Nurturing Instagram & Ambassador Relationships — with Marie de Font-Réaulx, The Bradery
Growing from 18K to 300K in 3 years, Marie shares with us her thoughts on Instagram, nurturing, and ambassador relationships.
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Last week, we had the opportunity to chat with Marie, the Brand & Communications Manager at The Bradery, a leading private sales platform in France.
The Bradery has a relatively higher positioning in the private sales segment since they sell exclusive brands that fit well with each other, and they create their own content to craft The Bradery’s distinct brand image as well as protect the brand DNA of the brands they work with. Their target clientele is quite young – the average age being 27.
She’s been with the company since almost the beginning, having joined when there were only the two cofounders and a former employee, Luce, the art director.
In the last three years, the company has grown quite a lot – particularly during the pandemic when there was significant surplus in stores that couldn’t be sold, making its way to platforms like The Bradery.
In this article, we’ll dig into how she grew and nurtured the community from 18K to 300K while keeping a good engagement rate, her thoughts on Instagram, how she keeps the community nurtured, and how ambassador relationships play an important role for them.
How has your Instagram journey been so far?
When I joined, our community was at around 18,000 people, with an engagement rate of 1.5% – not bad for a community of that size, but we needed to grow the community further. Our content strategy was not that strong either, with few pieces of content and lots of testing and no consistency.
Our challenges were primarily related to growth – we wanted to grow quickly to build a community of potential customers, in order to increase sales and also have an audience for our brands to be exposed to. But that growth couldn’t come at the cost of engagement – that had to remain high too.
Today, we have a community of 300K with a 1.5% engagement rate, which is absolutely great for a brand.
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How do you keep your Instagram community nurtured?
Our strategy changes every now and then, but overall we’ve pretty much split up our communication between the feed and the story. On the Story, we generally post about all of our flash sales – which makes sense, because these sales are quick and short, just like Stories.
On the feed, that's where we share our "good vibes" – so that's basically all the cool things that are happening at The Bradery as a company. We're a pretty young team and we have a lot of fun, and we love to share our story on our feed so that people know who's behind the brand. This is something we've seen engages the community a lot more than the sales.
At the same time though, we do want to post about our sales on the feed – but in a way that keeps it engaging. That’s one of our challenges.
What does your ambassador program look like?
We do have a lot of ambassadors – around 200 micro-influencers, all of whom we have long-term relationships with. We don't do short-term collaborations, except when a relationship doesn't work and it has to end.
We're already seeing results from this in the ways of mentions and tags, even in the off-periods, which for us are basically the sale seasons, so it’s been great.
How do you assess the quality of an ambassador relationship?
For me, the most important thing is the relationship itself — how do I feel when I'm engaging with this person by talking to them? Are they engaged? Do they like the brand?
Besides that, what's also important for me is the quality of the content itself, because we use that content to repost on our feed.
And of course, we also track sales performance through the ambassadors, and this is something we’ll be increasingly looking into the next few months. The new Shopify integration in Ubu is going to help us get a better overview of global performance, including direct sales.
What do you do with the content that the ambassadors generate?
We mostly just repost the content on the feed every week – we’ve seen that it gets a lot of engagement and it shows the ambassadors we’re listening! People also love to see more relatable content, and the UGC serves that purpose.
What's your take on micro vs. macro influencers?
When we work with macro-influencers, the impact is usually HUGE — but at the same time, sometimes, depending on the mechanism of the partnership, it can be of lesser quality. But after trying a lot of things over the years, we’ve found the best mechanics for us – and it’s something that will require fine tuning over time. We’ve also identified which are the macro-profiles that are best suited for us – and that’s great.
On the other hand, working with ambassadors, while it's a slow-growth, the recruitment you achieve is high quality, and due to repetition we really stick in the followers’ minds – this helps us a lot in terms of notoriety. What's cool now is that when you ask someone on the street "do you know The Bradery?" a lot of people say yes – which was not the case a year ago!
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The Instagram Swipe Up has now been replaced by a link sticker: what are your thoughts?
Since the swipe up disappeared it's been a nightmare! With the swipe up, it was just one upward swipe that opened links, but now you have to tap twice. This is an extra element of friction – with the swipe up, some people would also open the link by accident, which doesn’t happen anymore.
Mayank: But there's also an opportunity here, because now people with below 10K followers can also add links – this is great for the nano-influencers you work with that are below 10K, or other ambassadors.
Wrapping Up
Thanks a lot, Marie, for sharing your insights with us, and thanks a lot to you guys for reading!
What are your thoughts? Feel free to reply to this email or comment down below :)
Shameless plug: Ubu is a tool that helps DTC brands engage and grow their community better by combining Inbox Management, UGC/Analytics and an Influencer CRM. We're growing pretty fast in Europe, and I'd love to have you give it a shot for free for your brand.
See you guys in the next one!
Very Interesting !!! thanks Mayank
I learned a lot! thank you Mayank