iHerb

As a retailer that has a presence in over 50 countries, iHerb found that creating marketing materials that relate to multiple, highly diverse international markets can be quite difficult and expensive to do in-house. iHerb’s internal creative team looked for ways to outsource content creation without compromising quality and authenticity. The team turned to influencer marketing as the perfect solution to generate large amounts of engaging, authentic, and inexpensive content that works in all of their global markets.

iHerb runs its program primarily in-house as it strategically never made sense for agencies to run their influencer program. However, iHerb soon realized that scaling an influencer program without the proper tools is nearly impossible.

iHerb then began searching for tools that would allow their in-house team to source, connect with, and manage dozens of influencers each month. After vetting several influencer marketing solutions, iHerb found that Aspire was one of the best, most robust platforms and it met all its needs.

Nicole Rohrer was then brought into the iHerb team as the Senior Marketing Manager, in charge of growing and running the brand’s influencer marketing and rewards program. Now, Nicole and her team use Aspire to generate large amounts of dynamic content each month that successfully speaks to all of its target markets.

iHerb needed enough content for multiple social media channels that reached customers from countries around the world, including the United States, Russia, Korea, Japan, and dozens more. The content iHerb needed would promote products from their 1,500 suppliers in niche markets ranging from beauty to fitness to health and wellness. The iHerb team found that truly understanding their target market was critical for online engagement. However, because iHerb customers are from dozens of different locations, speak many languages, and have a wide range of interests, generating enough localized content in-house was impossible.

Without the proper tools, the iHerb team found it very difficult to source enough excellent quality niche influencers to meet their content production goals. Before discovering Aspire, the iHerb team used to search for influencers manually. The team spent dozens of hours each week searching for the right influencers, their contact information, or reaching out to them through direct messages, with little success. When the team was finally able to connect with an influencer, managing the relationship, setting collaboration terms, and sending payments required even more time and energy. This homemade solution was time-consuming, tedious, and did not allow the team to source the amount of content needed to keep up with the company’s social media presence.

Connecting With Influencers

iHerb needed niche influencers who are knowledgeable in their space and who can create content that speaks to each of iHerb’s global markets. Aspire allows iHerb to easily search through 2,000,000+ influencers based on filters such as location, content type, and audience demographics. This allows the iHerb team to find the influencers that fit all of their campaign requirements perfectly, in a fraction of the time.

Managing Influencer Relationships

She finds that the best content is produced when both the brand and the influencers build organic relationships throughout the collaboration process. Aspire allows the iHerb team to quickly communicate with influencers in a much more organized and effective way than traditional email. Manage allows Nicole’s team to chat with influencers, send automatic messages and reminders, send contracts, review content, send payment, and more, all on one platform. Manage makes it easy for Nicole to quickly see the status of every campaign, from both a basic level or a high level, even if she isn’t directly managing it.

Measuring Success

Nicole and the iHerb team measure an influencer’s success based on the quality of content and the amount of engagement the influencer receives on social media. Aspire allows the team to see a snapshot of the best performing content for each campaign and the total amount of engagement per campaign. Nicole can use this accurate information to help her team decide which influencers they should create ongoing partnerships with.

‍

Before Aspire, iHerb manually searched the Internet for influencers, which was very time-consuming and ineffective. Since utilizing Aspire, iHerb has collaborated with more than 300 localized niche influencers. Despite a large number of relationships and having only a small staff, the iHerb team is still able to easily check in with influencers to maintain organic, long-term relationships.

Managing relationships with hundreds of influencers at once is easy with Aspire tools. iHerb now works with 3x-4x more influencers each month without compromising its organic relationships.

Nicole’s team is also able to save time throughout the collaboration process because Aspire’s management tools allow the team to handle tasks such as influencer payments quickly and easily, without getting other departments, such as accounting, involved.

‍