HISTORY uses Aspire to achieve a 12.4% engagement rate on influencer content
Founded in 1995, HISTORY (formerly known as The History Channel) is an American television network under the A+E Networks umbrella.
At any given time, HISTORY actively produces and airs 10+ shows, while its archive holds dozens more — not to mention thousands of historical articles and short-form videos. The network reaches more than 80% of television-watching households in America.
HISTORY wanted to be more efficient with influencer marketing as it scaled
As HISTORY’s programming expanded over the years, influencers became a crucial lever to strengthen relationships with existing audiences while capturing new, emerging demographics. By the time they partnered with Aspire, the HISTORY team had already built a robust influencer marketing function in-house.
Yet, the more HISTORY invested in influencers, the more administrative tasks piled up. This made the initiative a growing time-sink for HISTORY’s legal and finance teams.
So, they turned to colleagues at Lifetime, a fellow A+E network, for advice. That’s when Christine Gomez, Senior Manager of Social Media at The History Channel, got a glowing recommendation for Aspire and reached out.
“We try to plan ahead, but sometimes things come up last-minute. When we worked with agencies on a case-by-case basis, they sometimes just didn’t have the infrastructure in place to meet those quick turnarounds.” - Christine Gomez, Senior Manager of Social Media at The History Channel
From the moment they partnered with Aspire, HISTORY’s team regained hours to focus on their social media marketing from end to end, including management of a 7.5M-follower Instagram account. HISTORY’s legal and finance teams saw their workloads lightened, too.
Two factors of the Aspire solution make this possible:
1. Aspire’s massive influencer marketplace helps you find the right creators with minimal manual lift
Name any hyper-specific demographic, and there’s a creator out there who has their attention. However, finding, vetting, and managing all of these influencers is time-consuming.
Enter: Aspire. We help HISTORY streamline creator discovery and management in two key ways:
- Free up your internal team from repetitive tasks — The HISTORY team can eliminate manual management tasks with Aspire’s customizable campaign workflow builder. By automating day-to-day comms, content collection for approval, and more, HISTORY regains time to tackle higher-level, strategic marketing.
- Easily find the perfect creator for each campaign — Instead of manually crawling social media, the HISTORY team uses Aspire’s Influencer Search Engine to find millions of creators by any criteria across all social channels. With our Creator Marketplace, they can also list campaigns and let creators find them.
Christine explains that whenever HISTORY sends briefs for upcoming influencer campaigns, Aspire quickly and consistently responds with precise matches. As a result, the HISTORY team can always rely on Aspire to connect them with well-suited creators ASAP.
“Aspire provides us with a really wide variety of influencers and creators, allowing us to hit all of the different audiences connected to our goals. If we’re not really sure how to reach those audiences, the Aspire team is quick to provide options and opportunities to do so.” - Emma Diede, Social Media Coordinator at HISTORY
2. Aspire’s white-glove service builds strong relationships between clients and influencers
Influencer marketing is a business of relationships. As such, you get better deliverables when you have a human touch. That’s why Aspire proactively builds relationships with clients and influencers alike.
Christine outlines three ways Aspire delivers such high value for its clients:
- Consistent availability — We don’t like to leave clients waiting. Christine appreciates that the Aspire team responds “whenever at all hours.”
- Strong bonds with influencer talent — Aspire builds lasting relationships with influencers and then shares those benefits with brands. As Christine puts it, “Aspire can stretch our budget so we go far beyond the original goals of each campaign.”
- Looking beyond the brief — Aspire helps clients get to the core of what their campaign aims to do. Emma says, “If HISTORY wants to reach younger demographics, Aspire is really good at providing options and opportunities for that.”
In one case, Aspire’s Agency Services team executed a seamless partnership on HISTORY’s behalf: flying Emmanuel Acho to the Pentagon where he interviewed Morgan Freeman for a documentary.
HISTORY runs 3 influencer campaigns quarterly that garner millions of views
The team at HISTORY says Aspire feels like a dedicated in-house Influencer Marketing Manager: a single entity that handles all of the administrative details and has reliable answers for every need and question.
Here’s a snapshot of the results driven by Aspire for HISTORY so far:
- 12.4% engagement rate
- 3 campaigns run quarterly
- 6M+ views on influencer videos
- 4.4x increase in opportunities for expected reach
From here, the social marketers at HISTORY look forward to scaling their influencer efforts and results — without worrying about scope creep or bandwidth.