#everything-marketing

@Sambhav Chadha

@Tilen Krivec fire away. We run both small scale and large scale seeding programs for brands in health, wellness, beauty etc

Hey @Tilen Krivec – we have for our brand (albeit not in the cosmetics sector) with up to 500 influencers per month. We’ve scaled it back to 50-100 a month at the minute from its peak.

More than happy to answer any questions if I can help

@Sambhav Chadha @Tom Brown - BRND Labs

Hey, just starting product seeding with a small brand, so low number of products sent.

1. For starting out, would you go with getting bigger local influencers and making a more custom goodie boxes, mid-sized influencers or actually go to people not even real influencers, but more focused that they fit the target persona for our future customers.
2. How do you structure the initial communications, i'm guessing its a different approach than influencer collabs, here you're not really asking them for "deliverables", more just sending the product to test out and what... "please share it if you want to"? type of messaging? I'm sending out products that are in the 40-60€ price range for context

Great questions @Tilen Krivec – I’ll do my best to answer:

1. If the brand is fairly unknown/new/niche, I’d say dedicate 90% of your time to focusing on creators that have <50k subscribers/followers but have a genuinely high engagement rate (a raving community/fan base) with the audience you’re going after. Put only10% of your efforts toward connecting and building relationships with influencers 100k+. By and large, smaller creators have actually driven more revenue for us + produced much better creatives.
2. Kynship were the guys and girls that handled this for us, but they publish a ton online. We still use this exact strategy after 3+ years of authentically engaging/complimenting, offering to send the products with no strings attached, and not asking for anything other than honest feedback. If they love it, tell us. If they hate it, tell us. We don’t ask them to post, but a very high percentage do. One of the best pieces of content I probably point you to is: https://www.kynship.co/blog/how-to-contact-influencers That and I wrote this a year or so back if it’s of any use still: https://www.brndlabs.com/blog/influencer-seeding-first-1m (tactics may have changed somewhat but the strategy is the same)

@Tom Brown - BRND Labs Thanks for those, thats really helpful. For packaging, i don't really have any extra fancy boxes for this brand, should i just go with a handwritten note?

❤️

These links are awesome. Thanks for sharing @Tom Brown - BRND Labs

Product seeding is an expensive form of marketing IMO, Unless your cost (product & shipping) is low.

What @Tom Brown - BRND Labs said 😉

@Tilen Krivec apologies for the delay in response mate.

For start ups we typically go fairly broad at the 3-100k. We outline engagement rate benchmarks for each range as an indicator for performance (eg we’re looking for 5%+ ER for influencers with 3-10k followers, while usually around 1.5%+ ER for influencers with 50-100k followers).

Exception to the rule is if you’re looking to build affiliate or retainer partnerships with influencers post-seeding (which a lot of the brands we work with do). In this case, there’s a case to only work with influencers with 10k+ followers due to their ability to add links as ‘swipe-up stories’, which typically have highest CVR for us.

2.
Definitely use ‘no strings attached messaging’. As @Tom Brown - BRND Labs mentions, asking for honest feedback is the way to go for building strong relationships. Despite this we typically see 35-50% of influencers post, producing 2.5-3.0 creatives each on average. Consistent communication with influencers is key here, and extra points for onboarding onto an ambassador/affiliate program

Re packaging, I have some examples from clients that I can send over if you’d like - DM me if so!

Hope this helps and good luck 💪