One of the most common questions clients have in first meetings is which influencers we at Cure Media “have to offer” them. The question reveals how young and undeveloped working with influencer marketing still is in Sweden and how many are still not familiar with the best ways to optimise their advertising through these new channels. And who can blame them when things have developed so quickly?
Many who work with influencers try to sign them to their own company to later be able to offer them and their channels to potential advertisers. For the company there are obvious benefits with this model as they will then have influencers under contract for a certain period of time. Even for some advertisers this can be viewed as a positive as they will be able to easily select influencers from a limited set who somewhat match their values. But what if none of the specific profiles fully matches the campaign that they had in mind? The company that has influencers under contract will continue to pitch “their own” profiles. If they have enough of them a good match can be found, but otherwise the campaign might need to be adjusted to match the influencer rather than the influencer matching the campaign. The result could still turn out great, but often it doesn’t end up being exactly what the advertiser had in mind.
We at Cure Media think that there are better ways to work with influencer marketing. We don’t look to exclusively sign profiles to us but rather maintain a network of hundreds of interesting influencers who collaborate with us on specific campaigns – when it feels relevant both to the advertiser and the influencer! Instead of offering the advertiser a handful of predetermined options we have with our model the possibility to develop the precise concepts for the desired message and then contact the influencers who are a perfect fit for the concept. The resulting campaigns both better meet the advertisers needs and feel more authentic for the influencer to be part of, two essential factors to success with influencer marketing.
But there are other benefits to this model of working as well. Because the influencers we collaborate with aren’t signed to us but rather free to work with whomever they feel like, we have to put in a little extra effort to make sure everyone is as happy as possible with each campaign. Without any written guarantees that an influencer will keep working with us we have to rely on dedicated work and great campaigns to make both advertisers and influencers want to collaborate with Cure Media again in the future. We can’t afford to take anything for granted and love the hunger that this brings!
As influencer marketing continues to get established in Sweden more people will see the benefits of the free model of working that the influencer marketing experts at Cure Media advocate, and hopefully the question “so which profiles do you have?” will shortly be replaced by “how do we create the perfect campaign?”
