Digital marketing transformation doesn’t always come easily for heritage brands. They have been around for a long time and have generally gained a loyal client base. However, with an ageing customer base and a rapidly changing media landscape, Barone Ricasoli needed to reach new generations of consumers.
To address this issue, the Swedish wine importer WineWorld together with the digital communication agency Pronto created a unique job opening at the Baron’s vineyard in Tuscany. The winning applicant would spend a few days at Brolio, the castle that belongs to Barone Ricasoli, to create a limited edition wine, which would then be sold at Systembolaget in Sweden.
To succeed with the campaign, Pronto used the influencer marketing tool Traackr in order to identify, engage and analyse the impact from brand ambassadors and job applicants.
Identifying the right influencers is key
Influence is not about popularity - influence is about context and content. In Traackr, you enter your keywords defining the relevant conversations you are targeting and the tool will bring up the most relevant influencers matching your entries. You can also add filters by bio, location etc.
You can see influencers’ online footprint and scroll their social content to understand their conversations and decide whether they are relevant or not to your project.
Traackr’s conversation engine then allows you to know in real time what they publish on each platform, what they think and engage with, even what is trending within your community, which can be helpful to build your brand content strategy.
Traackr’s influencer relationship capabilities gather all your interactions with your influencers (whether from relevant Twitter handles, emails or manual notes) in one place, making it easy to measure the level of engagement and manage conversations, together with your team.
After finding and adding influencers to your project, you can sort your influencers by reach (the size of the influencer’s audience), resonance (the influencers’ engagement with the community) and relevance.
For the Barone Ricasoli case, we started with a search that helped us to choose the four top wine influencers in Sweden. These influencers would be part of a jury that would select the new winemaker for Barone Ricasoli.
Listen and engage at the right time
Digital marketers need to spend time listening to online conversations led by influencers so that we understand ongoing discussions and create activities and content that will resonate with our online community.
For the Barone Ricasoli campaign, we broadened the search after finding our jury members. This helped us to activate and engage Swedish wine lovers in order to encourage them to apply for the job opening as a winemaker at the baron’s castle.
700 applications were submitted and by activating digital wine influencers found in Traackr, we could drive traffic to the job posting and help applicants to share their applications (more shares and engagement would attract the jury interest).
Monitor, analyse and measure your impact
Monitoring brand mentions and hashtags will enable digital marketers to keep engaging in conversations, for example with link shares, share of voice and sentiment.
Best practice summary
- Listen, listen again and continuously listen
- Identify the right digital influencers
- Create a story worth sharing
- Inviting the top four key influencers in Sweden to be part of the jury
- Inviting anyone in Sweden to apply (over 25 years old)
- Generating visibility for the six finalists
- Offering a money can’t buy experience with the Barone Ricasoli Brand
Brands need to allow their team to spend time listening to online conversations led by influencers so that they can understand ongoing discussions, create activities and messages that resonate with the online community.
For Barone Ricasoli and WineWorld, Pronto identified the initial set of key influencers and invited the top four ones to participate on the jury, which helped give credibility to the campaign and guaranteed earned media from the onset. Engaging with the right influencers is key for the success of any campaign, as only genuine commitment and passion can drive a real emotional connection to a brand.
With this winemaker job opening, Pronto and WineWorld created a campaign that provided ongoing opportunities for true engagement:
With the influencer marketing practice maturing, best practices emerging and programs starting to bring measurable and proven results, Traackr is helping social media marketers move from tactical and local programs to develop global and scalable influencer marketing strategies.
