3 Ways Traackr Helps Valmont Cosmetics Run Efficient Influencer Product Seeding Campaigns

Valmont Cosmetics is a long standing skincare brand that is built on a foundation of expertise, specifically in Swiss cellular cosmetics. The brand is known for offering high quality, high end, and effective anti-aging products. 

While the brand was founded over 35 years ago and has built up a loyal consumer following, it recently decided to invest in influencer marketing in order to expand its reach. Given that the brand spans many different large markets, including North America, Europe, and Asia, it brought on Traackr to help its teams organize, manage, and optimize its influencer marketing programs. In the past year, Valmont Cosmetics has utilized a variety of influencer marketing strategies but has been particularly focused on improving its influencer product seeding campaigns.

In the article below, Corina Stan Eriksson, social media and influencer marketing manager at Valmont Cosmetics shares how the brand has utilized Traackr’s influencer marketing platform to improve its influencer product seeding campaigns. 

3 Ways Traackr Helps Valmont Cosmetics Run Efficient Influencer Product Seeding Campaigns

Influencer Discovery and Vetting

“Finding top influencers used to be a more difficult process — our teams would spend a lot of time searching directly on each social platform, digging for data, and aligning on which influencers to pursue. Traackr’s influencer marketing platform helps us quickly find the right partners by providing us with performance metrics, audience demographics, and content keyword search capabilities.” — Corina Stan Eriksson, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager at Valmont Cosmetics

Finding top influencers is still a challenge for many brands. In fact, 81% of marketers reported that finding the right influencers is one of the main barriers to building a successful influencer program.

This is why Valmont Cosmetics decided to use Traackr’s influencer marketing platform to find and vet potential influencer partners. The brand focused its search on two categories of influencers:

• An aesthetic category, that focuses on partners whose content aligns with the brand’s specific image and tone. This usually includes lifestyle and beauty influencers, UGC creators, and entrepreneurs.
• An educational category, that focuses on partners whose content provides education and expertise in the beauty industry. This usually includes professionals such as skinfluencers, facialists, makeup artists, and esthetician doctors.

Using Traackr’s influencer marketing platform, the Valmont Cosmetics team was able to find influencers within these categories by:

• Searching through past influencer content for relevant competitors, topics and hashtags
• Refining their search with influencer criteria such as job title, gender, location, language, platform, follower count, and engagement rate
• Filtering their search with audience demographics such as age, gender, language, ethnicity, location, interests, and brand affinity

Not only did this process make the team’s search more effective, it ultimately saved them time! (If you’ve ever had to search for influencer partners directly on a social media platform, then you know just how frustrating and time-consuming this can be). 

Influencer Outreach and Relationship Management

“Given that our brand produces luxury products with unique ingredients and patented technologies, we choose not to engage in mass influencer product seeding campaigns. Instead, we handpick each potential partner and only reach out to those who we feel confident would be a good fit for our brand and have high potential to truly love our products.” — Corina Stan Eriksson, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager at Valmont Cosmetics

It’s no secret that influencer product seeding — if not done carefully — can lead to a lot of time and product waste. In fact, Traackr’s recent State of Influencer Product Seeding report found that 65% of marketers responded that their brand will send product to an influencer, even if they didn’t post after receiving a gift. 

This is why sophisticated brands like Valmont Cosmetics approach influencer product seeding differently. Instead of aiming for volume (or sending out to the largest list of influencers possible), the team uses Traackr to select certain influencers and create personalized emails, UTMs, and briefs. 

Once the Valmont Cosmetics team established its small, targeted list of influencers, they then use Traackr to:

• Segment influencers by custom groups (remember those two categories we talked about above?). This not only helps them understand which influencers were earmarked for which categories, it also helps them understand how the categories performed against each other.
• Manage relationships and define workflows. Figuring out who owns what on a project can be messy, especially with a busy team. With Traackr, the Valmont Cosmetics team was able to assign relationship ownership to individuals, use relationship stages to align their teams on the progress of each influencer, define engagement workflows, and assign review statuses to clearly communicate who’s aligned and who’s not.
• Streamline communication and collaboration. Traackr enabled the Valmont Cosmetics team to create templated, customizable emails for their influencers, easily communicate goals and expectations for the campaign, and manage internal tasks (like who is in charge of sending out products to influencers).

Previously, all of his work had been done through a series of tools (spreadsheets, documents, and emails and DMs spread out across different platforms). While this is not uncommon in the influencer marketing space — a recent survey found that 56% of marketers still use spreadsheets to manage their influencer product seeding campaigns — it can end up being incredibly hard to manage! 

Pro tip: Cut the back and forth by letting your creators select their preferred products! With Traackr’s Shopify Integration, you can seamlessly integrate and automate product fulfillment with your influencer marketing workflow.

Influencer Product Seeding Campaign Reporting

“The Brand Buzz feature in Traackr has been particularly wonderful for our team. It allows us to see all content produced by all of our influencers across campaigns. Before, we used to manually look for and save mentions on our phones… now we can see everything in one place.” — Corina Stan Eriksson, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager at Valmont Cosmetics

One of the most difficult things about influencer product seeding campaigns is tracking success. Given that there is no guarantee that an influencer will post, it’s often a hectic scramble to find and log influencer mentions as they come in. 

This is why Corina and her team loved using Traackr’s Brand Buzz feature, which automatically pulls in influencer content and mentions from campaigns. In addition to automating influencer content gathering, and storing them in a centralized place, Traackr also provided Corina and her team with relevant data for their campaign reporting. Specifically for influencer product seeding campaigns, the team pulls statistics like:

• Number of active influencers
• Number of mentions
• Examples of best performing content
• Benchmarks against competitive brands

Pro tip: Want a shortcut for pulling together your report for your next influencer marketing campaign? Here’s a free template. 

What’s Next for Valmont Cosmetics?

The team has seen good results so far, so it is continuing to ramp up its influencer product seeding and sponsored content campaigns. The next challenge that the team is planning to tackle — they want to launch influencer affiliate programs!

If you want to stay up to date on the incredible work that Corina and her team are doing at Valmont Cosmetics, follow the brand on Instagram @valmontcosmetics.