We have spoken to featured agency, OUTREACH, to find out more about how they work and what sets them apart from the rest of the industry.
Tell us about OUTREACH and what sets you apart from other influencer marketing agencies?
We are the (semi) new kids on the block. We began as a talent agency for YouTubers and musicians in 2017, but due to the increased need of our clients to connect with high profile influencers, we tapped into our network and focussed our efforts on influencer marketing.
Ever since, our goal has been to create authenticity and transparency for both our brand clients and the influencers themselves. To do this, we made the decision not to manage any influencers. Many may question this decision, but we have found that it allows us to match brands with a wider, more authentic, set of influencers, instead of simply sending over influencers on our roster.
This allows us to really dig down into the goals of any campaign, whether that be a targeted demographic or spreading a particular message, and find the influencers who are passionate about the brand and can best achieve the goals of the campaign. We are also proud of our multi-department setup, comprising influencer outreach, social media management, and content creation, which allow us to add value to a wide scope of campaigns.
Choosing the right influencer is a challenge many still face but it is vital to the success of a campaign. What’s your influencer selection process?
It always starts with the client’s campaign goal in mind. Asking brands what their ideal campaign results look like is the first step in selecting the influencers. Depending on whether the campaign’s goals are short-term, long-term, to grow brand awareness or drive sales, these differing focus points will have a massive impact on how we go about selecting the influencers.
When we have finalised the goals of the campaign with the brand, then our team goes about pitching the campaign to those influencers within our network who we believe, based on our past personal relationships and key history data will be the best placed to execute a successful campaign.
We are proud to say that none of the influencers selection process is done through the use of influencers selection software. This is an active decision that we made as we found many of these softwares to be inaccurate, unreliable, and unable to create the personal relationship with the influencers which is needed to execute a successful campaign.
Once the influencers are on board and the brand are happy with our selections, we set out to create a detailed brief that gives the influencer the scope to add their personality, while giving enough direction to satisfy the initial goal of the campaign.
Measurement is something many marketers still struggle with. What business metrics do you measure?
Calculating ROI is key to our goal of transparency and authenticity. How we actually measure the success of each campaign starts with the goals of the campaign in mind. It’s relatively straightforward to measure a campaign with a goal to drive sales, a trackable URL and a website tag are both effective ways to calculate ROI.
Those campaigns with the goal of driving brand awareness are slightly more in-depth and it’s here where we are really proud of our analytics team. Many campaigns base their success on false metrics, followers, likes, etc, but our team uses value metrics, such as brand mentions, click-through-rates, brand reach, and audience engagement averages to give a detailed and tangible assessment of these campaigns.
Who is your main client? Tell us some more of the clients you work with.
The diversity of brands we have worked with is something we are extremely proud of – from globally-recognised businesses such as ASOS, Gymshark and AllSaints, to smaller but super fast-growing brands such as Lola’s Lashes, Cosmetify and WILD.
Supporting international brands with brand awareness in the UK has become a forte of ours and we’ve partnered with brands such as Estrid (Sweden), Waterdrop (Austria), LELO (Sweden), Ana Luisa (USA), and Rosental (Germany) to name a few. We have several exciting campaigns booked for 2021 already which we can’t wait to share.
How does pricing work?
The reason why we believe we are adding a benefit to our clients isn’t just because we can partner them with the influencers who best align with their brand, but because we are also able to achieve competitive pricing. We do this by using our longstanding relationships with the influencers to achieve transparent and fair prices for both brand clients and the influencer themselves. As each campaign is bespoke and can vary significantly, we do not work to a fixed commission, though most campaigns are between 10-20%, depending on a range of factors such as campaign size, length and deliverables.
What rights would brands have to the content being produced?
For the majority of our campaigns, we aim to achieve, at the very least, organic sharing rights for our brand clients. We’d like to see this as a standard throughout the industry as we believe this organic amplification is a win-win for both the brand and influencer, as it creates usable content for the brand and additional exposure for the influencer.
We believe that the future of influencer marketing will be dominated by those brands who are able to amplify their campaigns’ organic content using paid social. Paid Social has been key to the success of many campaigns over the past 18-24 months and it really allows brands to set themselves apart from their competitors and also provides a tangible metric to measure ROI through the paid social data available. Of course, this paid usage often creates an additional fee for the brand, however, we believe that this added usage is going to be crucial for brands to set themselves apart moving forwards.
We also believe that this additional usage creates a process whereby the brands are making the influencers a central part of their brand, and utilising their platform within a wider campaign (whether that be print, broadcast media, etc.) instead of a simple one-off social media post. This ultimately goes back to creating authenticity for our clients’ campaigns and the industry as a whole.
Which social channels do you specialise in?
Our foundations as an agency have always been in YouTube so we are suckers for video content and believe that there is no more engaging medium. With that being said, and while we love working on YouTube campaigns, we continue to focus our efforts on all of the big four; YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We are now jumping two feet first into growing platforms such as Twitch, TikTok, Pintrest and more. With any campaign, we believe that utilising as many of these platforms as possible based on the client’s budget and the influencer’s main platforms is key to amplifying reach, engagement and authenticity.
How can readers get started?
If you are looking for a new influencer agency, or are simply interested in hearing more about how influencer marketing works, then head over to our website – outreachagency.co.uk – and check out our work.
For us, the first step with influencer marketing is to nail down what you as a brand want to achieve from it and we are happy to help with that decision-making process. It is great to talk with anyone who’s interested in the industry so give our team a call as we are always working with new influencers who might be right for your campaign.
We really want to place ourselves as an agency that can be considered as an additional resource to our brand clients. As much possible, we are there to help advise on the industry, as to create long-term influencer marketing strategies that will add value to their wider marketing campaigns.
