That’s a great question. I can only speak from us as a brand, Blonyx. The primary thing is it comes down to your strategy for approaching. I’ve seen a lot of different strategies in ways to acquire ambassadors, and also the types of ambassadors that you go after. For us we’re very key to our core, to our marketing and our approach.
One of our pillars if you like, as a brand, is integrity. To do that, the first thing we do is we tend to approach people who already use our products. We look at our existing community, people who know our products, know the brand, and have a true and honest love for our products and what we do. We focus primarily on them.
It’s interesting because we had a lot of top level athletes in our roster. A lot of those athletes, we brought them on because of who they were and their following, etc., and started to work with them. It took a bit of time to build a relationship and I feel that is actually the best way to do it is firstly to understand where they are in your ecosystem.
If they are people who already use your products, that’s definitely the first…I think that’s the first people you should go with. They already know your brand, they tried your product, they have a real idea for what you stand for and that will be much truer. It’d be a real true endorsement, which I think a lot of people pick up on nowadays.
I actually think because of the success of influencer marketing, how people view influencer marketing is changing slightly. There’s a lot of people…You were asking about agents before and how you go about negotiating with influencers.
The top-level influencers that have big followings, you’re talking half a million plus followers on say Instagram as a benchmark there. Likelihood is that you will go through an agent and it will very much be paid to play. They will come up with a figure, you meet with them, build a bit of a superficial relationship with them.
It’s more around a contract. Then you go from there and they’ll promote your brand out there and that’s the way it’s going. A lot of people they’re creating great careers out of that space, in the influencer space.
A lot of brands, and this is something we actually learned from lululemon, a local company. They have a really interesting approach to influencer marketing, and it’s something we learned from them. They have a policy of not paying any athletes to simply promote their brand. They only pay athletes to be a part of their brand.
If they’re out there representing them maybe at a TED Talk or something like that, and they would bring them on and involve them in that, and that’s how they would use that person there. They use very grass root ambassadors and people who are out there in the fitness community, and having this very small sphere of influence.
They found real traction in that. I believe Vega, another supplement brand, a very successful supplement brand has also used that. I’m much more a believer in that. It’s about knowing your immediate community and building that community, and then basically empowering them to really influence.
I think that grass level influences much. Personally, I think it’s much more valuable. It’s also more fun and better to manage in my experience too.