CPG Influencer Marketing: Creating a Win-Win Relationship with Your Agencies

4 min read.

At a Glance: 

• Challenge: As Colgate-Palmolive accelerated its influencer marketing program, it needed greater visibility and coordination between country hubs and its agency partners.
• Solution: Traackr was implemented to serve as Colgate-Palmolive's system of record for influencer marketing uniting regions, brands and agencies on one platform for discovery, campaign management and measurement.
• Results: With streamlined workflows, data transparency, and standardized performance measurement, Colgate-Palmolive's personal care brands, including Sanex, have delivered significantly better results while reducing campaign costs by 40%.
  

In 2019, Barbara Mugica, Associate Director for Personal Care Digital Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive Europe, took on the integration of influencer marketing into Colgate-Palmolive's Online Acceleration Center, charged with the digital transformation of the organization’s brands. Her team’s mandate was to empower the brands to scale influencers programs in a cost effective and measurable way. 

“Influencers can do a job no other marketing touchpoint can deliver,” says Barbara Mugica, Associate Director for Personal Care Digital Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive Europe. “They are a vital part of our marketing strategy with a unique power to deliver authentic content and experiences to our audience.” 

Implementing influencer marketing across an international consumer packaged goods (CPG) firm can be incredibly complicated. It requires the ability to transparently collaborate across many teams (both in-house and agency) that have been historically siloed, a shift in strategy from traditional media to social and digital channels, and access to reliable data and technology. 

Bridging in-house and agency partners

It is common for multiple agency partners to play diverse roles across CPG organizations. Colgate-Palmolive is not different with a host of different agencies driving influencer campaigns across European markets. 

Prior to 2019, the brand teams had very little visibility into their agencies’ decision-making which made it challenging to justify budgets, establish best practices and standards and drive efficiencies. 

For the brand teams, it was nearly impossible to measure “apples to apples” across countries and products. There was an overall lack of transparency, therefore making each campaign a leap of faith where the brand team’s only option was to trust what the agency recommended. Ultimately, the lack of reliable and consistent data available to the brand teams made it impossible to challenge recommendations and manage programs to achieve greater performance.

Using data and tech to understand impact

In January 2020, Colgate-Palmolive implemented Traackr as its system of record for influencer marketing. The rollout was orchestrated by country, beginning with Spain, Italy, France and UK and later extending to Germany and CEE. The team at the Online Acceleration Center focused on: 

• Bringing all influencer profiles and campaign activity into one platform for all brands and countries. 
• Creating a standardized influencer vetting process that ensured the brand and agency teams were looking at the same data. 
• Establishing a measurement framework and unified key performance indicators (KPI) so campaigns, regardless of their objectives, could be measured and compared. 
  

“By getting everyone on the same page, using the same technology, with transparent access to data, we all gained better visibility into what works most efficiently so we can confidently invest more,” explained Mugica.  

To illustrate the impact, we compared two similar brand awareness campaigns for Sanex 0%, one in 2019 pre-Traackr and one in 2020 post implementation of Traackr, the teams were able to generate 6X greater reach and 2X greater engagement rate, while reducing campaigns costs by 40%. 

How Colgate-Palmolive uses Traackr

“Traackr’s platform, insights and expertise helped us generate greater impact per Euro spent by increasing transparency and coordination and enabling our teams to run impactful influencer campaigns that resonated with our audiences and drove measurement results.” 

Specifically, Traackr enables the Colgate-Palmolive teams to: 

• Partner with the right influencers: Leveraging data-driven insights, shared between the brand and agency partners, to find top performers who are brand safe, on-message, and speak to the target audience
• Coordinate and collaborate with colleagues and agencies: Including tracking relationships and communicating with influencers in a shared platform providing visibility to everyone involved. 
• Measure the performance of campaigns: Enabling communication of results across the organization with shareable interactive reports.
  

When asked what advice she has for others in the personal care industry embarking on a similar journey Mugica shared, “For marketing, it is essential to see the data, analyze what you do, and master performance. Traackr makes it possible for us to understand the impact of our influencer marketing efforts, in much the same way as Nielsen enables us to understand TV. It is vital!”