The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing for Perfume Brands
If you work for a perfume brand and are wondering what is going on with all of these fragrance influencers and how can my business utilize them effectively, you have come to the right place. We are going to demystify everything from start to finish on running profitable influencer campaigns.
How does influencer marketing fit into the perfume buyer journey
How to select what influencers your brand should work with
Effective outreach strategies
Negotiating contracts
What you can do after they post the video
Modern Perfume Advertising Campaigns Require Influencer Marketing
We have talked with quite a few perfume brands that think influencer marketing is a scam. Or low-brow. It doesn’t honor perfumery and the juice should be the selling point.
Lose this idea.
Maybe your perfume brand ran a couple of unprofitable influencer campaigns and decided to write off the entire thing. Don’t continue to make this mistake. While brand marketing is the best way to grow a perfume brand, influencer marketing still needs to be a priority in any perfume advertising strategy.
Let’s zoom out for a minute. It is clear that brands are spending a lot of money on influencer marketing across all product categories. in 2025, $9.3 billion dollars are expected to be spent on influencer marketing. Advertising spend for this category is rising 14.2% YoY. Brands would not be spending this kind of money if they were not seeing a return. Some brands are clearly able to make influencer marketing profitable.
How Does Influencer Marketing Fit Into the Buyer Journey?
The buyer journey for perfume is different for everyone, however, we can use aggregate data to map out the most common buyers journey. The majority of time spent on the internet is spent on social media platforms, to the tune of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on average. People are also watching much less tv. The decrease in tv viewership is especially pronounced among younger generations. When we analyze tv viewership, almost half of tv watchers are NOT watching linear tv with commercials, they are watching tv through a streaming service with no ads.
It boils down to, people are spending much more time on social media and much less time watching tv. And a large percentage of the people watching tv are specifically paying to not see ads.
We have an article dedicated to the perfume buyer journey with a more detailed breakdown here.
How Does the Buyer’s Journey Translate to Marketing?
If your perfume brand wants to be seen by more people you have to go where the attention is. And the attention is on social media platforms. Especially for younger people. Younger people also spend more money on perfume. Go where they are.
I hope the point has been made that social media is where perfume brands need to be. The next question is, how do perfume brands want to raise awareness on social media? There are only 4 scalable ways to raise awareness:
Buy ads
Brand collaborations
Influencer marketing
Influencers Get Higher Quality CPM’s
A CPM stands for ‘Cost Per Thousand’ and represents the cost it takes for 1000 people to see an ad. CPM can be used in the context of organic posts as well. Perfume brands need to be optimizing for the CPM metric. When you optimize for lower-cost CPM’s, you are essentially optimizing for brand awareness. Any performance marketer will tell you that the KPI for a brand awareness campaign is CPM.
Please read our article that covers why CPM’s are so important for perfume brands and the end of this article covers why brand awareness is a key metric for perfume brand advertising campaigns.
Influencers CPM’s are great because, unlike paid ads that get impressions from a targeted random sample of people, influencers’ videos get impressions on their posts from an audience who they have built trust with. The benefit of this is pretty self-evident.
Influencers publishing content organically are not bound by the linear relationship between costs and CPM’s that you see with paid ads. For example, when you promote a paid ad, in order to reach more people you have to pay more money. There is no way around this. With organic content, if the video get’s really good engagement, the social media algorithms will promote the content to more people at no additional cost to you.
Unlike paid ads, which will not show up on your account profile, when an influencer publishes a video, that video stays on their account profile. This has 3 big benefits. The video will continue to get views. The video will continue to provide social proof. If the video has well-researched keywords in the title and description, the video will appear in search results for relevant in-platform search queries.
Fragrance influencers have earned the trust of their followers by sharing their recommendations and thoughtful reviews. This trust stems from a perception of fragrance influencers as having a level of domain expertise. Influencer Marketing Hub found that 61% of consumers are more likely to trust influencers’ recommendations, only 38% of consumer trust brand-made content.
