The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line. The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line. The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our Lunchtime Webinar Express series. We've got a great session today with Sarah Bentham, who is UK marketing manager for Husqvarners, global brands, Flymo and Gardena. If you've watched any of our Webinar Express sessions before, then you'll know how this works, but for those joining us for the first time today, I'm very warm welcome to you. It's great to have you with us. I'll just very quickly give you some info on how today's webinar will run, how you can submit your questions for the Q&A and where to go if you want to watch the session again. We'll be hearing from Sarah for around 30 to 35 minutes. We'll then move into a 10 to 15 minute Q&A to answer some of your questions. 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If you want to turn your webcam on Sarah, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Hi, thanks Judith. Good afternoon everybody. I'm going to take you through today's webinar, Winning in the Gardening World with Influencer Marketing. I'm Sarah Bentham as Judith said, I'm the UK marketing manager within the Husqvarna Group. I'm currently working in the Gardening Division and looking after the brands Flymo and Gardena. So what I'll take you through today is who we are as a group, what is influencer marketing, some strategies and planning tips and then some case studies of what we've been doing over the last few years with influencer marketing with Gardena and Flymo and then we'll look at some key takeaways as well. So the Husqvarna Group in brief with the world leader in outdoor products for forest park and garden care as well as equipment for light construction industry. We've been in the business for 333 years, it's a very long time and have over 14,500 employees with a net sales turnover of 47 billion sec which is around four billion pounds worldwide. Our sales distribution is predominantly in Europe with 57% and the rest in North America and the rest of the world. One thing very close to our hearts which I'll touch on in one of the case studies is Sustainavate. So this is sustainable innovation and the group sets some 2025 targets for this so carbon emissions we want to reduce absolute CO2 by 35% the current rate of that is 30% so we're almost hit that by the end of 2022. We also want to launch 50 new circular innovations again we're already at 32 now so with more to come in the next few years so we'll definitely hit that target and we want to empower 5 million people to make sustainable choices around the world which we've just started to measure. So as I said I work within the Gardena division so we're the premium European garden and brand number one in water and in Europe and sorry number one in tools in Europe and number one in water and globally. Our target market is passionate gardeners and we're very retail centric and multi channel compared to the other divisions within the business. So within the Gardena division these are our divisional brands. I work on Gardena and Flimo but we also have Orbert which is in America and Neta in Australia. So for Gardena and Flimo I just wanted to touch on who our target audiences are because it's relevant when we talk about case studies. So the Gardena target audience is the passionate gardener someone really passionate about gardening they'll spend their weekends and all of their spare time in the garden it's their hobby it's their passion and we have three sub-segments of this the traditional the urban and the passionate and they're all passionate about gardening as I said but they have differences in demographics attitudes towards gardening and shopping behaviour whereas Flimo totally different target audience they're the convenience seekers the outdoor space is really low maintenance they don't enjoy gardening but they like to have a neat and tidy space they just want the tools that are easy to use and make it really quick for them to complete the gardening tasks so that they can get on to what they really enjoy which is the garden space. There are three distinct sub-segments of convenience seekers these are enthusiasts, practicals and occasionally so what is influencer marketing influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements made by people organisations or groups seen as influential experts in their area and why should brands use influencer marketing because it boosts brand awareness it increases product visibility and affects purchase decisions it demonstrates your authority, credibility and thought leadership within that segment and it directly advertises to your target audiences and encourages user generated content and where so all social channels including Facebook, Instagram YouTube, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Twitter the ones that we utilise as a brand are mainly Facebook, Instagram and YouTube but we do work with influencers on the other channels namely Tiktok and LinkedIn so influencer marketing there are three different levels of influencers there are nano-influences who have up to 10,000 followers the audience is really limited but it's cohesive then you have micro-influences that many brands do use they've got over 10,000 followers really high engagement rate so it's still a small audience but the audience is organically built and really really engaging they love the topic that the influencer puts out on their channels and their engagement rates are typically above 8% the micro-influences that we use for example in the garden industry their engagement rate is typically around 25 to 30 so you can find micro-influences with a higher engagement rate but as long as it's over 8% it usually costs a good influencer and then a macro-influencer