This post is for the purposes of a college assessment.
During Week 6 of the Digital Marketing Seminar Series, Ashley Walsh shed light on her experience as an influencer marketer. She brings with her rich experience working at Matchstick (a social media agency) — developing influencer marketing campaigns for several global and Canadian brands including L’Oréal, Beam Global, Maple Leaf Foods, and Coty. Her portfolio gets more international with North Strategic/Publicis Groupe coming into the picture, where she began working at in 2018, and engaged with clients such as Samsung, Sobeysand American Express. Her achievements include growing WedLuxe social channels, a luxury wedding magazine, to more than 500,000 followers.
In taking us through her influencer marketing journey, Walsh pointed out that influencers are different from advocates. While content produced with influencers is ‘sponsored’ (i.e. promotional), the content involved with advocates is ‘organic’ (i.e. through word of mouth). The former is contractual, easily measurable, and guarantees targeted messaging & audience reach while the latter is non-measurable, largely offline, and without guarantee of messaging.
Some important trends Ashley brought to light are:
- Utilizing TikTok to engage with young audiences.
- Combining live streaming with e-commerce to speed up the customer journey.
- Moving away from ‘super-polished’ content to ‘subtely-edited’ content
- Placing emphasis on diversity and representation
Some of my personal projects involve the study and use of influencer platforms and streaming services. In my experience, influencers can be solid investments for the right brands in the right niche. Funny enough, most digital businesses appear to be miles ahead in this domain than traditional ones. Some orthodox medium-sized businesses have no idea what they’re missing out on. On the other hand, tech startups, digital brands, sports apps, new-age fashion & accessory labels, seem to be killing it in this domain.
Ashely’s insight into her journey reinforced my growing appreciation of the opportunities marketing agencies have to offer: in particular, the ability to work with several large and interesting brands in the capacity of one official role. My chats with former George Brown students who are currently in their ‘dream jobs’ also revealed that experience they gained through agencies was ‘invaluable’ or ‘critical’ to their current position, a pathway only reconfirmed by strengthed by Ashley’s corporate story.
