Author Archives for Kirsty Sharman

5 Surprise brands that conquered Influencer Marketing

November 5, 2015 1:05 pm Published by Kirsty Sharman

Editor's note: This post was originally shared on Wallblog to showcase some unexpected brands that are getting Influencer Marketing right.

Word-of-mouth recommendations are the holy grail of marketing, promoting brand recognition, reputation and sales in one consumer-friendly bundle. Revamped for the digital age, personal recommendations have given way to Influencer Marketing platforms. Allowing every brand the opportunity to talk directly to thousands of receptive customers, this innovative channel uses established online influencers to drive sales, increase brand recognition and appeal to new demographics. With Influencer Marketing revolutionising the field, we thought it was high time we got to know a few of the more surprising brands emerging as champions.

1. Downy work with influencers to create engaging content

A household name in fabric softeners from P&G, with more than a few competitors, Downy’s marketing strategies are constantly evolving. Taking a chance with Influencer Marketing, this home-based brand used influencer content to “Bring out the SoftSide” of hard situations and icons encountered in everyday life – such as alarm clocks, high heels and even politics. Downy created fabric sculptures accompanied by the tag #softside and witty lines promoting its signature fabric softener. The brands newly enlisted influencers were set to work posting images of these sculptures across social media. One of the best examples was from the Vine influencer, Meagan Cignoli, of how Downy can help solve the Rubik’s cube. It became one of the most popular pieces of the campaign with close to 500 shares and more than 8,000 likes on Facebook. [video width="480" height="480" mp4="http://blog.webfluential.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/D5C038586B994998507096117248_1900fb688f7.3.1_ctDm_qJck2AOObm4Un6MCGPsCAfYPwtqp1XZOKJP78E0UBtP.VyHGPWkxfwjLqSa.mp4" loop="true" autoplay="true"][/video]

Meagan Cignoli's interpretation of the Downy brief

Designed to initiate conversations between influencers and their followers, the #SoftSide campaign helped consumers to define what the soft side means to them, increasing brand recognition for Downy and marking it out as an influencer marketing champion to keep an eye on.

2. Cooper Tire target a new market working with Mom bloggers

They’re not going to feature highly in any wedding gift registry, Christmas hints or birthday list, but for the average family, tires are a must-have. They’re just not sexy, or something many consumers shop around for, and they’re definitely not a product most women covet. Until now. Having identified a demographic its competitors had left untouched, Cooper Tire decided it was high time they utilised the untapped purchasing power of the female population. And to do that, it needed ‘Mom bloggers’ — women who had successfully built up reputable blogs with dedicated followings. CooperTires 1

Macaroni Mum putting Cooper Tires through their paces

Inviting these bloggers out to its test track in Texas gave Cooper Tire the opportunity to demonstrate the performance of its tires on multiple tracks and conditions. A few adrenaline fuelled laps later and the brand had provided each of its guest influencers with a fun-filled day that no one was likely to forget in a hurry — and more than a few would blog about later.

3. Vodacom Deezer achieve brand awareness with nearly 4 million music lovers

When Africa’s biggest mobile communications company met the music streaming service Deezer, it was a match made in heaven. They wanted the whole world to know about it -so they turned to Webfluential for advice on relevant influencers. Our team recommended ten key influencers with the likes of Live Magazine, Texx and the City and StephanieBe helping get the word out. These music-centric bloggers were charged with getting the conversation started, creating original content that introduced Vodacom Deezer and recommended its streaming services to their musically minded followers. To sweeten the deal, Vodacom worked with the influencer Da L.E.S, timing its campaign to coincide with the launch of the rapper’s new single, available exclusively on Deezer.

Da LES shares the availability of his new single on Deezer

This two-pronged attack certainly did the job. Influencers’ posts on social media helped Vodacom reach nearly 4 million music lovers and engaged with over 11,200 people, substantially increasing brand awareness and online talkability with one influencer campaign.

