Get ready to dive into the wild world of influencers and their role in Nobody Studios’ game plan.
Although influencers are a part of our core strategy and power everything we do at the Studio, from ideation and company creation to marketing and product testing, this will only be a glimpse into our initial Crowdfunding Influencer Campaign, how things went, and what surprises awaited us. Buckle up, folks, because there was a bit of turbulence!
Talent, Influence and Capital
An influencer campaign is a social media blitz but with a twist.
It is similar to an ad campaign, but with the added magic of influencer personality and charm. It is a synergistic relationship, where influencers gain additional exposure, and brands get to ride with their wave of followers “frugressively”.
In the next few paragraphs, we will explore the four main reasons that the influencer portion of our campaign was such a major focus for us.
Why Win Friends By Influencing People
First and foremost was content creation.
Influencers are skilled at creating engaging content, which is why their audience followed them to begin with. The content that they created was able to be repurposed across various other marketing channels to increase its overall visibility.
For this campaign, we created a composite video that featured snippets of all of our influencers contributing a few words to an overarching message and CTA.
The composite video we created from these influencers was one of our most viewed posts to date because each of them came with their own built-in reach and engagement.
We were able to leverage all of the influencers’ audiences combined, which meant millions of eyes on our custom social media posts. And even more importantly, these were mostly folks who normally do not engage with or have any knowledge of Nobody Studios.
Authentic Influence
Working with authentic influencers, rather than actors, gave the posts an innate resonance and credibility because they were already relatable personalities for their followers. It allowed us to build trust among their audience for our brand. We reached people and places, on a rich and personal level, that would not have been possible without our new partners.
Lastly, the reason that we selected the partners and ambassadors we did was because we were looking to broadcast our message to a wide array of people of every color, and across every continent. We wanted to source ideas and solutions from every corner of the globe. Our portfolio companies within the Studio all aimed to solve different problems, and required access to various demographics in order to validate our ideas. By identifying influencers who aligned with our target market, it allowed us to more effectively reach them with more focused marketing efforts.
Unleashing Influencers Will Be a Studio Superpower
Ultimately each influencer campaign contains its own DNA. Because this campaign was not only asking for an investment but also building brand awareness, it was an uphill battle.
Educating people on new ideas is both costly and time-consuming. At the scale we plan to grow, we needed to find a more scalable approach.
Selecting influencers that were ultra-aligned and asked the right questions resulted in our biggest investments.
The specific influencers that brought in the largest amounts interviewed some of our senior leaders on niche podcasts with very targeted audiences. This allowed for an open discussion on topics most relevant to each individual demographic.
We had originally assumed that contracting individuals on the Influencer Relationship Management platform we invested in would be very easy. “Click on a name, offer them a fair amount and they would post for us, right?” Well, if only it were that simple.
We ended up reaching out to thousands of influencers with only a hundred or so that ended up in solid communication. Out of those, we narrowed down to 30 aligned influencers ready to take action.
What were the reasons that we worked with one-third of the people that we spoke with? Well, there were a number of different reasons.
Some people did not want to commit to a CTA that involved investing; especially with the number of financial scams across the current social media landscape.
Other influencers were looking for far more money than their impact on our audience would normally command.
But what really surprised us was the number of influencers there were from SouthEast Asia that were interested.
After further research, we realized that most of these accounts were companies looking to make the most of a thriving industry, and not individuals with a genuine base of followers.
Real Results
At the end of the campaign, we had 904 investors in 55 countries that contributed over $771k in a little over 3 months.
Raising capital wasn’t the only goal of the campaign — believe us there are many more effective ways to raise capital. Our mission is to bring more Nobodies to the party, build our worldwide community of crowd-infused innovators and capability to run influence campaigns such as these in the future.
We established our global brand in the venture studio space, increased our number of investors and overall number of Nobodies that now know about the Studio, making it a success.
We’ll continue building these relationships with authentic influencers who embody our brand’s values and resonate with our target audience. But we’re not stopping there!
As we ready for future campaigns for our portfolio companies, we’re eager to collaborate with individuals from different niches and experiment with the uncharted territories of influencer campaigns through creating compelling content, and providing value to the everyday lives of our community.
Stay tuned; the best is yet to come!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PK Naidoo
Marketing Maestro, Nobody Studios
Born near the chief seaport of the Republic of South Africa, P.K.’s experience in communication, project management and logistics boosted his prior company’s bottom line by quadrupling sales. His implementation of new systems and procedures, overseeing compliance, and fostering a positive, solutions-driven approach has improved every one of his previous teams. Within the Nobody Studios marketing team, P.K. brings a consistency that gives everyone a boast of confidence.