this is someone with over 100,000 followers that have a large audience typically less engagement unless it's someone who is like a high profile celebrity or someone who has been building that audience really organically over time and they're very engaged in the topic so influencer marketing it's growing year on year worldwide the market size is now worth $16.4 billion so it's huge it's grown from 2016 from 1.7 billion and Lease if we can now launch the poll please so I'd just like to know from the audience today whether you budget for influencer marketing have you budgeted for influencer marketing in 2023 working for your businesses or brands so please select one either yes it has increased versus 2022 yes the budget is the same as 2022 or no we don't have the budget or no we don't see the value in influencer marketing we haven't looked into it yet so please if you could vote while we're waiting for the results to come through I'll just talk you through the next slide which is a you go poll from 2023 that they've just put out saying that of the brands in the poll who budget for influencer marketing increased from 37% in 2022 to 75% in 2023 so now 75% of brands have budgeted for influencer marketing they're having it as a separate budget line which is yeah it's really interesting so here's the results so 13% yes and it has increased versus 2022 that's great to see yes the budget is the same as 2022 that's 20% of our audience no we don't have the budget 48% well there's some tips coming up in a little while to try and help you with that and no we don't see the value that is a shame and I hope these slides end on that and if we can close the poll please so as I said brands that are budgeted for influencer market and is increased from 37% to 75% and the spend is quite big for some brands with over $500,000 spent that's 11% of businesses spending that and 43% spending less than 10,000 typically we'll be spending that second segment spending between 10,000 and 50,000 depending on the brand and the influencer or the campaign or we'll pushed up to the next depending on the year so social strategies, this is strategies and planning just to set the scene of Gardena and Flymo I started with the business six years ago and when I started with the business all of the social media was internally managed we did no influencer marketing at all so we met with our PR and comms agency and sat down and went over some strategies for the brands and where we wanted our social media to go and we worked closely with the agency and they now manage or since then have managed our social channels and our influencer marketing as well so that's been for the last five years so when we sat down with them six years ago we did a social order we set together a strategic plan a long term plan and then a plan for the year ahead and this is what we did so we looked at the brand and comms strategy long term and short term we created a plan and a budget and we set key goals and KPIs we created a calendar of events for the following year and we also set a small budget which is a really good tip we set a small budget for anything reactive so like a one hit reactive campaign depending on what's going on in the season planning I would say that timing is definitely key with influencer marketing the influencers are always very busy or they have the schedules and calendars booked up months in advance so when you're looking at influencer marketing and you want a really strong hitting campaign you should definitely get in touch with them months in advance so we always plan for a season ahead so for example we'll start our plan in June ready for launch the following March so yeah typically nine to six months ahead we will start contacting the influencers and putting the campaigns together another great tip is to pick your approach whether you do it organically yourself go out and search for the influencers put those lists together or subscribe to a platform one thing I would say is to definitely build those relationships with the influencers influencers are people they're not businesses and one thing that works really well for us or has worked really well for us in the past is to go over and above so yes you'll have a product that you want to focus on and a campaign strategy and you'll talk about the product and you'll send a product or service to the influencer to talk about on their social channels but when you do this the best thing to do is over send them additional so for example if we sent someone a loan more and we wanted them to talk about a loan more for a specific campaign we would also send them some merchandise in a goodie bag or a collaboration product just so they get a little bit more and it helps build that relationship up with them also collaboration so when you're looking at a key campaign or an influencer campaign make sure that you build and make it stronger by this I mean look for other brands to collaborate with for example we do collaborations with other brands within the garden industry non-conflicting or we'll look to do a collaboration with the retailer where that product's been sold so I've got some examples of it coming up but it does make it a stronger campaign and it hits a wider audience as well approach so we would always sit down for the year ahead and map out exactly what we're trying to achieve going to a deep dive on the creative idea and create a brief budget this is paid versus gifting so we would look at the budget per campaign whether we wanted to pay the influencers to try to do it on a gifted basis again going over and above giving them additional product or additional services from what the only subject we were talking about and then pick your platforms and content so is it going to be on Instagram is it going to be on TikTok what contents the most engaging