How to Select a Fragrance Influencer
The most difficult aspect of influencer marketing is finding the right influencers to work with. The biggest factor in whether or not your influencer campaigns will be successful is based on finding the right influencers. Influencer marketing is very front-loaded in terms of where marketing teams should be spending their time and efort. Chosing the right influencers is a process that involves more than just finding people who align with your perfume brand. The process involves going beyond looking for influencers who have an audience that overlaps with your brand’s target audience.
Awareness vs Targeting Influencers with More Trust Signals
Some fragrance influencers are known for their antics and on-screen personality. Some fragrance influencers are known for their in-depth perfume reviews and knowledge of perfumery. The followers of each type of these influencers will be different. If your brand’s goal is to reach as many people as possible, and the focus is less on the level of analysis of the perfume, then selecting an influencer will be more based on their reach and what they charge.
If your goal is to reach a more niche audience who is more concerned with the scent composition and getting more in-depth reviews then your focus in finding influencers will be based on the influencer’s previous content and their average view duration.
Analyzing Their Audience
Any prospective influencer that you want to work with will gladly give you their audience metrics analysis. If they don’t, do not work with hem. These are the 1st party data points you should be considering:
Geographic distribution: What is the geographic distribution of the influencer’s audience, specifically what percentages of their followers by country and city.
Age and gender demographics: What is the audience’s age and gender in percentages.
Reach metrics: For Reels, and Youtube videos, ask for the influencers reach data for the last 30 days on these platforms to get a better understanding of the influencer’s content engagement in a typical month. For Instagram stories and TikTok, request reach data for the last 10-15 days to gauge their current engagement levels.
Engagement data: How many people interact with the influencer’s content with average likes, comments, shares, and any other relevant engagement data. The goal is to understand the percentage of their audience who engage with their content.
Conversion metrics: If the influencer has run similar campaigns in the past, how effective are they at driving sales and other relevant conversion events like email sign-ups.
Average View Duration: More on this later.
Subjective Factors of the Influencer and What it Indicates About Their Audience
These insights are not wrapped up so nicely in objective data points, however, they are important nonetheless in choosing influencers. Let’s look at 2 examples:
Influencer A: The influencer can go into great depth about the notes of a perfume. Most of their videos are long, in-depth analysis of a perfume. The influencer provides thoughtful comparisons to other perfumes. The emphasis of the video is on the quality of the review. This influencer may even have a background in perfumery. The production quality of the video content is likely average, but that is ok because the emphasis is on the quality of information.
What can we infer about Influencer A’s audience?
These people want content from knowledgeable people. You will likely see a higher ‘Average View Duration’ for this type of influencer. They are more likely to review more niche perfume brands. Since this type of influencer prioritizes the expertise and depth of the perfume review, they will likely have more trust from their audience. Since their followers likely have more trust in the influencer and are interested in more detailed reviews — it is fair to say that this audience will be more likely to buy based on this influencers recommendation.
Influencer B: The influencer is charismatic. The videos are well-edited and will generally have a high production value. This influencer will often be good at providing the context of when to wear this perfume, however, their analysis of the perfume is rarely in-depth. This influencer tends to pepper in more personal details about their life which is good for connecting with their audience. There is more emphasis on emotions within the context of the perfume. These influencers tend to sound more ‘salesy’.
What can we infer about Influencer B’s audience?
These people are more focused on their connection to the influencer than the perfume being discussed. While these followers certainly enjoy fragrances, they are less concerned with the specifics of the composition of the scent. They are attracted to influencers who can provide a broader emotive context for the perfume.
Analysis
Many brands look at influencer marketing through the lens of a branding perspective when they should be looking at influencer marketing through a performance marketing perspective — especially if they want to run profitable influencer campaigns. Broadly speaking, the two types of influencers both have their place in your marketing campaign. Choosing more Influencer A (from the example above) to be a part of your campaign is good if you want to optimize for building trust with your brand. Influencer A types may also help potential customers who are lower in the sales funnel. Hiring Influencer B types for your campaign is good if you are trying to optimize for social proof and brand awareness. Most of the fragrance influencers with the largest audiences fall into category B. From a strictly performance marketing perspective, you will likely get the most reach for the lowest cost with Type B Influencers. Low CPMs are what drive perfume advertising campaigns.
