Meet the Clients: Grace Fung, Influencer Marketing and Comms Lead, Coty UK

Wearisma is useful in helping us work with a wide range of influencers and have the capability within the platform that allows you to track your campaign measurements.“

— GRACE FUNG, INFLUENCER MARKETING AND COMMS LEAD, COTY UK

How does Coty marry brand purpose within its influencer marketing strategy?

We really want to build a community of influencers for luxury, those who align with the brand DNA, aesthetically and how the content looks on the grid itself but also what they believe in. useful to use a platform like Wearisma which helps us look for specific talent and influencers with similar attributes. We can also make metric decisions, looking at where they’re based, where their audience is based.

Coty’s paid partnerships increased by 106% between H1 and H2 2020, why did you invest more in this strategy?  

It has accelerated due to the pandemic, a lot of brands are focusing more on ecommerce and content has become such a good thing to have in lockdown. Influencers have changed the way they create content as well, it’s become more personable. We have established some more long term partnerships with influencers and some of our brands. When you invest in those long term relationships, you really see the benefits in the long run.

Why did you decide to use Wearisma as your Influencer Marketing Insights partner?

The way they do the campaign management, the way they do reports so you can report back to your wider team. They also do bespoke consultations so it’s really useful when you need to improve your strategy. You can identify influencers on a different platform such as tiktok which may be different to those you usually work with. When something you can’t find yourself or will be very time-consuming, that’s where something like Wearisma will be very useful.

With multiple brands under the Coty umbrella, how do you keep track of and ensure the success of each brand?

We work with a large number of different influencers even within one brand so we need to organise in coherent teams, Wearisma is useful in helping us work with a wide range of influencers and have the capability within the platform that will allow you to track your campaign measurements. One campaign might perform differently to the next, you can make informed decisions on whether you want to work with that influencer in the next project or for a different purpose, Wearisma helps you make that decision.

Coty benefits from Wearisma’s bespoke reporting. What are their main advantages?

We use the bespoke reporting to find out how we are performing in the market and against our competitors, find out any key insights and trends to make sure we’re on track with our strategies and campaigns. Wearisma can also give you trend forecasts on what’s coming up, helpful in deciding what you would like to do next and staying ahead of competitors when it comes to Influencer Marketing.

Marc Jacobs’ Fragrance and Gucci Beauty achieved a 25% and 55% increase in engagements between Q1 and Q2 2021. How did Wearisma’s reports help you achieve this growth?

Reports which give you the insights within the market really help with where you want to position your brand moving forward. We have more choices on who to work with and more engagement subsequently year on year.

How has Wearisma’s solutions helped Coty to achieve their KPIs?

The bespokes are useful and as well as this, when you use Wearisma you can also run your own quick reports where you can for example put in your brand or a competitor’s hashtag and you can see how well it is trending. It was helpful for us to do some of our own tracking this way during the pandemic to see what people were talking about online. Putting hashtags and handles into the platform really helped to give you a better picture of what the trend is without that bespoke element.

It’s also useful identifying macro and micro influencers and with wearisma, as you work with longer term partnerships you can really get a clear view on return on investment and look at how much you’ve put into each partnership and the return.

What do you think is the future of influencer marketing in 2021 and beyond?

I believe there will be a lot more content which is video focused and a lot more reels. There will be a shoppable function on reels whilst live-streaming stays. TikTok will continue to become more popular and the gaming industry is a space we will need to take more seriously too.

What do you think needs to change to make influencer marketing more ethical and inclusive?

When you do campaigns, it’s whether you will do something original and inclusive at the same time. For example, the successful Marc Jacobs fragrance campaign we did last year, #perfectasiam, fronted by a diverse cast of talent, but also have different talents. Understanding your influencers and their audience is key.