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When I scroll Instagram and flick through my favourite influencer’s latest posts, I would be lying if I said I didn’t experience a touch of ‘Insta-envy’. The grass is always greener and when we look at beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places, it’s only natural to wonder how they’re managing to ‘live the dream’ while we’re plugging away at our desks and working tirelessly through our to-do lists.
However, while their lifestyle may look idyllic and stress-free, not to mention the epitome of wanderlust and fashion/family/friend goals, we should never underestimate this powerful new force in the marketing world, or how savvy and hard-working influencers are when it comes to achieving client objectives and delivering measurable results.
Many PR professionals and companies scorn the influencer trend because they fail to recognise these individuals as the highly commanding and authoritative voices that they represent in today’s communication world. For consumers, influencers are trusted reviewers, lifestyle coaches/gurus and motivational speakers all rolled into one. As online traffic increases and competition between companies intensifies, these individuals offer brands the chance to distinguish themselves from the white noise and reach their audiences in a meaningful way that really does inspire action.
With each influencer comes a niche following that could be perfectly aligned with your company’s target audience. Rather than a blanket approach to communication, this offers a targeted approach that speaks directly to the people who are just waiting for your product or service to come along. Carefully matching influencers to brands is an incredibly important part of a successful influencer campaign for this reason, involving in-depth research and a careful assessment of the person’s relevance to your business objectives.
At C&B, our See & Be division is dedicated to finding the perfect match between influencer and brand, and then designing, implementing, tracking and monitoring comprehensive influencer communication campaigns in line with brand goals. Through experience, we have discovered that more than just a pretty face, influencers are discerning, creative and conscientious individuals whose work has a real and quantifiable impact for our clients.
Our client Sahara Centre, Sharjah’s leading retail, leisure and dining destination, frequently runs promotions to strengthen its relationship with its customers. For its most exciting promotion to date, Sahara Centre gave its customer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win an ultra-luxurious McLaren 540C and a trip to Surrey, England to visit the McLaren Production Centre.
With such an amazing prize up for grabs, Sahara Centre wanted to launch an extra special campaign, which is where See & Be came into the picture. To give this campaign the wow factor it deserved, we suggested bringing a top regional personality on board to create a real buzz around the campaign, raise public awareness, increase footfall at the mall and attract new followers and customers for Sahara Centre.
After conducting meticulous in-house research, we reached out to influencers and talent management agencies and identified Sara Al Madani as an ideal partner. Sara was selected not only for her strong regional presence, but also for her close ties with Sharjah and the emirate’s audience. Sara was selected by His Highness Sheikh Sultan Al Qassimi, Ruler of Sharjah, as a board member for the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and her ambitious entrepreneurial spirit has earned her a loyal following in Sharjah and across the region.
Sara and Sahara Centre developed an organic relationship that was underpinned by brand goals, but also gave Sara room for creative freedom. The result was a creative video that captured the unique campaign in a fun way that inspired a remarkable response. The video generated over 6,000 followers for Sahara Centre through minimal spend on advertising and without promoting the pages, yielding a reach of over 700,000, total page impressions of 1.6m and total post impressions of 1.5m. The video also received more than 78,500 engagements in the form of likes, shares, feedback and comments, with a total 398,200 views in addition to 357,585 auto-plays.
This extraordinary level of engagement was the result of working with the perfect influencer, who gave Sahara Centre a human face and introduced her audience to the mall’s exciting campaign in an engaging way that captured hearts and mind. This is the power of influencers in action.
Joyce Mourad is the Senior Account Executive of Cicero & Bernay Public Relations. An independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai and offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the MENA. | www.cbpr.me