Both influencer types have built trust with their audience in different ways. When selecting influencers, you shouldn’t be worried so much about the influencers themselves, instead, the focus should be on the audience they attract. The influencer has their audience because the influencer’s style resonates with a certain type of person. Your job is to understand these intangible audience signals, that aren’t easily conveyed through 1st party data points.
If the influencer dresses a certain way, are they attracting a certain demographic?
If the influencer speaks a certain way, what type of person are they attracting?
Does the influencer only review $300 bottles of perfume? What does this convey about their audience?
Aligning Your Brand with the Influencer’s Previous Content
The goal is to get the closest alignment between your perfume and the audience of the specific influencer. For this reason, analyzing the history of perfumes that have been reviewed by the influencer will help you to better understand their audience.
There are two important classifications to make:
What is the percentage of reviews for designer fragrances, niche fragrances, and luxury niche fragrances? Your brand should match the classification of the perfumes often reviewed by the influencer. In other words, if the influencer only reviews designer scents and you represent a small niche house, you should not prioritize working with that influencer.
What is the average price point of the perfumes that the influencer reviews? This will give a clear indication of what the influencer’s audience is interested in. You want your perfume to be within the average price range of other perfumes reviewed by the influencer.
Average View Duration: The Most Important Performance Metric to Look For
The pricing of an influencer to review your perfume is largely based on their reach and audience size. Both of these metrics are heavily correlated, however, the highest leverage metric for truly raising brand awareness and getting sales is Average View Duration (AVD) — which indicates what percentage of the total video the audience is watching. It is the best proxy for audience engagement. If your goal is to get people to your website to buy your perfume, they need to hear the influencer talk about the perfume and the sale or discount code. They need to hear the influencer mention the link to the site in their bio. A post’s ‘reach’ and ‘view count’ only tell 20% of the story.
Instagram counts a view when a user watches the video for 3 seconds. TikTok counts a view when a user watches the video for 1 second, and for longer videos, 3 seconds. For this reason, a perfume brand should not be as concerned about an influencer’s reach and video views. Video views mean very little if the user isn’t sticking around to watch any of the video content.
When you are choosing influencers and they provide you with their historical account data, you need to be prioritizing this metric above all else. Views, impressions, reach, none of that means anything if people aren’t actually watching the influencer’s content. It is helpful to think of AVD as a proxy for the level of connection people feel toward the influencer.
It should also be noted that many of an influencer’s metrics are gameable. Influencers can buy followers, reach, likes, and shares. And why wouldn’t some influencers fake their metrics when their salary is directly related to these metrics? Many brands use software and ‘the eye test’ to see if an influencer’s engagement is real. This does not always work. There are some sophisticated operations that make it almost undetectable, whether an influencers engagement is real or not.
The one metric that is very hard to cheat: Average View Duration. It turns out that bots don’t want to stick around for a breakdown of Byredo’s newest release.
Downsides of Fragrance Influencers
Authenticity is crucial for influencers. Viewers can usually tell when an endorsement isn’t genuine. Since perfume is so subjective, it is hard to refute an influencer who ‘likes’ a particular scent. This results in influencers who love every perfume that they review, which has led to bold claims, exaggerations, and misleading perfume comparisons.
Many people can discern the influencers that fall into this category. The influencer feels entirely bought and paid for. This might be fine for the influencer’s loyal audience, but for niche perfume enthusiasts, the lack of honest reviews is easily detectable and discrediting to that influencer. More on this later in this post.
What Most Brands Don’t Understand About Influencer Campaigns
Influencer campaigns are by default, a top-of-funnel advertising strategy to raise brand awareness. Brands obviously want to get sales when working with influencers, but the primary KPI for the campaigns should be the CPM and overall reach of the posts. This is especially true with perfume influencer campaigns. The average price of something sold on TikTok Shop is $23 and the Average Cart Value is $42. It is not common for consumers to make abrupt $90 purchases, regardless of how much urgency is included in the ad or influencer campaign. It is understandable that someone working for a perfume brand is reading this and vehemently disagreeing with the idea that CPM is the KPI to measure for, not sales. Obviously sales are the most important factor in the health of a brand, the point being made is that sales are a byproduct of brand awareness.
