Greats

How can you increase influencer posts by over 337% in just a few months? We talked to Kristin Sword, marketing lead at Greats, a modern luxury shoe brand, to find out how she was able to save hours per day while getting more than triple the number of influencer posts per month.

Like many Aspire customers, her search for an influencer marketing platform began after realizing there had to be a better way to efficiently manage hundreds of influencers.

Kristin, like many marketing managers, manages everything from social media, content marketing, and influencer marketing. In 2016, Greats came to the realization that influencer marketing could be a hugely successful avenue for them if they could figure out how to scale it. That’s where Aspire came in.

After deciding to invest in influencer marketing, the Greats team began to manually assemble their program. Like many brands in their position, they started small, manually discovering influencers through Instagram and search engines. Once they finished making a list of potential influencers, they organized them on a spreadsheet and reached out to them via email— a slow, labor-intensive process.

After onboarding her first round of influencers, Kristin was able to get around 70 posts within a month, a number she knew needed to be much higher to drive the results she was looking for. While the initial results were good, Kristin knew the campaign’s impact would be limited by the high administrative overhead involved with manually searching, emailing, and tracking each influencer and their posts.

Kristin knew that authenticity was the key to driving solid sales results with influencer marketing, and to foster that authenticity she needed to solve three primary issues:

1. Find and communicate with influencers on a massive scale.

2. Efficiently manage hundreds of influencers.

3. Make data-driven decisions about which influencers to further invest in

Kristin used Aspire to search for the best influencers out of a database of over 2,000,000 while also receiving automatic recommendations based on her preferences, something that she says saves her a massive amount of time by constantly providing her with a list of quality influencers that she may not otherwise have found.

Aspire makes it easy for Kristin to stay on top of all of her hundreds of collaborations with a robust set of workflow and automation tools; everything from outreach to payment is handled on the Aspire platform. One of the keys to keeping influencer relationships moving smoothly through the process of a collaboration is solid communication. As a self-proclaimed “data nerd,” Kristin constantly uses Aspire’s analyze functionality to report on the results of her various influencer marketing campaigns. Greats strongly believes that the best way to approach influencer marketing is through a “test and invest” strategy in which the influencers driving the best results are re-engaged for future campaigns.

Kristin approaches influencer marketing on an ongoing relationship basis. Like many savvy influencer marketers, she’s realized that the best results come from working consistently with a group of enthusiastic influencers who will show the product in the most engaging and authentic light. The Analyze tab gives Kristin both a bird’s eye view of influencer performance, and the details needed to fine-tune and make adjustments.

Also, Aspire makes it easy to share the results with the rest of the team so they can be kept up to speed about how campaigns are performing.

Before using Aspire, Kristin was able to get about 80 posts live every month using her spreadsheet and emails. After switching to Aspire, Kristin’s seen that number increase to over 350 — an increase of over 300%.

The robust automation and workflow tools also save her hours of time per day. Because Aspire helps manage and automate many of the time-consuming tasks and activities associated with running an influencer marketing campaign, she’s able to get products out faster with a much smaller time commitment on her end.

The influencer content had such a huge impact on sales that Greats sold through their entire inventory in under a month — instead of the entire season.