4. Boxed Water’s ‘Retree Project’ highlight charity campaign

It bills itself as ‘part water company, part sustainable water project, part philanthropic project and part completely curious’, so it was no surprise that Boxed Water chose to think outside the box when it came to creating a buzz around its latest charity campaign, the Retree Project. A partnership with the National Forest Foundation, the Retree Project aims to plant one million trees within the next five years. Loathed to plant them quietly, Boxed Water turned to influencer marketing to spread awareness, ensuring its latest venture went off with a (digital) bang. The campaign was launched by social media influencing gurus Jaime King and Aiden Alexander. Each posted their own pictures of Boxed Water products to get the ball rolling, tagging them #Retree and informing their followers that, for every tagged product picture posted, Boxed Water would plant two trees.

Jaime King shares her thoughts on why she likes the Boxed Tree project

It was certainly a creative way to put a digital spin on a real-world project. It also worked wonders for promoting both Boxed Water’s partnership with the National Forest Foundation and its products, successfully highlighting the brand’s philanthropic activities at the same time.

5. Better Sleep Council target a niche demographic of diabetes patients

Proving that every brand stands to benefit from influencer marketing, non-profit Better Sleep Council used this innovative channel to promote their annual campaign, ‘May is Better Sleep Month’. Entering into a partnership with the Diabetes Influencers Network, Better Sleep Council found the perfect platform from which to launch its campaign. This community of health, wellness and fitness professionals (and the odd celebrity) all suffer from diabetes and have a diverse array of followers motivated to live healthier lifestyles. By hosting a Twitter Chat Party with Dr. Amy Peterson Campbell, a diabetes educator, Better Sleep Council succeeded in generating more than 11 million Twitter impressions. Its success demonstrates just how useful influencer marketing can be when targeting a niche demographic.

Some Tweets shared around the Better Sleep Council campaign

With the ability to take campaigns in any creative direction, make relevant and engaging content, successfully target niche demographics or new markets and increase brand awareness, this multifunctional channel is increasing in popularity as more and more ‘surprise’ brands continue to achieve impressive results.

Sign up as a marketer to run your own Influencer Marketing campaigns.

Trusting online influencers to share your brand’s message

October 28, 2015 1:58 pm Published by Kirsty Sharman

Just admit it. You love the idea of being an Influencer Marketing rockstar and creating content that has unstoppable sharability. You even dream about showcasing your results as a best practice case study for your brand. However, you are nervous about co-creating content with influencers which aligns to your brand's messaging. How do you trust someone else to interpret your brand's messaging and make it relevant for their audience? How will they understand what is best for your brand? What happens if they get it wrong? But the more important question to ask yourself is rather, what happens if they get it right?

Getting it right

We recently approached the team from How Far From Home to work with us on our very own Influencer Marketing campaign. With the objective of creating awareness of Webfluential with influencers all over the world, we needed to work with influencers who have a global audience. HFFH have a cult-like following of people who have been inspired by their story of travelling the world and seeing 'how far from home they can get.' But they also have a following of eager online influencers wanting to learn from them and how they built such a large audience in a very short space of time. This is where we found relevance to partner with them for our own brand. Even with part of their audience being relevant to our brand's messaging, we wanted to ensure we did not alienate the inspired wannabe travellers with content that was of no interest. How could we make our content relevant to both? It was time to handover to the HFFH team. We trusted HFFH to conceptualise content ideas for their travel blog and Instagram followers. They know their audience best and we gave them enough guidance to understand our brand and objectives. I suspect a sigh of disbelief or a little nervous laughter from most marketers at this point - but it worked. HFFH responded with an idea that we not only loved, but would also resonate with their audience. They would show how many items they could tick off their 'Wanderlist' with the money they made from a Webfluential job whilst in Sydney, through sharing a blog and Instagram post. This would appeal to the inspired travellers who want to know what they are up to next, as well as, the influencers who like to learn more about how they make money. The post they shared on Instagram received 3 801 organic likes within the first few hours.

The blog post they wrote was accompanied by some fantastic illustrations to showcase the items they could tick off their Wanderlist. Not only was the blog post great for building awareness with their audience, but the illustrations provided us with great content we could share with our own Facebook and Twitter communities.

