How To Molly Mae Your Marketing
Molly Mae is a social media influencer that could deliver a marketing master class with ease.
Runner-up on ITV’s popular Love Island reality show, the influencer has not only built up a personal fanbase and capitalised on the reach she has but also launched her own brand in the process.
Molly Mae has been on a path of grand superior social media status for some time. Whether it’s down to a good team or not, her social media savviness should be admired, as she’s head and shoulder above her cohorts when it comes to building audiences and creating compelling content.
Peak Molly Mae can be attributed to running a competition, which is a tried and tested marketing tactic. To mark the milestone of receiving over one million subscribers on YouTube (no small task), Molly created a giveaway of over £8,000 worth of goodies to be won by one lucky follower.
To chart its success, we must also look at the negatives. The winner selection process was criticised in the media, so we’ve taken this into consideration in the overall effectiveness of the competition.
Simplicity = Effective
In the first 48 hours, the competition achieved:
More than 200k Instagram followers to Molly Mae’s personal account
Over 200k YouTube subscribers
X6 more the followers of her brand @filterbymollymae Instagram page.
From what seemed like an off-the-cuff celebration of a social media milestone, the competition produced lucrative numbers and heaps of eyeballs to her new make-up brand, due to the requirement to follow these channels to enter.
Molly Mae is particularly savvy when it comes to YouTube as this is where the real money is at for social influencers. Gaining a high number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily equate to viewers, but it’s a key metric decider for brands when deciding whether to work with certain influencers and ensures she can command larger fees.
Execution
While we can presume the competition was created with good intentions, the aforementioned backlash took some of the shine off it. Due to the unprecedented numbers that entered the competition (over one million), managing such data saw Molly pick 25 entrants to shortlist and announce a winner from.
There is questions over how clear the terms and conditions were and how clear they could have been, especially the entry mechanic.
In hindsight, careful pre-planning regarding how to manage entrants was required to avoid being overwhelmed by the numbers. Despite this, there could only be one winner, and Molly published an open and honest statement diverting attention to this fact - further demonstrating her PR chops.
What can we learn
Molly’s competition marketing campaign hits all classic campaign highs and lows that we’ve seen throughout the social media era.
The key takeaway remains the same: Marketing logistics are a crucial element to any execution. The power of Molly’s celebrity enabled her to access a massive audience, but she is looking to spread that follower wealth across other platforms most notably her own brand of products, and it’s that kind of future-proofing that makes Molly Mae a shrewd businesswoman that we can all learn from.
WXY has worked extensively in creating competitions in partnership with brands to not only achieve results but also to remain complaint too.