for that platform for example Instagram it's Reels and then also with the influencers agree usage and terms and make sure that you're setting the time bound results as well so the different types of campaigns that we do with our agency internally we've got four different types of campaigns so we've got a general campaign which is just a one time event it's planned it's time bound it aligns with the overarching plan and it's a mix of nano to macro influencers we have event 360 which is physical and digital a mix of micro and macro influencers we have seasonal campaign so this is over a season it's a continuous campaign with key moments throughout the season and a one hit campaign this is something reactive or standalone with a sole objective or message so in terms of influencer selection when you're going out and looking for an influencer what we would generally do per campaign is create a macro micro and nano list and then from that list we would then sit down and go through do they align with our target audience are they authentic authenticity I would say is the number one most important thing when working with an influencer it needs to be someone who would use or does use your product or service for example for us it has to be someone with a garden for Gardena it has to be someone who's passionate about the garden who grows their own vegetables who spends a lot of time talking about gardening it can't be inauthentic otherwise it's just going to turn off the audience we need to qualify them for brand safety as well check their engagement rates check the demographics and then check them for fees and also the best thing to do speaking with influencers is be human like I say it's people talking to people it's not a business talking to a business so we always take out the corporate side and we make it really personal and build that relationship another great tip is to catch a rising star so someone within your industry who's really influential who's building their channels up here on year and catching a rising star is fantastic because you can start that relationship up when they're small and then as they grow their audiences and their reputation within that segment they've got that relationship already with you so we're actively doing that at the moment also always have a contract very very important to have a contract with them set your deliverables set your budget, set the timeline what you want them to say yes you have a brief but always have a contract if it's a paid influencer campaign Gifton is different you would only send them a non-de-illed brief but for a proper paid collaboration always have a contract with the brief as well we tend to keep the briefs really flexible so that authenticity is still there so when we talk about being authentic rather than it being really over scripted you must say this you must say that you must use a product in this way we select our influencers because of their persona because the audience loves them and making them do something unnatural to what they would normally do it makes the content really inauthentic so we love to just give our influencers a general brief this is the product we want you to focus on this is the messaging and go away and do what you do best must be authentic we'll talk about it again this is a really great example of a really bad campaign which was fire festival campaign I'm not sure if everyone can remember it but this is where a lot of high profile celebrities and influencers all posted an orange square all over social media and social media blew up but all of these paid influencers paid a lot of money to create the formal effect on social media it backfired and it ended up being the worst campaign because I've got Bella Hadid here but there are many other celebrities that also participated in this paid collaboration and because they posted on something that they didn't do themselves that they didn't really have any information on because it was just a paid basis it ruined not only fire festivals reputation which didn't have a good reputation anyway but it also tarnished their reputation so just making sure that they fit with you and they use your product or would use your product is really key with this it can have a negative effect so make sure you're passionate about the subject matter they are the right persona that they work in the correct environment and then tailor the approach to the specific influencer for example if you're working with more of a comedian make sure that you've got you allow them to have a comedy element in there like play their strengths to help your brand with their audiences and also a D to FTC regulations and this is why it's important because Yougov did a poll and 62% of consumers agree it's unethical for influencers to promote products they don't use themselves it's a huge turn off like I say it tarnishes their reputation but it also has a bad effect for your brand so if you're going to budget and invest in influencer market and you must make sure that you're doing it in the right way and it's not a scattergun approach or it's not well thought out and mapped out because it can have a bad effect social success so this is where I'm going to talk about some of our campaigns that we've run over the last few years with Gardena and Flymo so as I said when we're planning a campaign will plan 69 months ahead for the next season we work with our agency really really really aligned with them and yeah they like I said they run all of our PR and comms and our social media the help with the influencers and ambassadors as well so we sit together we create an event for each brand or multiple events for each brand we make sure that these campaigns are educational and useful so they're not just a product launch for example with no use to the audience we make sure