Ovation Hair
April Bobadilla was brought onto the Ovation team as a Social Media Manager to promote their Cell Therapy line of products through word-of-mouth marketing with a group of targeted influencers. While managing all of the brand’s owned social channels, April realized there was a need for large amounts of high quality content. After attempting to build their influencer program manually, April realized she would need management and analytics tools in order to scale and streamline her process.
Ovation Hair showcases several customer testimonial videos and success stories on their website. The goal of these videos is to provide consumers with content from people who have actually used Ovation products. Because of this, it was important for April to have an ample amount of high-quality content that could be repurposed on their website, YouTube channel, and other owned social media platforms.
Because user-generated content can be inconsistent in terms of quality, partnering with influencers was the perfect approach to generate high-quality content at scale.
Like most social media managers, April struggled with the time-consuming task of scaling influencer marketing in addition to running multiple social media channels and performing market research.
April was using Google and Instagram to individually search for and privately message each influencer she wanted to work with, with little to no avail.
The brand initially hired another competing influencer marketing platform, in the hopes of connecting with influencers and creating YouTube content. After waiting 4-6 months to see their first video live, and dealing with issues with the contract terms, April decided to find a different platform that could help her manage relationships, contracts, and payment with influencers directly. Enter Aspire.
Finding the Right Influeners
Like many social media managers, April found it difficult to identify the influencers who were the right fit for her brand. In addition to looking for creators who were on target with Ovation Hair’s aesthetic, April was looking for people who were authentic, had great quality photography/videography, and had a targeted audience. When assessing influencers, she first considers, “would Ovation’s bottle look organic on their feed?”
Aspire gives brands the ability to view each creator’s rating, which is based on reviews from other brands they have worked with, prior to deciding to move forward with a collaboration. Before working with Aspire, April ran across several influencers who would submit their content late, or not follow the terms of the collaboration. Most brands have a strict content calendar and must ensure that influencers submit their content in a timely manner. April finds that only working with influencers who have high ratings has helped her to avoid late content and other issues that she was experiencing before.
Managing Influencer Relationships at Scale
Once April had the ability to connect with more influencers than ever, she knew she would need the tools to manage all of these relationships. She thinks of Aspire as a “one-stop shop” that allows brands to see where each influencer is during the various stages of a collaboration.
April also loves the fact that she can have a group chat with multiple influencers to save time without sacrificing individual attention, relationship building, or transparency.
Reporting on results
After connecting and managing influencer collaborations, one of the most difficult parts of the influencer marketing process is determining ROI and knowing which influencers to invest in.
April uses Aspire to compare influencers’ engagement rates in addition to how much traffic they drive to the Ovation site. She also looks at sales data to see how many sales are being driven by each influencer.
April uses this insight to determine who she should invest in in the future. Influencers with a high ROI, lower cost per lead, and high engagement are made a priority for any subsequent campaigns.
At any given time, April is now working with 50-80 influencers. Struggling to see just one collaboration come to fruition is no longer an issue for her.
Working with dozens of influencers at a time has given April the ability to test new markets and invest in people who drive the most conversions. April wanted to ensure that the profile of influencers that Ovation was working with was diverse, but did not have the resources to explore new markets until partnering with Revfluence. After seeing that curly-haired women spent a considerable amount of money on hair products, April finally had the opportunity to test that market, which was different from the profile of influencers she used previously.
Ovation partnered with curly-haired beauty gurus @Thefindguru and @Sayriajade and the results exceeded expectations by driving around 18k website visits– making them “the best performing influencers that Ovation has ever worked with.”
Ovation typically saw about 40 visits to their influencer landing page per day. After partnering with multiple curly-haired influencers, there was a huge jump to over 2,500 visits per day in the week after the video went live.
