From Rags to Riches: Daniel Wellington

Influencer marketing, a hot-topic term in 2019, yet so many brands miss the mark. The biggest fail that comes to mind is the unfortunate partnership between Keeping Up With The Kardashian’s, Scott Disick and Bootea, a healthy detox tea. If you’re not familiar, Bootea partnered with Scott Disick to promote one of its protein-based products when everything that could have gone wrong did. Upon prepping Disick for the sponsored post, his contact at Bootea sent an instructional email with the suggested copy. Well, unbeknownst to Bootea, Disick copied and pasted the entire email into this post caption. Yes, you read the properly. Talk about a fail.

Although celebrity influencer campaigns tend to have a bad rep, one brand succeeds tremendously when it comes to its influencer marketing strategy. Daniel Wellington. If you’ve never heard the name before, Daniel Wellington (DW) is a Swedish watch brand founded back in 2011. Since about 2014, DW has taken full advantage of the trend of influencer marketing, and for good reason. From sponsored posts to affiliate codes, DW utilizes influencer marketing to bring in a majority of its revenue.

Founder, Filip Tysander, decided to invest $15,000 in influencer marketing campaigns and in four short years, that investment resulted in roughly $220 million in revenue (Wilson, 2018). But how did he do it?

With just $15,000 invested in his business, Tysander knew he needed to be strategic in his marketing efforts. Instead of focusing on traditional advertising, Tysander decided to focus his marketing efforts on social media, and more specifically the most visual network there is, Instagram (Wilson, 2018). DW’s influencer strategy, before the term even existed, began with gifting people watches in return for a post on Instagram of them wearing the watch. DW tracked its influencer efforts by giving each influencer an individualized discount code. By 2018, DW received the most influencer mentions out of any brand on Instagram (Gilliland, 2019).

source- econsultancy — Source: socialbakers

DW targeted a wide array of influencers thus resulting in a wide range of creative content. Through this influencer campaign, DW also had the opportunity to capitalize on all of the user-generated content (UGC) coming in. It took advantage of the UGC by creating its entire content strategy revolving around it. Because of the mass amount of influencer postings, DW also decided to capitalize on a branded hashtag contest that would allow “non-influencers” to also win a free watch by sharing their photos accompanied by the hashtag #DWPickOfTheDay.

Daniel Wellington has surely taken influencer marketing to the level it is today. It has succeeded beyond expectations and continues to utilize this strategy to grow the brand and increase engagement on a daily basis. If any brand is looking for tips on how to best kick start an influencer marketing campaign, I would highly recommend mirroring what Daniel Wellington did.