Our client, Western Union, came to us in 2017 looking for a way to implement a brand reappraisal and raise awareness of their app, all the while increasing awareness and engagement with their growing millennial customer segment. Most people are generally aware of the basic service that Western Union provides as a 160-year-old legacy brand, however, highlighting the multitude of use cases would allow more people to discover the other services Western Union has to offer.

It was clear to us that simply creating targeted ads were not going to be enough – we needed to find a way to connect with our target audience on a more personal level and show them how Western Union could become a part of their 21st-century lifestyle. Only through this approach would we be able to secure a position with millennials.

In this influencer marketing case study, we’ll discuss how implementing an influencer based marketing campaign has the potential to increase both awareness and engagement that it is not a “one size fits all” solution for any brand, and the amount of controlling before and during the campaign is something that must be taken into consideration before starting.

So, how were we able to get results like these across Western Union’s social media channels in just three months?

This was by far the most time-intensive single step for the entire campaign. Anyone who has worked with influencers for a marketing campaign can tell you that selecting the right influencer can make or break your campaign. Additionally, you have to consider what type of influencer will give your campaign the highest ROI (Return on Investment).

For this campaign, we also had to consider that our target audience would not be limited to a single country or region. We needed to find influencers that would be able to represent the global nature of the Western Union brand. At the same time, we recognized that given Western Union’s social media channels and their focus, we would need to identify influencers that would be appealing to the dual belongers in the Latino or Pinoy markets as well as the global citizens that represent the core of the “Modern Money Movers”.

For the first season, we were able to identify 10 influencers from 10 countries (this would grow to 23 influencers in season two). These would include a Grammy Award-winning singer, an MMA champion, several entrepreneurs, world travellers, photographers and other people dedicated to making the world a better place. 

Each of the influencers we chose fit into at least one of the archetypes that we identified during our initial research and would be featured through content, created by either us or the influencer themself across Western Union’s social media channels. These influencers would become a team of brand ambassadors for Western Union, representing the values of the Western Union brand, with the added value that all of them were actual Western Union customers and were “living the brand”.