that there's value-added content in there that it has purpose that it's fun and we also like to tie in a retailer collaboration as well to see the full 360 of sales so the first one I'm going to talk you through is First Cut Sunday so five years ago our agency approached us to suggest why don't we create an event right at the beginning of the season that kicks off the season for the year so great idea so we called this First Cut Sunday there was a bit of an educational piece in that as well whereby consumers were contacting us on social media asking when to first cut the grass in the year how to first cut the grass so that they didn't damage it there was a lack of knowledge there so we thought great we'll have an event at the beginning of the season it kicks off the season and we'll work with influencers from the last five years it's just snowballed to be honest we work with a mix of macro and micro influencers and it's also gathered press attention because we've been doing it for five years and it is the kick off event of the season the press the national press now come to us and our agency and say right when is First Cut Sunday because now they know that it should be in the calendar and they come to us asking for that date because then they know it's the date that they then talk about the garden and season or the kick off of the garden and season so this 2020 I was going to say this year but this last year last year we worked with a mix of seven key influencers we created 32 pieces of content and we had a total reach for the campaign of 2.3 million we worked in collaboration with eBay so the influencers would have a swipe up to eBay or would suggest to go and by the products from eBay and year on year we had a 400% increase on sales on eBay which is fantastic and as I say we received 18 pieces of national press around First Cut Sunday as well so really successful campaign that we built an event from five years ago and every year we've repeated that event and kept the consistency and now we have influencers and press coming to us asking if they can collaborate asking when the event is the same with the retailers so we've been working on this with eBay but now other retailers that we distribute via they're also coming to us asking when First Cut Sunday is because then they'll start their promotional activity and they'll change the content on the site so great campaign the next one was garden staycation so garden staycation was created it was one hit campaign we've not repeated the campaign since it was reactive to COVID so when COVID hit us marketers had to be really reactive and adapt our budgets and plans and come up with marketing campaigns when everyone was trapped in the house we all remember it, it's a bit scary now to think about COVID so what we did we sat down with the agency and well over teams, not sat down we sat over teams with the agency and came up with garden staycation this is whereby we challenged five key influencers, macro influencers to transform their gardens into staycation holiday destinations and it worked really, really well it was a four week summer challenge they had four weeks to transform their gardens the campaign itself got 386,000 views a total reach of 1.2 million with no boosting as well none of this is boosting, this is all organic 25.3 thousand engagements and almost 4,000 comments to really strengthen it and make it highly engaging we incorporated a competition as well whereby 20 lucky competition entrants could win a suitcase full of fly more goodies to have a staycation at home we've made it really fun and engaging and it was also award-winning we won the northeast market awards 2021 adaptability campaign as well and then we go on to have a week so have a week is in May every year again it's a campaign an annual campaign that we now set in our calendar it's been running for the last three years we created it with our agency again working really really closely with our agency because we did some research and there was an educational gap with the younger generations the new market byer generations with hover they didn't understand hover they weren't purchasing hover so we were relying on an aging population on hover basically so we needed to educate the younger generations on what hover is and easy to use so we created hover week so we work with a mix of micro and macro influences and get them for a full week in May to go out and cut their gardens using a hover we also ran this in collaboration with home base so home base have been working on this with us for the last two years they work with us on sales promotions and they also share all of the content as well so last year we received 20 pieces of social coverage a reach of 352,000 we also had 12,000 clicks to home base like I said there was the click link or the swipe up on all of the influencer content and our hover sales increased year on year by 259% so yeah really fun connects with our audiences we call them the flymore family and it just it works really well hover is our market if you don't know flymore we invented the hover lawnmower back in 1964 so flymore is hover out of all lawnmower sales in the UK hover is 25% and of that 25% we own 91% of the hover market so it's our market so we need to make sure that that market is stable and it grows year on year especially with the younger generations of home owners coming in to the market the next case study I'm going to talk about is the event 360 so this is where we mix the physical with the digital so this example is Gardena in Chelsea flower shop last year so we had a trade stand garden with a really sustainable message about yeah food waste about our carbon footprint and about plastic waste as well as there were some really key sustainable messages in there which aligned with a new product range of sustainable