Word on the block

Introduction and Problem Statement

For nearly 40 years, Benchmade has evolved from a small garage in Southern California to a thriving knife manufacturing business located in Oregon City, OR. Motivated to design a knife that embodied the latest manufacturing technology and material, Les de Asis turned his passion into a family-owned and operated business that continues to set the standards for production knife manufacturing around the world. Benchmade had already been doing some influencer work in-house, with the help of available tools to facilitate that process. They saw glimmers of success, but needed help operationalizing their influencer marketing work with an infrastructure that provided a constant stream of great influencer options, evaluation and distribution of custom materials, execution of deliverables and performance analysis, all while reducing the amount of work required from their team. Knowing they had available to them the best influencers at the most competitive rates was table stakes for any successful influencer program, but they wanted to develop a recurring motion that ultimately drove sales and a superior ROAS vs. its other marketing channels.

Solution

Word on the Block tapped its network of over 100,000 pre-vetted influencers to find those with an audience that would resonate with Benchmade’s products. Word on the Block was able to engage more great-fitting influencers than Benchmade could execute on, building a pipeline of influencer options for months to come. Word on the Block managed all influencer relations, negotiating industry-leading prices, and keeping each one on track to deliver their best quality work. The results of each influencer and each month’s campaign was organized in Word on the Block’s performance dashboard, which automatically pulls in views and engagements on an hourly basis, as well as link clicks and conversions, all on a gross and per dollar basis. Working with new influencers and forming recurring partnerships with high performing influencers from past months, with data to inform each influencer’s value and optimal deliverable structure. The performance analysis also made it clear which content Benchmade should license for their paid media work, and Word on the Block made it easy to obtain usage rights and assets in various formats and iterations for use on different platforms.

Results

With Word on the Block, Benchmade was able to quickly identify top performers and obtain usage rights to their content for Benchmade to run through their paid media department. This organic / paid strategy has driven a ROAS of over 4:1. Benchmade now has dozens of ad-ready assets, which they can use in their ongoing paid media efforts to drive an even stronger ROAS. Landing page visits have continued to climb at an accelerated pace, providing an improving pipeline of prospects to convert over time.