Let’s illustrate this with one clear example:
You pay $550 to Influencer A. They generate 72,000 views with a high AVD and 46 attributable sales.
You pay $550 to Influencer B. They generate 29,000 views with an average AVD and 55 attributable sales.
If you are basing the campaign strictly on attributable sales generated then Influencer B is the influencer you want to work with again. However, Influencer A has reached 43,000 more viewers who also watched more of the video. We cannot discount this brand awareness because it doesn’t directly correlate to revenue. Maybe these 43,000 people don’t buy immediately, but when they do decide to buy a new perfume 2 months from now, they are aware of your brand. It is difficult to quantify how integral that perfume review was to a consumer’s buyer journey. Because attribution data can often times be unreliable, other influencer performance metrics need to be considered.
It is very hard to get objective data on the percentage of revenue attributable to an influencer from discount codes as many people simply don’t use the codes that an influencer provides in the video description. For social media platforms that allow active links in video descriptions, tracking sales through the link with a URL parameter is possible — but comes with its own set of limitations. In aggregate, an incrementality test is one of the best ways to attribute revenue earned specifically from influencer marketing.
When vetting influencers it is important to see how many sales they have driven from their videos, however, influencers only have control over driving brand impressions (and this is how they want to be paid - more on this later). As we already discussed above, influencers also get higher quality impressions than any paid ad can get. This should be the basis of their contract negotiations.
A mistake that we see often with brands negotiating contracts with influencers is wanting to only pay the influencer based on the sales they can bring in. This is a quick way to let the influencer know that you have no experience in influencer marketing and are wasting their time. Influencers are not affiliates.
Any influencer contract will include a flat fee.
Why?
Let’s look at it from the influencer’s perspective.
They are putting their reputation and credibility on the line to review (or endorse) your product
They are taking the same amount of time to make the video
They have no control over how well your website can convert viewers to sales
They are still generating impressions for your brand, even if nobody converts
You don’t get to NOT pay Google for running ads, even when nobody buys.
Influencer Briefing
Sending out ‘briefs’ to prospective influencers can help save both parties time by setting a baseline level of expectations for the collaboration. Much like a ‘media kit’ saves influencers time by providing an outline of their services, briefs are similar. Brands should never send briefs as their first message to prospective influencers. Once negotiation has started, send a brief that outlines:
Campaign Name
Deliverables
Deadlines
Usage
Exclusivity
Payment Terms
It should be very short and in plain language.
Contract Negotiations With a Perfume Influencer
Before diving in, it should be noted that many influencers will already have media kits that outline the services that they offer.
We always suggest using an official contract for influencers to ensure that you get the content you are paying for. If you are negotiating smaller deals then a contract might not be necessary, but for larger sponsorships, we recommend the contract. As a brand, you want to be easy to work with, however, you also want to be precise in what is expected. Every brand will find its own way to balance these 2 factors. It should be noted that most influencers are part-time. They might only be a hobbyist. They don’t have a management agency or official legal counsel. Many will be extremely hesitant to sign lengthy, verbose legal contracts that they don’t understand. If you have influencers sign contracts, keeping the contract as brief, and concisely worded as possible will reduce the reluctance to sign the contract and put them more at ease.
A contract should specify:
The date that the video content gets posted
What platforms the influencer will post on
Content type
Number of posts
Promoting the post stipulations
Brand values
Payment terms and amount
Approval process
Link, tags, and captions
Usage rights
Access to follow-up data
A frequent point of confusion between brands and influencers is the usage rights. The contract should make it clear which parties own the rights to the content. In most cases, both parties will own the rights.
Usage rights should also outline where the content will be posted. What can the content be used for (owned social, paid ads?)
How long do the usage rights extend for?
Another point that should be clarified is the approval process. This can simply mean that the influencer will send the final draft of the video to the brand to review before posting. It is important to review the content that the influencer posts, but keep in mind, you are paying them for their creative output. If the brand wants the influencer to revise every detail, they should instead hire an actor. This will also be a quick way to never work with that influencer again. If you do a good job with influencer vetting, video briefing, and contract negotiations, you shouldn’t have to worry about an arduous revision process.
