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Newsjacking lands GRIN 1,000+ customers in a year

Direct-to-consumer brands have to do more than just optimize their websites to meet their share-of-mind and share-of-market goals. With the advent of social commerce tools like ratings and reviews, customers have been able to make data-driven decisions based on other shoppers’ experiences. More modernly, they’ve had the assistance of social media influencers and micro influencers who can share a box-opening experience and personal opinions about a product.

Retailers are increasingly supplementing their marketing channels with influencer marketing campaigns. Similarly, their digital marketing tools are extending to influencer marketing platforms that can increase the ROI of social media marketing across social media platforms.

In many cases, attracting and retaining influencers require financial incentives, but it isn’t always clear how effective individual influencers are generally or during a specific campaign. For one thing, influencers are individual content creators. Many organizations struggle to achieve their goals because they lack insight into the influencer market, including individual influencers.

GRIN, the pioneer of the world’s leading creator management platform for influencer marketing, helps brands reach even more consumers through authentic influencer relationships. With the company’s marketing tool, brands can easily identify and engage the right social media and media influencers, monitor their success, and get other insights that help boost influencer marketing ROI.

Thousands of the world’s leading brands – including SKIMS, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Mejuri and MVMT – depend on GRIN to help make creators feel like trusted, empowered partners. Working together, brands and influencers can both become household names.

Challenge

The rapid cultural change occurring in today’s digital world requires access to many more types of creators than a brand may have used in the past. While GRIN has always had a pipeline in place to help brands identify more creators, the company needed greater visibility in mainstream media, so that more creators could discover the many benefits of the company’s platform and community, and brands would have access to even more creators.

One challenge was that the company didn’t have a steady stream of news every month that could keep it in front of the creators it wanted to attract. Another challenge was that its vice president of marketing needed help developing media relationships and being positioned as a credible go-to source among journalists.

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Strategy

The company was operating in a crowded space of influencer marketing platform providers. To succeed with its growth and visibility goals, Bospar would need to break through the noise to educate creators about what makes GRIN unique, not the least of which is forging authentic relationships with brands. 

Understanding the company’s low profile at the time and the fact that social media tends to create its own news cycles, Bospar suggested a newsjacking-focused program that could keep the client’s executives in front of media, whether the company had news to announce or not. 

Newsjacking is hijacking a story already in play and providing comments about it. In this client’s case, that meant providing commentary on an array of relevant topics, including marketing, influencer marketing, AI use in marketing, and the de-influencing trend in which influencers focus on a product’s shortcomings rather than its merits.

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Campaign Results

1000 + Customers
80 Pieces of coverage

Success

The Bospar team sifted through the many media opportunities each day, looking for stories that had the most reach and impact.

To ensure a successful newsjacking program, Bospar did two important things: First, the PR team kicked off a daily news monitoring program that focused on specific topics that were relevant to the client and its goals. Since Bospar is a fully remote agency, Bospar’s East Coast PR team monitored breaking news while PR professionals on the West Coast and in other time zones helped pen and execute the pitches.

Second, the client needed content creation in the form of ghostwritten quotes that were not only credible but also something the media would actually use. To accomplish that, Bospar needed to understand what the reporter and the outlet wanted to accomplish with a piece. Armed with that knowledge, Bospar provided content that helped round out a story or which served as the basis for a follow-on story.

The PR team also made sure to pen quotes that were original and thought-provoking to increase the probability of inclusion. The PR professionals at Bospar also wanted to make sure the quotes tied back to the client’s key messages and recommendations.

During the months when the company had news to discuss, Bospar adjusted the newsjacking accordingly to raise awareness of GRIN’s own accomplishments and momentum. During the months the client lacked news, Bospar doubled down on newsjacking efforts to ensure the client’s vice president of marketing commented often on timely topics, including entertainment, fashion and sports.

What became clear to GRIN is that time is always of the essence – and that there’s a need for speed – when it comes to newsjacking so the client made sure he was as agile and available to reporters. This was important because the very nature of newsjacking is fast-paced. When a story breaks, there aren’t days or weeks in which to articulate a point of view. It must happen within minutes or hours. So, in addition to having a bank of pre-approved quotes that could be used instantly, Bospar created media templates for entertainment, fashion, and sports, which allowed the team to work on various topics in parallel. Having the various templates ready to go also meant Bospar always had the right contacts at its fingertips when the PR team needed them.

Bospar-PR-Messaging-Marketing-Grin

Detailed Results

The client has enjoyed 80 placements since it hired Bospar in mid-2022, including coverage in top-tier publications for a total of more than 505 million impressions. More importantly, Bospar’s outreach resulted in additional media opportunities beyond the newsjacking including stories exclusively about the company. To date, some of the most notable placements include Adweek (Will Russo), Bloomberg, Digiday (Julian Cannon), Marketing Brew (Kelsey Sutton, Katie Hicks), Mashable (Christianna Silva), Modern Retail (Maria Monteros) and The Wall Street Journal. 

In addition, the tables have turned: Some reporters are proactively reaching out to Bospar for timely perspectives from the client instead of waiting for a pitch. This alone proves three things: the newsjacking worked, the spokesperson was credible, and the media trust both the client and Bospar to deliver timely and relevant information. 

Notably, when Bospar started working with this client, the company had virtually no share of voice. Now, the company consistently appears as one of the top contenders among nine competitors. 

In May and July 2023, the company enjoyed the top spot!

More importantly, Bospar helped the client meet its business goal of attracting many new creators.

A detailed view of the results includes:

Reached Key Audiences

Bospar continues to help GRIN increase the size and quality of its target customers (brands and influencers). The vice president of marketing is now a credible, sought-after spokesperson.

“I was surprised how fast Bospar’s newsjacking strategy started to produce results. The team is very proactive and quick-thinking. They can turn a media-ready quote in just minutes, which is truly amazing. Even more impressive is the business impact the newsjacking strategy had. We wanted the efforts to attract more creators and brands, which it continues to do. We now have more than 1,000 more customers than before we started working with Bospar last year.”

— Ali Fazal, VP of marketing at GRIN

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