tools made from recycled consumer plastic so what we did was we again sat with our agency collaborate Brainstorm and we thought how can we enhance this physical event using the digital yes we're at the event but how can we let everyone who's not attend and also see the event and the key messages that we're putting out there at the event we also like I say were launching the product and we hosted an exclusive influencer event at Chelsea flower show as well so I'll show you some images so while Chelsea flower show was launching we worked with a mix of six key influencers really passionate gardeners and they were at home in their own environments using and talking about our new range of products we were at Chelsea talking about our fantastic stand our garden our sustainable brand ambassador and hosting press and influencers there as well and talking about our socials and then we held an influencer event so the influencers who were talking about our product launches on their channels they then came along to the event they posted loads of content about the garden interviews with Lane it was really really great really engaging that full 360 we ran a retailer collaboration with Argos promoting the products as well and run an engaging competition to win a bundle of the products so again if you're doing any events this year sometimes it's good to say to an influencer or why don't you come down we'll host an event, we'll do a talk we'll have some drinks or some food and really create that especially if it's somewhere prestigious or somewhere where your influencers would like to be sometimes just gifting some tickets is enough to get them there and then they're going to post the content it's not always about paid it's sometimes also about gifted and then we have our seasonal campaigns so we work with high profile influencers and we also have some ambassadors on the Gardena brand these are more longer term campaigns so they'll run for a full season the overarching comms plan is in line with them as well and we select dates of key moments through the season when the messaging is going to hit so a great great example of this is Lynn Lamborn she's our ambassador of sustainability for Gardena and we worked with her last year on full key moments throughout spring to autumn about how to garden sustainably and it wasn't just or this is a sustainable product or he's me growing some potatoes it was a lot more than that it was really engaging creative content like how to's how to make a Dory how to make some s'mores out of apples that I've just picked with my apple picker how to create some nice cocktails it was really fun and engaging and the reason Lynn is the right person for this to create our content for us is because she aligns perfectly with the brand and the messages she's a sustainable warrior on waste she's known for that she's very passionate about her garden and the messaging's right but we also did while the film while we were filming is we optimised the content for three platforms that we made it go a lot longer so for example we had it in six formats so that it was formatted for Facebook for Instagram real stories grid and it was also optimised for YouTube so yeah working with a videographer as well is always great when you're creating this kind of content because it can go like a much longer way than them filming it themselves a lot of influence it film it themselves yes and Lynn does a lot of that for us but for these key campaigns these seasonal campaigns getting a videographer involved and getting that content chopped up into different formats it is really key so this example one example is Lynn's autumn pruning video which we also put onto YouTube and it received 1.53 million impressions and 25,000 views so again really successful and we're hitting that passionate audience now this is an example of a one hit campaign we do a few of these in season depending on what's going on in the season to be reactive or to be stand alone it's really product focused sometimes we'll do it in collaboration with a retailer it's sales or awareness driven and it's generally we'll do this with a macro influencer and again we'll make it really fun authentic and playful a great example so our agency came to us last year and said wow have you seen the pool guy on TikTok he's got 13.9 million followers almost 14 million followers and he's got 404,000 followers on Instagram and they said we think he would be great to do some garden activity with Flymo so because he's out there he's cleaning the pools he's already in other people's gardens he's got an engaged audience of cleaning why don't we get him to work with Flymo blowback so I said yep no problem his fees were within the reactive budget it was great that's what it's there for and that week we worked with him his TikTok reel received 1 million views so just off the back of should we send him a blow and work with him we got 1 million views and then we did it in collaboration with Amazon and we sold 1,500 units that week it was just incredible another great example is tired and tested if you don't follow her you should she's a comedie mum she calls herself and she worked with us on our robot campaign it was standalone we just we loved her and we loved following her and yeah we thought she'll be great for growing robot awareness and robot sales so we contacted her and yeah she worked with us in collaboration with eBay and we sold 252 units with 80,000 views so a great great for awareness aligns with her audience really fun and playful fab another great example of the one hit is for Gardena we wanted to grow awareness of Gardena now being sold in home base we had 1m space in home base and we were competing against another brand right next to us and we thought right what can we do how can we utilise influencer the influence