Unilever has a 300,000-strong influencer army. Should SMEs take note?

The CEO of multinational business, Unilever, has revealed that the company now has a staggering 300,000 personalities in its influencer roster. 

What makes this figure all the more impressive is that the company was working with just 10,000 influencers only two years ago. Clearly, they’re hedging their bets in this direction. 

For SMEs, however, building relationships with influencers can be time-consuming, and there has been mixed reports over the last few years about how much ROI small businesses get from partnerships of this nature. But with large companies now banking on huge networks, is jumping on the bandwagon the only way for smaller brands to keep up?

Corporate mistrust

In a recent fireside chat with Warren Ackerman, Head of European Consumer Staples Research from Barclays, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez talked about how the multinational had vastly grown the company’s influencer network.

Fernandez explained that the decision was driven by the power of “other peoples’ recommendations”, and how this works as a foil to the mistrust many feel towards corporate messaging.

If a recommendation comes from an influencer – someone that people have chosen to follow for personal reasons – it just lands better. 

Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer, Leandro Barreto, explored this topic further in a blog post published last month. 

“Attention is becoming scarcer, rewarding brands that show up with relevance and immediacy” he explains. “People are seeking trusted voices, giving brands the chance to earn credibility through authentic, culturally grounded participation.”

“Poetry and plumbing”

Barreto also details how businesses need both to build trust –  the “poetry” as he terms it –  but should also work to develop an infrastructure to their marketing strategies. This, he called, “the plumbing”. 

He shared: “Poetry is the cultural intuition and creative courage that sparks ideas people care about. Plumbing is the operating backbone – the systems, data and AI capabilities – that allows you to optimise and scale those ideas quickly.”

Influencers can help you out with the poetry part, granted, but it’ll be all for nothing if you don’t attend carefully to the plumbing, which will help you understand what kind of relationships work, which ones don’t, and what you should scale. 

Avoiding the one-way relationship

The important point to make here is that collaborative marketing escapades with influencers will amount to very little if they don’t fit neatly into your wider marketing strategy. And, in the worst case scenario, it can leave you out of pocket for minimal additional publicity.

For SMEs owners without huge marketing budgets – or armies of hundreds of thousands of influencers, for that matter – any relationship which puts your product in the spotlight has to be mutually beneficial to be worth pursuing and subsequently nurturing.

Working out what a productive partnership looks like isn’t easy, especially with lots of influencers trying to get their hands on freebies, which has put some businesses off influencer marketing altogether.

A recent case involved Reshmi Bennett, 42, who owns luxury cake business Anges de Sucre in London, receiving a request from influencer Binky Felstead for a free birthday cake.

According to the Daily Mail, Bennett refused the request, quipping sarcastically in response that her energy supplier “continues to insist on being paid in actual money rather than exposure or engagement”.

“We did try to explain, but they simply will not accept Instagram tags as legal tender,” she added.

While this slightly misses the point of influencer marketing – and why so many brands are engaging with it – there’s a lesson in there for all small businesses: don’t enter into relationships that have an unclear return on investment, and continuously evaluate your marketing exploits to ensure you’re getting what you want from them.

Bennett clearly doesn’t think off-the-cuff requests for freebies will bring in more business – and in this case, she may well have been right. She’s also cleverly leveraged this moment for her own publicity campaign, and managed to get her business in the headlines anyway.

I wouldn’t let this put you off, however. Relationships with influencers and their highly-engaged audiences can be highly effective if they’re long-standing, attentively nurtured and both parties get something in return.

Collaborating with a local influencer in a relevant field, who’s already visited your shop anyway could be a valuable pathway to free publicity and better local visibility. Giving out random freebie requests to whoever asks, on the other hand, is likely to be less productive.