How Influencers Can Enrich Your Brand
“Word of mouth” is still said to be the best form of marketing around. Mix that with the digital age and you stand the chance of getting that word spread to millions of relevant consumers.
With Influencer Marketing at an all time high and exploding not only in fashion and music industries but now more and more taking on the FMCG industry; we’ve noticed a few brands have locked down the brand affinity x influencer equation and nailing their marketing strategies. We’re taking a closer look at a few best examples.
Early this spring, American retailer Lord and Taylor launched an influencer marketing campaign exploiting the brand all over Instagram feeds by partnering with 50 high tier bloggers. Lord & Taylor supplied each blogger with a dress from their new collection and had them wear it and share it on the same day. The impact online was immense – most posts reached over 1000 likes and some even made it to over 13,000.
Brands are constantly looking for innovative ways to reach customers and build on loyalty and affirmation. A few years ago we saw the makeup giant L’Oreal collaborate with YouTube star Michelle Phan on the branding of a new product line. With over 6 Million subscribers on her beauty tutorial channel she’s considered a solid opinion leader in the market. L’Oreal’s new product saw a 10 million dollar revenue in the first year.
Mavens are all around us; and I’m not talking just about the ego-blogging and selfie-sharing ones out there. An influencer can be defined as anyone who knows anything about a particular subject and happens to have a connection with a certain audience.
In the British Airways Ungrounded campaign, the brand launched an innovation lab with founders, funders, engineers, academics and a couple of journalists. They gave them 10 hours to work on a big problem. Among the passengers were Google, IBM and Microsoft – all highly influential. The amount of press and social media attention received among tech publications was incredible.
“UnGrounded was originally developed to forge new relationships and build equity with the highly influential technology community on the West coast of the United States.” – John McDonald
Most of these examples come with big budgets attached. I’ll give you another example of a simple, smaller campaign we worked on recently. The vegan spread Pure Dairy Free approached us to help them increase their overall online awareness to the dairy intolerant demographic, as well as healthy eating audiences.
We launched a campaign working with over 50 bloggers across the UK. We asked them to create recipes using the “Pure Dairy Free”: http://puredairyfree.co.uk/ spread and publish them alongside the UK hit show The Great British Bake Off. In less than 4 months we went from zero to substantially increasing social media following, reach and engagement and saw a rise of overall traffic to website and ranking. All thanks to the amount of influencers and content created in such a short time span.
With 75% of marketers already working with influencers to promote, brand, or launch a product or service – our money is definitely on this type of strategy for 2016. Keep in mind a creative approach and remember it doesn’t have to be complicated. Anything from a dress sent to 50 influencers to a 10 hour plane ride with Silicon Valley’s best – the options are endless. Just take a good look at your brand and find the right fit.