Many founders want their brands to do more than just sell great products—they want to change their industry. The team behind The Honey Pot’s wanted to create products and resources to support vaginal health and encourage conversations that traditionally have been taboo.
With the help of a network of influential creators, VP of marketing Giovanna Alfieri transformed The Honey Pot into a household name. To achieve this, Giovanna and her team leaned toward promoting the brand with honest talk and real human stories. As a result, she’s created a winning strategy for influencer marketing and generating meaningful connections with customers.
Embracing hyper-intimate conversations
Intimacy and vulnerability are important for a brand like The Honey Pot. “We have to create a safe space where the micro-experiences of humans are actually leveraged as points of conversation,” Giovanna says.
One of the guiding principles she follows is finding creators who can add a personal touch to the content they create for the brand. This is important, because it adds another layer of authenticity to the brand’s content and a deeper level of trust. “They help us define these core concepts or elements of our brand and community,” Giovanna says.
Using humor to deliver educational messages
One of The Honey Pot’s most important guidelines when it comes to working with influencers is ensuring they use humor to promote the brand’s products.
“Humor is a massive opportunity for us to get into those sticky subjects, or things that we’ve unfortunately been conditioned to feel are inappropriate or lewd,” Giovanna says. This sense of humor helps the team shift the perception around vaginal care and wellness.
While humor is key, it’s not enough on its own. The brand pairs humor with a tone of confidence and relatability, adding just the right amount of seriousness to a topic. “Our high level content might have an angle of humor, but then the caption, for example, will be deeply insightful, with reference points that are backed in science, so I think it’s about having that juxtaposition,” Giovanna says.
The brand’s light approach has made its content more shareable—both by news outlets and customers online. “We know that humor often suppresses personal belief systems and opens up an opportunity to simply laugh or have a moment of reflection,” Giovanna says.
Finding people who reflect your brand values
Who better to share The Honey Pot’s story than those with personal experience in managing their vaginal health? This strategy creates close-knit bonds between ambassadors of the products and new potential customers. “It minimizes the potential shame or discomfort that comes from the educational topics that we cover,” Giovanna says.
The Honey Pot seeks out creators who have similar personal or brand values. “For us, it’s about finding people who can reflect our values back at us whilst producing meaningful, creative content,” Giovanna says.
The brand doesn’t prioritize follower count or content performance when choosing creators. Rather, it looks at posts, captions, and covered topics to ensure everything aligns with the message being promoted.
Humanizing the strategy
Giovanna recommends the human touch of working one-on-one with influencers over working with a large agency. “I don’t want to be perceived as merely a data set. I want to be perceived as someone who exists in the world in a dynamic way,” she says. “We find it’s hard for agencies to replicate our humor.”
This approach also helps the team satisfy its ongoing content engine. The brand’s internal social team can produce only so much.“What’s powerful about influencers [is that they] deliver against the brief in a way that shows some level of connection and understanding to the brand,” Giovanna says.
Bringing resources to your community
When preparing for its next product launch into a new category, instead of taking the traditional route of hiring beauty influencers, The Honey Pot digs deeper, considering different types of creators. “How about an esthetician, or someone who is experiencing hard skin conditions [who] can naturally segway into talking about products?” Giovanna asks.
The Honey Pot’s approach to influencer marketing proves that brands can think outside the box and take risks with their strategy to create more meaningful connections with customers.
Tune in to the full Shopify Masters episode to discover more about Giovanna’s influencer strategy, her event marketing tips, and how to use storytelling to expand your brand’s reach.