Working with influencers - when less can be more

Here at Bottle, we’re big believers in doing things in a way we call “simply moreish.”

It’s a neat concept, and one we swear by. Don’t say something in five words if you can say it in four. One piece of coverage in a high DA, top tier target publication can do more for a brand than ten in titles that are irrelevant. In essence, it means make whatever you do actually affect the results for your client. You can focus on the essentials without sacrificing quality.

Recently, I’ve wondered if there’s a way our simply moreish mentality can be applied to working with influencers, since influencer marketing is ‘so hot right now’. There can be an automatic default to look at the heavy-hitting ‘megas’ on Instagram, with their millions of followers, and dream of the wonders it’d do for our brands if they’d give us a shoutout. And it’s true that the opportunity to see your name or product in front of such a huge audience should never be sniffed at. But I wanted to know – could an influencer with a significantly smaller, yet highly engaged following also offer huge value without that vast reach? 

Back in January, I had the opportunity to find out. Goodyear, a client of ours, had launched a new all-season tyre, and I was in the process of sending a test vehicle out to a number of different motoring journalists and bloggers. One of whom was a YouTuber called Volkswizard.

To provide a little context, the sort of YouTube channels that immediately come to mind when I’m thinking about consumer motoring include the likes of Schmee, DriveTribe (run, incidentally, by Top Gear alumni, Clarkson, Hammond and May) and Car Throttle. At the time of writing, these three channels have a hugely impressive, combined following of around seven million subscribers. Volkswizard, by comparison, has twenty-eight thousand.  

Still, we were keen to see if there was an opportunity to collaborate. As you might have guessed, Volkswizard is a specialist Volkswagen channel. Well, not only does Goodyear’s own market research show that the Volkswagen Golf is a particularly popular vehicle for all-season tyres, but as luck would have it, our test vehicle was, itself, a Volkswagen Golf. So, we asked if Volkswizard might be interested in taking the new tyres for a spin.

A few weeks later, Volkswizard posted their video. It’s been live now for just shy of two months and has around sixteen-thousand views. Make sure to give it a watch; it’s a great review. 

It might sound though, like sixteen-thousand views is a little low. After all, DriveTribe posted a video two months ago of James May checking out a new Lotus, and that’s currently sitting pretty at two-and-a-half million views. 

But this is where our simply moreish approach seemed to kick in. Because within an hour of the Volkswizard video going live, we were spotting comments such as these:

As the hours rolled past, even more came through. At one point, we worked out that the video was garnering a comment for every hundred views. You might be thinking that a 1% comment rate doesn’t sound all that impressive. But when you consider that many experts would see 0.5% as strong, it becomes a pretty great level of engagement. To put that into further context, the video of James May’s Lotus is currently hovering just below 0.2%.

On top of this, there was the fact that the vast majority of these comments were incredibly positive, ranging from praising the quality of the road-test to outright declaring that these tyres would be the next the viewer purchased.

Goodyear were very happy, too. When I caught up with our client a few days later, I heard that she was so pleased with the video that she’d chosen it over all of the other coverage we’d achieved in order to present it to the wider business. As feedback goes, it doesn’t get much better. 

So, I asked myself the question again; can a smaller influencer be as valuable for a brand as a larger one?

For me, it’s now a simple answer. Yes. They can. But if a smaller influencer can be as valuable as a larger one, the next challenge becomes working out when they are.

At Bottle, we take an audience-first approach to virtually everything we do. Whether it be a press release, a hero campaign or simply a tweet, the most important thing to nail is who you’re trying to show it to. Get your audience right and the results will follow.

This, I think, is the answer to our question of what makes an influencer valuable. Look at Volkswizard. Twenty-eight thousand subscribers might not be the largest audience in the world, especially when you think of who’s “influential” on YouTube. But theirs is an audience that lives and breathes cars. A group of petrolheads that tune into this channel for genuine recommendations, and who might actually make a purchase off the back of a review. The digital content created is there for the fans, with huge neon arrows pointing down on what they should be buying.

Think of it this way. How many of the two-and-a-half million viewers who watched James May on DriveTribe do you suppose will head out and buy the Lotus he was looking at? I’m willing to bet that it’s far fewer than those who’ll buy a set of Goodyear all-season tyres after seeing them on Volkswizard.

To wrap up, if our work with Volkswizard has shown me anything, it’s that a smaller influencer can provide a huge amount of value (and a few sales as a bonus) for a brand. They tend to have a dedicated base of fans and are much more in touch with the issues that ail their followers. With that in mind, the goal should always be to take a laser-focused, audience-led approach. The number of views might not be astronomical, but the engagement – and therefore the value of those views – can certainly make up for it.

We should strive to work with the right influencers, rather than simply the biggest.