The Cotswold Company

Building an Influence(r) Marketing practice

  • Objective

    The keystone of our efforts at Inpulsus is aligning both strategic planning and tactical execution of Influence(r) Marketing while building efficient in-house practices for our clients. If you want to take advantage of what a true Influence(r) Marketing program can deliver, simply running Influencer “campaigns'' is never the answer.

  • Context

    We sat with James Birtwhistle, CMO of one of the leading UK Interior brands - The Cotswold Company - to discuss how Inpulsus helped redesign and revitalize their Influence(r) Marketing program. An experienced multi-channel marketer, James was kind enough to highlight below some of the key factors in our work together:

  • Ongoing Impact

    • 4.34% engagement rate

    • 114% growth in brand mentions

    • 600% growth in video views

    • 121% growth in Instagram followers

    • 5% growth in Average Order Value [AOV]

“We saw Influence Marketing as important to our new marketing mix, but weren’t sure how to level up the program.”

Influence(r) Marketing is not a new concept and the speed at which many consumer brands have embraced Influencers is only increasing. Yet, almost all brands that begin some form of IM quickly hit a wall: Did we pick the right Influencers? What are our KPIs and do they ladder up to our marketing goals? What’s the best internal team structure and workflows? What technologies do we need to scale up? We hear these and many other concerns from senior marketers.

It’s not easy. Managing a live program, regardless of the shape and size of the effort, while also trying to redesign that program can be challenging. For The Cotswold Company, Inpulsus introduced a work plan that married both ongoing execution and optimizations with future-state planning.

 

James Birtwhistle
CMO
The Cotswold Company

“Inpulsus first led us through a Social Listening effort to understand the online conversations that mattered to us as a brand - and to our Influence strategy. The result was a comprehensive picture of online activity that revealed many new and critical insights that we simply didn’t know.”

Our first step in any practice design is to listen to the current online conversations around a brand - what it says and what others are saying about it. More often than not, we find early misalignment with the themes that a brand wishes to participate in and the audiences that those themes reveal - are they really who you want to reach? For Cotswold, the core demographic of the ideal customer hadn’t changed much in its thirty-year history - or so they thought.

In a detailed Benchmark & Listening phase, our team shed light on a completely different customer type who were very active in talking about a specific Cotswold product category - Men who comment about couches and sofas! Without this data-driven insight, Cotswold’s existing Influencers and their audiences were destined to remain the same. Remember that what an Influencer brings is their audience to your brand. You cannot hang your hat on a monolithic Influencer type, you need to widen and deepen the roster.

“We had seemingly good Influencer engagement, but it was up and down, very ad hoc. Our team wasn’t quite sure what would turn an average Influencer engagement into a great one.”

The best Influence(r) Marketing practices begin and end with successfully managing Influencer relationships. While campaign structures are good to focus certain activities and content, the real value from Influencers happens in between campaigns. At Cotswold, Inpulsus found good campaign thinking was in place, but inconsistent engagement by the social media team to fill the gap with its Influencers given their limited resources. We helped Cotswold build a playbook of Influencer outreach that reinforced the reality that great Influence(r) Marketing is an “always-on” practice.

“With our push to grow beyond our direct-response heritage, our brand team was working hard to rebuild awareness (including a full company rebranding), but we needed better integration as many teams pursued independent content creation. We had to be more efficient.”

Content married to Influence is a potent combination. At Inpulsus, we call this - Confluence. By assessing existing content strategy for the brand, we led Cotswold through a Confluence strategy to match the right content with the right Influencer. This included a variety of content formats and eventual diversity of channel promotions. These pairings were then mapped directly to existing campaign calendars at Cotswold, such as Back to School, Holiday planning, et al.

“And of course, we were running everything with manual tools… a spreadsheet here, an email list there, no way to roll up performance reporting or tracking.”

The evolution from “Word of Mouth” Marketing to Influence Marketing has impacted not only strategies and tactics, but also sparked a similar evolution of tools that can be used to manage, automate and scale the practice. Highly integrated platforms can now be employed to drive Influencer discovery, activation, agreements and unified performance reporting.

Navigating this landscape of toolset options is a big job as the space is incredibly dynamic with new options launching all the time (including some very high profile and recent acquisitions between technologies). For Cotswold, Inpulsus led an impartial review and selection process for such a platform that included feature set requirements gathering, SLA detailing and final pricing and onboarding plans.

“Wonderfully, the journey that Inpulsus took us through not only elevated Influence Marketing into a real practice for us, but was the catalyst for much better cross- functional integration across Cotswold’s teams - Brand, eCommerce, Product R&D, Customer Service…“

Reaffirming our mantra of “Influence at the Center”, we see Influence as the glue between many different stakeholders in the business. Why? Because Influence itself resides in many different parts of your business ecosystem - not just as Customer Advocates, but also as Industry Thought-Leaders, Brand Partners, Vertical Market Experts, Corporate Advisors and even Employees.

As James notes, our program workshops became the focal point for many cross-functional themes to be vetted and re-invigorated. Influence(r) Marketing is not only now visible and understood within The Cotswold Company, but also supported from the Board, CEO through the CXOs, across departments and at the team-level.

“Lastly, the proof is in the pudding. We’ve had a stellar year of marketing performance, driving KPIs past most of our targets. And with our redesigned Influence Program, we could see for the first time the real KPIs and their place in our overall reporting.”

The Cotswold Company uses a very advanced econometric model, allowing the team to understand the impact of all media investment into revenue. However, within earned and owned activities (not PPC), the triggers were not fully understood and left a gap in the model. Inpulsus helped guide Cotswold and its Media Mix partner to lift key metrics from both Influence and Social Media marketing into the broader formula. And now, over six months in, key metrics such as competitive share of voice, engagement rates, video views and follower counts have surpassed original targets.