of influencers so we worked with JP's life and loves and KJJ home they have different audience sizes one's micro one's macro so 48,000 and 446,000 and the content was just fantastic so again we mixed the physical with the digital so we got them to go into a home base store to say wow look this is Gardena and they filmed themselves in the store which we got permission to do in advance of and then they took the products home they used the products you can see JP there in the top corner going through his sprinkler to cool himself down after being in the garden all day but again it's just it's that one hit it's really cost effective and it's selecting those influencers that are right that are passionate about the gardens and their audience is aligned with our audience and we received almost 40,000 views on JP's and 502,000 views on KJJ home and the content they created was just fantastic they went over and above what they were contracted to do because we sent them extra product and we worked with them really closely so it always works and then gifting for those who don't have a budget specific to influencer marketing or just want to do some experimentation with it really, gifting I would say always try for years and you can have a few surprises sometimes it doesn't work which is fine we've had a few cases where we've sent out some product or some robots and we've made them really personalised and skin them and name them but they don't always get posted about ones that I will mention Joe Wicks obviously does nothing on a paid basis he only promotes his own products on social media but he will post about products that he does love so we contacted him and he said we'd love to send you a robot for your garden he said great, yeah, send me it I'll try it out so he set it up in his garden and did loads of posts about it completely free which is great because it was a product that he loved and then every time he exercised in the garden especially over COVID or he was playing that with his kids it was there, it was in the background it was product placement it's really, really great and about doing some collaboration with us about doing some influence and marketing and unfortunately it was just way out of our budget at the time when we were in talks with the agent and we just said look do we have permission to get Kelly's address and just send us something and they said yeah no problem so we sent her a surprise, we sent her a robot which is what we wanted to work with her on and we also sent her a cake so we worked with this cake maker of her garden with a picture of a house in the background with a robot and she posted like three stories in a grid post about this cake and then the robot was featured in it with her partner at home it was just phenomenal and we got all of that for free just the cost of the cake and the product so it's always worth a try always ask permission and always send them a surprise as well so don't just send them the product or anything else that's eye grabbing or catch their attention or give them that nice feeling like I say it doesn't always work out sometimes you're sat by your phone and looking at their Instagram every night thinking oh they're not going to post about it which is fine but yeah if you find a celebrity or influencer and you can't really afford it try gifting and see what happens so key takeaways influencer marketing can be a success year on year we have over the last five years and we've now got a group of influencers who we work with year on year it's really really authentic and those relationships have been built so I would say yeah try it if you haven't already tried it and definitely put it in your market and plans and budget planning and timing is key like I say always plan where ahead you start those talks with those influencers sometimes last minute you'll have to change your plans or your timings but that's fine we're in marketing we're used to that build relations as well if you go over and above for them they'll go over and above for you it's a person and everyone loves a freebie and then also think outside of the box so build and collaborate as much as you can work with other brands within your sphere for example in gardening sometimes we'll work with a compost compost brand or we'll work with a garden furniture brand or we'll work with a luxury drinks brand and then we'll collaborate with a retailer where both of those are sold and for them it's the cost of some product placement and for you it just strengthens it because they'll share the content all of their audiences will see it it just really makes the campaign score the extra mile this is my this is my contact information if you have any questions or want to feel free to share your examples or you want to collaborate if you're a brand out there and you think wow Flymo is someone I would love to collaborate with please get in touch there's my email address and I'm also on LinkedIn dash sarabentham now I'll hand back over to Judith I hope you really enjoyed the presentation I certainly did I thought it was very interesting that's really great Sarah so we're now going to head into the Q&A session we've already got some great questions coming through to get us underway and we'll get to those in a second but if please do continue to post your questions and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 15 minutes or so and just a little reminder that if you want to comment on the socials about today's webinar then you can use the hashtag CIMEvents so the first question it's quite a straightforward one how do you find your influencers I think you mentioned an agency but how would you brief them on how to find influencers and do you have a little hit list that you would like to get apart from you Kelly Brooks who might be too expensive you've got