Perfume brands also need to set clear guidelines for access to the analytics of the posts (will be covered later).
Scripting
Brands tend to overcomplicate this part of the contract negotiations. Brands should not provide any sort of script for the influencer. At most, brands should give an outline of a couple of points they would like the influencer to include. Brands want to set up their influencers for success, however, they need to give creative flexibility to the influencer to speak in whatever way they see fit. The reason influencers are so successful in generating content for brands is because they know their own audience and what they want to see. The influencer’s audience connects with the communication style of the influencer. By providing a strict script and a list of verbiage to use, you are turning the influencer into an inauthentic ad spokesman which is exactly what we want to avoid. Ultimately a perfume brand should give the influencer a brief and let them make your product shine in their own way.
A win-win situation.
The influencer doesn’t feel overly controlled by the brand and creatively confined and the brand has less work to do.
What are the Rates for Perfume Influencers
Most influencers will expect to be paid before they begin working on the project. The rates are so variable that anything provided is an average. The first number proposed by an influencer will normally be negotiable.
What they charge should be based on their audience size and engagement rates (specifically their Average View Duration). Everything else is secondary until you start working with celebrities and very well-known influencers which require a different pricing structure.
A rough figure is $10 per 1000 followers.
Affiliate Commissions
In addition to the flat fee, an affiliate commission can be included. This would necessitate tracking sales on your end. The average commission rate is 10-15%. From a brand perspective, the only reason to negotiate a commission with the influencer is to bring down the flat fee that they are charging. The commission will not motivate them to make a ‘better’ video. They will make the same style video with loosely the same script style and production quality as all of their other videos. The overall trend in influencer marketing is influencers asking for a flat fee and moving away from the commission pricing structure.
Most influencers intuitively understand that their job is raising brand awareness, not getting sales. Furthermore, their video will continue generating awareness, sales, and providing social proof long after they post the video. All of this is very hard to encapsulate in a commission. Furthermore, they aren’t affiliate marketers who spend all day with attribution software to track conversions. This means they are reliant on your brand’s attribution software, and your brand being honest with attributable revenue, in order for them to accurately get paid. In addition, we have heard numerous stories from influencers who are working with brands that have overly verbose, overly complex, tiered affiliate commissions that turn influencers off from using an affiliate pricing structure, which is essentially a part-time job to track.
It is best for both parties involved to negotiate flat fee contracts.
How to Create Profitable Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Before diving into tactical ways to make your influencer marketing campaigns profitable, it needs to be noted that 50% of the responsibility for whether or not an influencer campaign is profitable relies on choosing the right influencers to work with in the first place.
As we already mentioned in this post, influencer campaigns are the best at getting high-quality brand impressions. This is a top-of-funnel sales activity. What separates an average influencer marketing campaign from a highly profitable campaign is the ability to move people through the sales funnel to the next step. If you cannot move people to the next step in the sales funnel, then you are relegating your influencer campaign to merely a brand awareness and social proof strategy. Nothing is wrong with that, but you also want sales right?
Moving people through the sales funnel requires them to visit your website, TikTok Shop, Instagram Shop, or whatever your Point of Service is. What can you do to incentivize people to visit your website? You offer a discount on the perfume. Anything over 15% will do. 25% would be better. Creating urgency by making the discount code expire after a certain time can help move people through the sales funnel. Another way to get people to want to visit your site is to include an exclusive offer. This can involve including a free sample set.
How do you get people to visit your website? This is the difficult part. All of the social media platforms will either:
not allow clickable links in the post or video description
allow links in the post’s description but will actively throttle organic views of the content
…with the exception of Youtube videos (not Youtube Shorts)
This leaves brands with very few options for directing traffic to their website. Perfume brands can still find ways to direct traffic to their site in 3 major ways:
Link in Bio - When negotiating the contract, this aspect is crucial. Specify how long the link stays up. If they use Beacon or LinkTree, optimally you would negotiate to use your direct link. If they only want to use a Beacon or LinkTree link then negotiate to be the first link in the menu page.
