Influencer marketing has a 'really big future' in nutrition, says specialist startup Reachbird
Founded in 2015, Reachbird is an influencer marketing specialist that has developed an online platform to connect brands with influencers for social media advertising campaigns. The company has a global network of around 15,000 registered influencers and a 500,000+ pool of identified influencers to provide brands with suitable matches, along with campaign management tools and in-depth analytics to track and analyse ad campaigns. Reachbird also has a Sports branch that connects brands with professional athletes.
Currently working primarily within Europe, the Liechtenstein-headquartered startup wants to expand in the coming year and says sports and nutrition has huge potential to drive things forward.
“I think it has a really big future,” Marvin Stravs, sales manager at Reachbird, told NutraIngredients.
“It's not a small sector and I think it's growing because people like nutritionists are getting more important at the moment, because health is getting more important, as well as fitness and all sports,” Stravs said.
Athletes and influencers combined
Stravs said that whilst there is, of course, significant opportunity for nutrition brands to team up with professional athletes, there is also strength in working with 'regular' influencers.
“The athlete is using nutrition in competitions or really high-level sports, so they're really experts in the sports segment. And of course they have more reach and, compared to influencers, they have fans not followers. But that's not to say they're more valuable, because the influencers can talk about other topics and have another background to be integrated into a campaign.
“...The best is to mix. So, you work with athletes like sponsorships but mix this with influencer marketing because they have another target group.”
Working with individual, “micro-influencers”, Stravs said, can be very powerful on social media because they are well-trusted by their followers. This is particularly important for companies and brands in sports and nutrition as it's an increasingly competitive sector, he said.
“Brands have to find a way to communicate and find a unique selling point (USP) and I think influencer marketing is a really good way to communicate USPs or build their image. Our experience is that brands in the nutrition area are just working with really specified micro-influencers because the products are really specified too.”
These micro-influencers, he said, can communicate when they use the product; why they use it; what the effects of using it are; and even what other products they combine it with – concepts really difficult to communicate online or through regular marketing and advertising.
“I think it's an authentic way of storytelling. People don't trust adverts anymore because there's just so much, and all the ad blockers show that consumers don't want to get more ads.”
Stravs said social media channels like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are particularly powerful for experiential influencer marketing.
Direct: Brand-to-influencer
Stravs said the overall goal of Reachbird is to directly connect brands with influencers, what it calls 'self-service' or cutting out the agency step, to enable brands to better understand the true scope of social media campaigns – looking at data and tracking reach and reaction.
“We want to help the brands to make a data-driven decision, looking at all the key performance indicators. We want to do that with our platform because we can show all this data and then we want them to make their own decisions...The concept of Reachbird is to help brands do influencer marketing on their own,” he said.
Working directly with influencers also enables long-term partnerships to be built, which is important in terms of trust and getting campaigns right, he said.
“A lot of company campaigns are with the same influencers they worked with before. Long-term relationships between influencers and brands are the best... For the influencer, it's really easy because they know the person they're talking with in the company and they know what the brand and the campaign is about. That's the most important thing in the future, is getting more towards long-term relationships in influencer marketing campaigns.”
However, Stravs said Reachbird still works with lots of marketing agencies and will continue to do so because not all brands have the time or knowledge to work directly on influencer marketing campaigns.
He said the company can tailor involvement according to company needs, either working with the direct brand-influencer 'self-service' model; providing a full service where it identifies influencers, develops and manages campaigns; or a combination thereof.
“In the past, it was a little bit more full-service because brands didn't know much about influencer marketing and just wanted to try and thought maybe they should just trust a platform like us who has experience. But I think it's moving more and more towards self-service – they want to try it themselves.”