What we learnt from co-creating content with influencers

Select relevant influencers for your campaign. This might be obvious, but it is a common mistake. Marketers often prioritise reach over relevance, which can result in content not resonating with an influencer's audience. Our search tool assists with sourcing influencers with interests related to your brand or campaign.
Explain your objectives in a clear and concise brief. Unpacking your messaging and what you want to achieve from the Influencer Marketing campaign is key. We have a great group of campaign managers that help facilitate this process.
Trust the influencers you work with to know their audience best and how to position your brand's messaging. Influencers understand how to position content to their audience and should guide the process on how to share your brand's messaging with their audience.
Be open minded. You know your brand best - but not the audience that will be targeted with your messaging. Whilst you need to ensure that you adhere to brand guidelines, be open to new ideas you might never have considered in the past.

As an Influencer Marketing tool, we are advocates of the co-creation of content with influencers - not only for the marketers that use our platform - but for ourselves too. We ensure that we 'practice what we preach' in order to share learnings and give guidance to the industry from experience with our own brand. Sign up as a marketer to start running your own Influencer Marketing campaigns.

Protecting your brand as a blogger and online influencer

October 21, 2015 11:46 am Published by Kirsty Sharman

This blog post was originally written by Ruan Fourie. Have you ever Googled your blog’s name? Your brand. It’s important to know what results are returned when people Google your brand. The more info people can get about you by just searching your brand, the better. There are typically 10 search results on the first page of a Google search, and every single one of those 10 results should point directly to an online property that you manage. Brands, marketers, potential new readers or followers will likely Google your brand at some point. Brands and marketers will Google your brand if they are considering including you in an Influencer Marketing campaign.

How do you dominate the page one of Google with your brand?

It’s not as hard as you think. Most influencers already own multiple branded properties online. A blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Instagram account and YouTube channel etc.

All these properties can potentially appear on the first page of search results when your brand is searched. You just have to make sure that Google (and other search engines) understand that your brand owns all those properties.

You have to tell Google where you can be found

Most of these social media profiles have a field where you can link to your website. That is the first and most important step to helping search engines understand that the social media account is part of your brand. Google now has direct access to Twitter’s data stream. Google can only crawl certain parts of public Facebook pages, and the same applies for Instagram. For this very reason it’s important that you use the one property that you completely own (your blog) to help Google understand your whole brand and where you can be found online.

Link to your social accounts from your website

You control how much of your website Google (and other search engines) can crawl. You control where you are linking to, and from where on your site.

You control how Google interprets your brand. You should already be linking to all of your social media profiles for your brand from your website, so that your readers can easily find those profiles. Your “About” page on your Website is there to give your users all they need to know about you. From here you can easily link to all your social media profiles, not only for your readers, but also to help Google understand that your brand extends to those social media profiles. But it doesn’t have to stop at your “About” page. You can also use your “Contact” page as an opportunity to help Google understand where you can be reached. Because some of your audience will prefer Twitter as a channel for communication, it would also make sense to inform your audience of all the social channels they can use to contact you.

A Webfluential profile page is a gold mine of info for Google and your audience

Your Webfluential profile page gives a lot of information about your brand and your audience. Things like your audience demographics, links to all your brand social media profiles and also a link to your Website. Google loves pages like a Webfuential profile that provide a lot of information about a search. By simply linking to your Webfluential Profile page from your website, you will be giving Google a great resource to return relevant information for your brand. So make sure you also link to your Webfluential profile from your “About” page, your “Contact” page and even your “Advertise” page if you have one.

It’s not just about the search results

You are doing a good job with your brand. You have an audience and that audience is still growing. You create cool content for your audience. Now brands and marketers want to start working with you so that they get access to your audience. The first thing a marketer is going to to do before reaching out to you is Google your brand. When your brand is searched it’s a sign of a strong brand if you dominate the first page of the Google results by not only showing your blog, but also all your social media profiles and your Webfluential profile.

«‹24 252627 28 ›»

ESTIMATE HOW MUCH YOU COULD BE EARNING

GET AN ESTIMATE

GET DETAILED REPORTS

VIEW DEMO REPORT