a list of famous gardening people to be honest I'm a bit of a I love consuming social media myself and I've got a little list of influencers that I love to follow but what we also do which is a little bit cheeky is look at who's following Flymore and then look at who they're following as well and you'll always find some great because you know who your Flymore family are or your audiences are and then you can go off and find influencers that way but yeah we work really really closely with our agency LPR comes in from a social media agency and they create a hit list for us and then whenever we're out on social media and see someone and think wow they're absolutely fantastic we'll also put them into the suggested list to go through but they'll also come to us so for example first after first cut Sunday or after have a week on Flymore we'll be inundated with influencers once you start building up those campaigns you'll be inundated with influencers and saying oh wow I saw this campaign please can I work with you when's the next campaign please put me on the list so we've also got that hit list as well of influencers who've approached us right so how many could you manage at one time you're ad hoc gifting types but then you've got ones for your series campaigns how many people would you sort of have per campaign or altogether that would be manageable yeah well it depends on the size of the agency and your budget really it's manageable and it's within budget as well because some influencers can be more than the callybrooks of the world and have a really smaller audience size so watch out for that as well some influencers they're coming out a crazy phase at the moment but yeah per campaign you'll have seen it in the examples we used it's generally less than 10 that makes it nice, easy to manage, authentic and yeah not too crazy we don't go out and work with 100 at a time especially with the fees the fees are also increasing I showed the chart about the investment, the businesses spending year on year and it's obviously the fees are also going up with inflation on that as well to make it a larger amount yeah so these two questions are sort of linked you say that if someone's one of your proper influencers that you're working with on a formal basis how would you go about putting together a contract with them and then the second part of that is is part of that contract your agreement would you be allowed to approve the content before they post yeah so we always do that as a rule of thumb especially when working with more of a celebrity this year I'll give an example this year we're working with Joe Swash Stacy Solomon's partner really excited we're working with him on Flymo as a seasonal campaign so three key moments through the season and we've got a contract with him that we've worked on with his agency and as part of that contract we have said in the terms that we want sign off on the content before it goes live it's just a standard usually because we want it to be authentic we obviously don't want to have too many rules and regulations in place when signing off but if someone's mentioned the brand name wrong or like smaller things or they've got a competitive product in the background they haven't realised things like that I would definitely say have it signed off in terms of the contract we have a standard contract as a group that we had created through our legal team but there are standard contracts on the internet and if you need help or you want to see an example of a contract you've got my details please get in touch I'll be happy to help so can we ask I think we're all probably going to be looking out now for first cut Sunday now that the spring hopefully is on the horizon for us looking in the UK sorry about the overseas people in the land it's a bit of a permanent sunshine they won't have that to look forward to but for this year who are you planning to be working with are you able to give us some little hints of who to look out for and follow and to say alright remember hearing about that or is it a secret first cut Sunday we're at contract stage with the micro and macro influences so I'm not able to say at the moment until they're signed off but like I say Joe Swash is going to be working with us so he's working with us on first cut Sunday so yeah if you follow Flymo Flymo UK on Instagram and Facebook we'll be sharing all the influencer contents you'll be able to see but it's a mix of influencers that we worked with on the campaign last year and some new fresh faces but the one we're most excited about is obviously Joe Swash really excited for him to get involved in first cut Sunday with us we have dated it the 26th of March sometimes we move it depending on the weather because we're very weather dependent sometimes our campaigns move so if the grass starts growing and the temperature goes over 11 degrees and you hear that lawnmower sound outside we do bring it forward a little bit because it's all weather dependent but at the moment it's 26th of March well we might have to hang on up here in the northeast then there might be all moving away I thought longer when you mentioned someone like Joe Swash would you have categorized him you were saying about the different demographics for each brand who would you see him and Stacey appealing to to influence so Joe really fits with our Flymo so we're working with him on Flymo he definitely fits with our Flymo family convenient seeker audience if anyone follows him he's not very good at DIY he doesn't garden he loves socializing and he's really fun family focused so he fits perfect and when we looked at the demographics of his audience as well he was perfect for the brand because our products are really easy to use easy to set up even the robots are really easy to set up and then once they're set up