some will be too small to waste your time with.
It doesn’t end there. From the already narrowed number of influencers you could possibly contact, it’s likely that only some of them will agree to work with you.
In other words, your options for influencers will be a lot more limited than you probably expected initially.
If you’re curious on whether dropshipping or affiliate marketing is easiest for beginners, you can see our comparison right here.
Reason #2: It’s Not Consistent
Imagine this: you spend all this time reaching out to influencers. One week, you might get ten, the next week you might get only three, and the week after you might get none.
At any rate, you’re constantly waiting on these other people, and for what? A possible bump in sales that won’t last forever.
You have to go through so many steps just to get a hold of an influencer who agrees to work with you. For instance, you may need to send them a free product and work with them on scheduling their post.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Once you’ve done that, it’s not over, because you’ll need to maintain a relationship with that influencer.
In all honestly, it’s just a hassle to manage.
Read Also: Dropshipping vs FBA
Reason #3: You’re Not Building an Asset
Influencer marketing works best when you’re trying to get your brand some exposure. If you’re trying to establish yourself as an independent brand with a legitimate product of your own, it makes sense to work with influencers.
However, if your product is just a generic one you’re using to make money online, influencer marketing is less sensible. This post is directed at those people: anyone who has Shopify stores or is selling Aliexpress products.
Using influencer marketing isn’t the most direct way to turning your stores into real assets. With influencers, the well can and will run dry eventually.
Like we mentioned previously, you have to maintain a good relationship with each influencer. You have to keep coming up with new ways to use them in promoting your products.
To illustrate our point, we’ll tell you a quick real story.
The reason we picked on yoga pants earlier is that someone we knew actually did that. They were selling yoga pants, and they chose to collaborate with yoga influencers.
So they reached out and found that these influencers would oftentimes flake out.
Sometimes, this store would even send them free products, and then nothing would happen afterward. The influencer wouldn’t post anything about the product they got for free.
That’s not to say that influencers are always so unreliable. But the thing is, unlike running an ad yourself, you can’t always assume things will be completed by the time you need them to be.
See Also: Is Buying a Shopify Store Worth it? Dropshipping Store Case Study
Is There a Way to Incorporate Influencer Marketing into Your Dropshipping Site?
We know we just spent all this time telling you that influencer marketing sucks. That’s the title of this article, after all.
But there is actually one way you can use it to build your assets. That way is using influencer marketing to strengthen up your email list.
The reason for that is, you can spend all this time on a campaign with one influencer to boost your sales…but that’s only temporary. Using them instead to bolster your email list makes it possible for you to get repeat customers by contacting them down the road.
This is really the only way we could recommend using influencer marketing in Shopify dropshipping.
Running a Shopify dropship store can be really complicated. If you’re concerned about the legality, you can take a look at our post: Is Dropshipping Legal?
What You Should Do Instead of Influencer Marketing
So if influencer marketing sucks, what should you be doing instead? We’re glad you asked.
You’ll make things way easier for yourself if you dropship high-ticket items from brands in the US that already have an established reputation. Think about it: no need to work on getting a brand name out there, because the brand itself will have already done that leg work for you.
There are literally thousands of brands to choose from that sell luxury and expensive items. The sky is the limit here.
Once you’ve chosen a brand to work with, what you need to do is start running Google ads. Google ads are efficient, consistent, and can be run long-term, as opposed to ads for Facebook which tend to only last for a short time.
You’ll get more reliable results doing this than if you depended on influencer marketing.
See Also: Dropshipping Basics: 5 Easy Steps to Make $10,000 Profit a Month
Wrap Up
Here’s our conclusion: even though it’s popular, influencer marketing isn’t the best method for your Shopify dropshipping store.
For one thing, you won’t have many viable influencers to choose from once you eliminate those who are too big to answer you, those who are too small to bother with, and those who will agree to work with you.
For another thing, it’s just not consistent. You’ll put all this time trying to get in contact with multiple influencers, and the boost in sales they give you will be only temporary.
Plus, you can’t guarantee any influencer you get in touch with will actually post about your product.
Leveraging the reputations of high-ticket items from dependable brands with a track record is the way to go. You can learn even more about our Shopify strategies in our Build Assets Online course.
If you’d like to take a peek at some our strategies at no cost, take a look at our Online Assets Playbook..