How Ideal of Sweden's Influencer Marketing Team Grew From 0 to 26 People (and $100M in Revenue)
Case Study
Pain points before Scope
Hard to find new profiles: ended up on the same profiles over and over when sourcing through Instagram
Difficulties to scale globally, stuck to local markets
Hard to find profiles in new markets
Scope made it easier to
List more profiles per employee, set higher listing goals per employee
Find influencers on new markets (globally)
Enter new markets, and quickly get up to speed
Grow team from 6 to 26 people in two years
Automate the listing process
Find new profiles aligned with audience faster
Let's go back to when it started?
What were your main challenges back then?
Main challenges before Scope
Listing/scouting - find new influencers
Manual mess with Instagram: ended up on the same profiles over and over
Scope made it easier to
Find new profiles
Automate the listing process
Exclude contacted profiles
In Scope, to be able to exclude profiles we've reached out to before is a life safer.
How did Scope help you to go from 6 to 26 people in two years?
When we were 6 people we were mainly focusing on the Nordic countries. Then we have entered a lot of new markets. That's of course the main reason. We're now in Germany, Netherlands, France. Basically all around the world. And of course we need more people to be able to handle the collaborations.
It sounds you have built more of a global brand since we got started. You were at $40M when we started, and now $100M. Did Scope help you shift the mindset from local to global? Or has it been like that from the beginning?
The intention the whole time has been to grow, and to become a global brand. But I couldn't imagine when I started that I would have a team of 26 people. I thought, maybe we will be 5 people. Scope has contributed to accomplish this improvement. But our intention, regardless of Scope, was to grow into other markets - but it has definitely helped us to automate the scouting process.
What's the process behind growing from 6 to 26 people, what's the most important things to keep in mind when scaling influencer marketing?
We have been so result focused from the very first start. I know that branding is also an extremely important metric that we start to work more with now. From the very first beginning we were very sales focused, we had clear KPIs: measured sales, number of collaborations, and therefore we have had clear expectations and targets for each employee.
From the very first beginning we were very sales focused, we had clear KPIs: measured sales, number of collaborations, and therefore we have had clear expectations and targets for each employee.
Then we know what to expect and we can compare employees with each other. So, if we hire a new employee we know what to expect and targets to set. But of course this differ per market as well, so we cannot expect to achieve the same results in Sweden compared with Germany for instance.
Summary
Sales focused from the very beginning
Clear targets and KPIs
Measure sales per employee
Measure number of collaborations per employee
This helped to
Know when to hire more people
Know when to enter new markets
What has Scope helped you with? What would life have been without it?
There are substitutes to Scope. We have tried many, a lot of companies ask for our attention, wanting us to try their demos and stuff. We haven't found anything similar to Scope. Scope has helped us to automate the whole process. Without Scope we would probably have been sitting directly in Instagram. That would have taken longer time, which might mean that we would need to hire more people or we wouldn't be able to reach the same results, since it would take longer time.
How has your role changed over time?
It has changed a lot. But I appreciate that I have been working hands on, because I understand the business deeply. I still do some hands on work, very operatively with my team. Therefore, I understand all their challenges. I can take the right decisions based on their challenges and all the opportunies they are facing.
5 years ago I was the one working with all the collaborations. I packed the products and sent the packages and so forth. Now my role is a bit more strategic. I'm responsible for setting the targets and budgets, and coaching my team, and giving them the right condition to make the best out of their job.
What's your view on employees to focus on one vs multiple markets?
Let's say I would focus on 10 markets. It would take extremely long-time to learn about these 10 markets. They behave in such a different way. France compared to Sweden, day and night. That's why we want people to become experts in the markets they are working in. If we can hire local expertise, that's a big plus.
But also agile - if we see that one market get lots of traction, we can move employees to that market. Our employees are used to fast changes, and to adapt to different situations - where we get most traction.
About being agile and moving with traction
How to structure your influencer marketing team? Which markets are similar? Anything to keep in mind?
What has changed since you started working with influencer marketing 2016?
The influencer marketing industry has gotten much more saturated, especially in Sweden. We were one of the first companies that started working with influencer marketing. I think it was us and Daniel Wellington at that time. Which meant that we got profiles for a very affordable price at that time.
We have been able to sign large profiles and grow together with them.
We see a great return of investment when it comes to influencer marketing. But I understand that companies trying it out now, when the market is so saturated, they might not see the same traction as before since there are more competitors in the market today.
In the way they worked with influencer marketing, she just shot widely, collaborations there and there, without a clear plan. But it worked. Also, Ideal has a turnover of $1M USD at that time. We had influencer marketing, paid advertising. And spent a lot of money so we became top of mind. We got both branding and conversions at the same time.
Today we have a clear strategy on each market, clear expectations, statistics and data so we can make more proper forecasting. We can forecast how will April look like for each market, since we have statistics to base that on - and that's quite cool. We take this channel very seriously, and I know that all companies don't.
Influencer Marketing account for a vital share of our turnover.
If you start a brand today, what's crucial in saturated markets of both brands and influencers?
Product of course important, but.. when we started the product wasn't that attractive, and we had another competitor that was working with influencer marketing. But we became top of mind because we had the money, we could offer the profiles budgets, and we did a lot of activations. We were all over the place.
We did events, we did a lot of advertising, we reached out to a lot of profiles, and we were serious about it. So I would say definitely to have a budget, and not only send out products and hope for the best. It's becoming more and more important to have storytelling - to do something important as a brand - to work with sustainability. Influencers have high demands.
Ideal of Sweden became top of mind, how:
Product important but distribution key
Offered budgets when no one else did
Did a lot of activations
Events
Advertising
Going forward:
More important with storytelling
Not only push and sell the product
Sustainability
Influencers higher requirements on brands
Work long-term - influencers pick brands selectively now
Oh, and work long-term
What do you believe brands need to do going forward?
Since influencers have such high requirements on brands nowadays we have to work more with storytelling and important values, and not only push and sell the product. And come up with more creative setups with profiles. Perhaps reduce the volume of collaborations, because we have worked a lot with quantity. Now when we analyze the results, we can see that there are not always a correlation between more collaborations and more revenue all of the time. So I think we have a lot of work to do there as well. We constantly need to find new customers, new channels. Youtube, still discovering Tiktok. Now we have Clubhouse as well, can that be something?
Since we talked last time, have you started seeing the commercial side of TikTok?
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