Giving the influencer a simple discount code that is also included in the script as well as the description/caption of the video
Pinning a comment with the discount code and when the promotion ends (only applicable to certain social media platforms)
Retargeting ads
Custom Landing Pages Increase Profitability
Your perfume brand is spending all of this money on influencer marketing in order to get people to buy your perfume. Spend a little bit of time creating a landing page for the perfume. Most brands get a little lazy with their perfume advertising and send paid traffic and influencer traffic to category pages, product pages, or the brand’s home page. Landing pages often convert at a higher percentage than product pages and offer the ability to customize the messaging to be more aligned with the influencer marketing campaign.
Why is a landing page better?
The most important reason for a landing page is that its flexibility allows you to align the messaging to the audience segment you are targeting. For example, you are running an influencer campaign, and are specifically targeting influencers with audiences who trend in the 18-25 year old demographic. The messaging and imagery on the landing page should be different than if you are targeting 45-65 year olds.
If you are running an influencer campaign that aligns with a certain holiday or cultural event, a landing page can be customized to reflect this much more effectively than a product page or category page. This is especially true if your website platform is not Shopify.
A landing page also provides campaign-specific analytics which allows you to more easily measure the performance of a campaign. Otherwise, you need to set up URL parameters for links used in influencer campaigns.
Optimizing Videos for Search
Influencer campaigns are not only beneficial for brand awareness, but they also help people doing product research who are lower in the sales funnel. 46% of Gen Z prefer using social media over Google for product reviews and this trend is only accelerating. How does this translate to perfume? Almost equal amounts of people are typing: “Yves Saint Laurent Libre Intense Review” into TikTok and Instagram as they are into Google.
This means that you need to negotiate with influencers to include specific keywords in the title and description of the video so that the video is discoverable for searchers who use buyer intent keywords. This also doubles as good social proof for your brand, but only if the video is findable for people using your brand name in their search query.
While influencers sometimes like to use video titles like, “This Perfume is My New Favorite” or “I Can’t Live Without This Winter Scent”, the videos are not as easily discoverable to in-platform searches for branded keywords.
Measuring Results
Knowing how influencer campaigns performed will better help guide future campaigns towards profitability. When measuring campaign performance for influencers, you cannot just look at the data and give a pass/fail. You have to look at the data in the context of the influencer, their audience, and your product. What is the point of the data that you collect if you aren’t able to gather actionable insights?
In the contract, you need to be clear about getting access to the influencer’s engagement data. There is software tools that enable influencers to give direct access to specific posts’ data rather than having to send you the data manually.
No matter how large the influencer campaign is, if you want to run profitable influencer campaigns in the future then you have to break down the data by each individual influencer, in addition to the aggregate data. Influencer marketing analysis is simple when you know the right questions to ask. As with any data set, you have to weight the accuracy and validity of data against how statistically significant the data is.
Looking at the video engagement data after it has matured
Having access to video analytics data in the immediate days following the video post can hasten the speed of your brand to launch paid ads consisting of clips of influencer videos that performed well — more on this later. The actionable insights that you can glean from the engagement data are going to be most valid once the video has acquired the majority of its ‘expected total reach’. The expected total reach can be calculated based on the influencer’s historical data on how long (days) it takes to reach >85% of the expected total video views. There isn’t an exact science to calculating this number, but a benchmark does help when you are evaluating the data.
Some questions to reflect on:
(some questions are only applicable to specific social media platforms)
How many people viewed the video in relation to the influencer’s other videos?
Follow-up: Why did more/less people engage with this video?
When did viewership drop off in the video?
Follow-up: what was the topic at hand? What was the topic of discussion immediately preceding the viewership drop-off? How does the viewership drop-off rate compare to other videos from the influencer?
How many impressions did the video get?
Follow-up: What does the ratio of impressions : views tell us about the thumbnail, title, and video optimization? How does this ratio compare to other videos made by this influencer?
Did the influencer drive any sales attributed to them?
Follow-up: Was the influencer’s specific discount code given early in the video or late? Was a sales link prominently displayed in the video description (Youtube only)?