they'll cut your grass all season for you we thought he's just his persona his audience really aligns with our audience we're just happy that he's signed the contract and he's working with us this year but they've just had a baby so I'm waiting to send his product until after he's come off paternity leave I saw that so there's a question here as well about can there's some and I guess you're looking at people who are very authentic as opposed to the examples that you've given the very famous global celebrities that might get involved in certain things is there a consumer skepticism at times about the lack of trust in the influences I guess you try to read that out for authentic people who share your brand values but is in general would you say beyond your company yeah there is a skepticism out there and we try and avoid it as much as possible like we talked about the authenticity rather than scatterbun in it and just paying a bunch of influences because they've got large audiences also be careful make sure you check the demographics of audiences as well because some influences pay for their audiences and the false audiences so make sure you look into the detail just because someone's got over a hundred thousand and they call themselves macro it's not always the case sometimes it's a false narrative but if you look at recent polls like on YouGov or an influencer hub there are polls out there about lack of trust in influences and yeah I think it's just more of a skepticism and especially with all of the celebrities at the moment being fined and like Kim Kardashian for example posting without the FTC regulation she was fined for that because yeah it can be misleading but then the audience knows as well the audience will think oh they don't use that they've never talked about that they don't go in the garden so it's best to definitely align your influences with your content, your product or your service got a question as well do you usually mention about having like partnerships with people like Amazon or eBay do you always run with an incentivised offer on the campaign or literally just a link through to buy the product do you sometimes offer discounts or other incentives? It depends on the retailer generally retailers will because they'll want to jump on the back of it but it's more the retailer decision so we'll work with them with the sales manager so we have account managers per account here with the retailers will sit with their buyer and their marketing teams ahead of season and say these are our campaigns these are the dates do you want to get involved and generally they'll say yes because they'll love it and they'll set the promotional plan around that not always though for example our gossip Chelsea flower show they didn't run any promotions but we still sold out the product so yeah it depends on the retailer okay and I think we've got time for one last question we've got a lot of questions coming through unfortunately I'm going to get a lot of emails then probably or followings so one last question your personal favourite campaign to work on so far and why? Oh wow that's really hard um I would say the 360 Chelsea flower show campaign I mean it's Chelsea flower show but it's the first time we've really done the full 360 where we've had an influencer event at an exhibition we've mixed it with the influencers posting about the products at home as well and then the retailer collaboration, the competition it was just phenomenal it just went crazy and it was mixing that physical with the digital it was really interesting to see that yes you're at the exhibition yes there's a huge footfall there but there's a huge audience of passionate gardeners who don't go to Chelsea flower show or can't get tickets giving them snippet and making that the message from the garden that we had go further so it's not just staying at that one location at the exhibition, it's also getting those messages to a wider audience we created a lot of content at Chelsea we had our videographer going the film, the build, audiences loved that so Lynn and the videographer went in every day and they filmed what they were doing on the garden every day to build it and that content was so engaging we put it on YouTube and on socials and we got so many thousands of hits and views and it's all on Gardena YouTube if you want to go and see it but yeah that was my favourite campaign Chelsea's fun and will you be going to Chelsea? Yeah we've got another trade stand garden same space, different similar messaging so it's sustainable but it's more modern sustainability so rather than the upcycle it's more modern sustainability and how you can make something look really modern and innovative out of recycled products so if you're at Chelsea or follow us on social and you'll be able to see the build Brilliant, thank you very much I think that's all we have time for now Sarah that's been really really interesting and thank you for delivering that presentation so unfortunately that's all we have time for in our webinar today and I would like to say thank you to Sarah for the fantastic presentation and to the CIM Northeast Group who organised the webinar we do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey in the next few hours and would love to hear your feedback it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts and what you would like to see from our webinar series in the future we'll be back with our next webinar which is China Ovation Why it Matters to Your Brand with Dominica Delieto from the award winning agency Emerging Communications you'll find further details listed on the events page of our website where you'll also be able to register for the session so that just leaves me to say a final thank you to all of you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon thank you