It is always interesting to see how different businesses are carrying out their own digital marketing campaigns. Last week, The Drum examined Transform’s new marketing approach, and while their approach is familiar territory for many SEO professionals, the size of the campaign is a real eye-opener.
Transform is a cosmetic surgery company that provides both surgical and non-surgical cosmetic treatments. Cosmetic surgery is a rapidly growing industry and any company that can monopolise the market will undoubtedly be well rewarded.
It was only when Lord Sugar chose to hire Dr. Leah in the 2013 series of The Apprentice that many people woke up to the fact that cosmetic surgery was big business. Procedures that were once disregarded as being only for Hollywood A-listers are now accessible to the general public, and the development in the technology and medical understanding that supports cosmetic surgery has been nothing short of revolutionary in recent years.
The Transform Marketing Model
What has impressed us the most about Transform’s marketing model is that they have fully embraced the blogging community to help market their brand.
To achieve this Transform developed The Blogger Stories, in which they have essentially sponsored some of the top beauty and lifestyle bloggers to be their brand champions. These include Sarah Ashcroft’s That Pommie Girl, Monikh Dale’s Tres Monikh, Lydia Millen, and Scarlet Dixon’s Scarlett London. Each of these bloggers are specialised in a specific cosmetic treatment and some have undergone treatments, so have first-hand experience.
As well as the bloggers using their own websites to write promotional stories, Transform are supporting them in the creation of image and video production to utilise Instagram and YouTube, which are now the two most important visual digital media channels.
As well as the huge readership they all receive on their websites, they all have a massive social media following. Sarah Ashcroft has over 500K followers on Instagram, and Lydia Millen is not far behind with over 300K.
The Budget
What is most impressive about Transform’s blogger outreach is its budget – The Drum reports that they have allocated £777,000 for a 12 month campaign that will focus on brand building.
Organic Growth
Transform are hoping that this approach will lead to rapid organic growth. To understand this, we need to understand how the blogging community works.
Blogging is very much a hierarchical activity. The Internet’s leading voices will first blog about a product or service, and when the story is published, smaller bloggers will write their own reviews and opinions.
The campaign cannot reach a big enough audience based on the Transform’s five bloggers alone (although their readership is huge) but relies on hundreds, possibly thousands, of smaller bloggers picking up the stories and re-blogging them, along with social sharing at near viral levels.
This approach has been working in other niches for years. For example, whenever top tech blog Mashable runs a story, it is guaranteed that hundreds of bloggers will also write about it, with the aim of capturing searchers and driving more traffic to their own websites and businesses. More often than not, they will link to the products or sites mentioned as well as the source material.
Tranform’s marketing director, Steven Taylor, explained to The Drum: “This is a significant and ground-breaking campaign not only for us but for the UK cosmetic surgery industry. We’ve been building relations with the UK’s A List bloggers for close to two years which has now culminated in the ‘Transform Blogger Stories’ campaign.
“We are strong advocates of only using real patients in all of our marketing materials and this keeps us firmly on this path. We are moving towards a more subtle and sophisticated way of marketing to an increasingly discerning audience.”
The campaign will also include press and television advertising, online display advertising and some dedicated webpages.
Content marketing is now recognised as one of the most important digital marketing methods, and while this has been the case for several years already, it is only now that we are starting to see business launch large campaigns such as this.
With a huge budget and the industry’s top bloggers on board, it is hard to see how such a campaign will fail. We’ll be following Transform’s progress over the next year and hopefully learn a few new tricks in the process.