In aggregate, do you see an incremental increase in sales, website visits, social media profile visits, etc from your influencer marketing efforts?
What influencers had videos that exceeded the average performance rate of their other videos (based on historical data?
Follow-up: Did the influencer do anything out of the ordinary in this video? What made this video resonate with more people than average for this influencer? This question is best analyzed through the context of the influencer’s audience and your product.
What influencers had videos that underperformed the average performance rate of their other videos?
Follow-up: What might be the reason this particular video underperformed? This question is best analyzed through the context of the influencer’s audience and your product.
For any underperforming or overperforming influencers within your influencer campaign, does the influencer match your customer avatar?
Are there any common themes amongst the influencer videos that performed well?
Follow-up: Do these high-performing videos have any commonality in their video titles?
For any underperforming or overperforming influencers within your influencer campaign, does the influencer spend more time talking about the specific perfume, or spend more time talking about your brand?
The above questions are just a rough outline of some of the metrics you need to analyze. All the data points you collect from the influencers can be further analyzed by segments of the influencer’s audience based on age, sex, and any other demographic data. As already mentioned, it is critical that you read between the lines with the data. There are a million reasons why one influencer’s review of your perfume generated $28,000 in sales and another influencer with an even larger audience generated $800 in sales. It is your job to determine why this happened.
4 Ways You Can Repurpose High-Performing Influencer Videos
You did the hard work of finding influencers, vetting them, explaining your brand guidelines, and paying them. As mentioned earlier in the contract negotiation section of this post, you should have negotiated full-usage rights for the influencer’s video content. Now the fun part begins. Any influencer videos that perform well and feature beautifully articulated reviews are prime content to be repurposed. This content has already been validated by a smaller market segment which should give your brand the confidence to put advertising dollars behind the content or to use the content in other perfume marketing campaigns.
This can include:
Clipping the videos for paid ads
Depending on your brand, post the videos to your own social media account
Use clips of the video in your email marketing campaigns
Embed clips of the video on your brand’s website
What is influencer fatigue?
Influencer fatigue occurs when the influencer’s audience becomes overwhelmed by inauthentic reviews, contradictory claims, or repetitive content. Fragrance influencers have been in the cross-hairs of these accusations, and with many influencers these are not baseless accusations. Influencer fatigue leads to reduced engagement and wasted advertising budgets. Brands can avoid this by properly vetting the influencers they work with and ensuring influencer-brand alignment.
However, there is another way to avoid influencer fatigue: work with influencers who aren’t fragrance influencers. We would never recommend using the majority of your budget on influencers who have never reviewed a perfume. As we have discussed, it takes a specialized skillset to accurately convey scents through words. Influencers need to be familiar with many other scents in order to give accurate comparisons.
What we would recommend is running a small test to see if this strategy can work for your brand. Take a small percentage of your influencer marketing budget and dedicate it to influencers in the health and beauty space who align with your brand. Obviously this will involve an entirely different vetting process for finding the influencers and confirming their ability to properly review a fragrance. If you can find influencers who typically do not review perfumes then you have potentially opened the door to several advantages:
The influencer’s audience might more heavily weigh the opinion of an influencer’s positive review of a perfume compared to a fragrance influencer who is constantly praising every perfume they post about.
Potential to reach a new audience who is still in the health and beauty space.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking into more ways to increase the profitability of your perfume advertising campaigns, and you are unable to see any correlation between influencer marketing spend and revenue, it is time to re-evaluate your influencer marketing process. It can be difficult to directly correlate influencer marketing to revenue, however, the best tool you have to measure the success of influencer marketing is by running incrementality tests.
The 3 Highest Leverage Activities a Brand Can Do to Make Influencer Marketing Profitable
The hard work involved in making influencer marketing profitable is front-loaded to choosing the right influencers in the first place.
Analyze the data by reading between the lines. 1st-party data only gives a surface-level overview of the engagement. It is your job to dissect the intangible data points to better understand what went right and what went wrong with that particular influencer.
The influencer videos that perform above average have already been validated by a segment of the market. Repurpose these videos into other perfume advertising campaigns.