Last year, amongst the insanity that was 2020 we decided to offer a new service to our clients, influencer program development and relationship management. It started out as researching potential influencers to collaborate with for one of our clients and after fine tuning our approach, we decided it was something we could offer as a service at Wolf PR.
Lauren, our resident art nerd, has been primarily responsible for developing the program. She’s also an influencer in the art world (hello nearly 12K followers!) and has first hand experience collaborating with brands for social media campaigns (side note, did you know one of her instagram images was used to promote the The Vertigo exhibition at Vienna’s modern art museum, Mumok? She was on posters all over the city and on the cover of the exhibition catalogue). This was a fun and exciting task for her to get to be on the other side of social media collaborations. She started out researching interior design, lifestyle, fashion and sustainable influencers for BIPOC and woman-founded, sustainable sofa brand Sabai.
Lauren’s research methods allow us to work with a blend of accounts with 100,000+ followers and micro influencers. We’ve learned that there’s value in smaller accounts with high engagement and that it’s not all about the big follower counts, although those are certainly great to work with as well!
Lauren is also a micro-influencer who loves connecting with her audience of almost 12k and so she really enjoys working with the smaller accounts because she knows how they take the time to engage with their follower base. Some of our favorite influencers that we’ve collaborated with so far are Natalie Myers, Natashaburnsbrown, and Alysonsimplygrows. We have several collaborations in the pipeline right now that we’re very excited about!
A big part of the influencer program is obtaining photography assets for our clients to use for their social media. When we begin negotiating with influencers we ask for photography assets and provide specific parameters for what kind of photography our clients would like. Some examples are getting images without filters, images of the product from each angle, and for Sabai we specifically ask for people and dogs on the sofa when possible.
We use influencer collaborations to create brand awareness and right now we’re gearing to use it to promote upcoming collection launches for our ceramics client Haand. We’re experimenting with follower sizes and constantly learning about new ways to collaborate beyond product placement in stories and feed posts. One fun way that we collaborate with influencers is doing giveaways. We’re also about to dive into the world of affiliate programs with influencers and getting Sabai’s sofas featured in Reels on Instagram.
One of Lauren’s favorite research missions so far when working with Sabai is researching pet influencers in order to promote their new program, The Sabai Standard. Pets destroy furniture sometimes and Sabai took that into consideration when creating one of their new initiatives, Repair Don’t Replace. Sabai will retail replacement cushion inserts, pillow inserts, sofa legs and slipcovers so that customers can repair their sofas rather than replace them. By working with pets we get to partner with influencers and obtain imagery for Sabai that helps support the Repair Don’t Replace storyline. Lauren is very passionate about #adoptdontshop and she thinks this is a great opportunity to work with and promote rescue dogs (She has a super cute 13-year-old rescue Jack-Rat named Cilla!). She’s very much looking forward to reaching out to some fabulous pets and working with them to promote the new program.
