Rachel Riley, the much-loved TV personality, best known for co-presenting Channel 4’s daytime show Countdown, is teaming up with TopCashback. As a TopCashback member for over five years, she becomes the company’s first ever brand ambassador and will be working with them over the next couple of months to help demystify cashback.
PerformanceIN caught up with Emily Heathcote, influencer & partnerships marketing manager at TopCashback who has been planning and managing the campaign to learn more about it.
Could you tell us a little bit about your campaign with Rachel Riley? Where did the idea come from?
Emily Heathcote: We’re very excited to have teamed up with Rachel Riley as our first ever brand ambassador. We reached out to Rachel some time ago to see if she’d be interested in coming on board as an influencer, but when we realised how big a fan she was we started thinking about creating a much bigger campaign.
Rachel will be helping us to demystify cashback and explain how TopCashback works to the nation she will appear across our site and in social media and key marketing campaigns over the next few months. Our focus with Rachel as our brand ambassador is to educate members on all things TopCashback, from how to get started to using our advanced features, helping our members save even more money.
Why did you pick Rachel? What makes her a good fit for TopCashback?
EH: Rachel has been a TopCashback member for over five years now and genuinely loves to save money, making her a great fit to help us explain the benefits of TopCashback. Rachel aligns very well with our core values as a brand – she’s smart, savvy and generous – and therefore exemplifies what we stand for.
As the main aim of this campaign is to demystify cashback and explain how TopCashback works, the most important characteristic in a brand ambassador was trustworthiness, and as a respected TV personality and a big fan of our site, this came naturally with Rachel.
What can we expect from TopCashback and this campaign in the coming months?
EH: We have created a series of content featuring Rachel that will be promoted across our site and social media channels to help all our members – both new and existing – learn a bit more about cashback. We want to break down any barriers members have around using TopCashback.
As a genuine TopCashback member, some of the best content we created with Rachel was totally unscripted. She’s super savvy and could teach us all a thing or two about money saving. We also think bringing Rachel onboard will help add even more credibility to our model – encouraging even more advertisers to offer even better rates to our members.
How does a brand ambassador campaign differ from running an influencer marketing campaign?
EH: We work very closely with a range of influencers as a key tactic in our new member acquisition approach. Our work with Rachel as our brand ambassador will do this but also supports our overall strategy.
The content we’ve created for this campaign differs from our typical acquisition pieces, for example, we are using long-form videos to give a more detailed tutorial to our members. Typically, we work with our influencers to introduce members to TopCashback as they are selling our product rather than being ambassadors of our brand.
Do these KPIs differ much from what you measure from traditional influencers and partnerships?
EH: In working with Rachel as our brand ambassador, we aim to support our acquisition activity. We want to make cashback as simple as possible, and with Rachel being a credible figure, we hope to eliminate any barriers our new members may have and help them become loyal TopCashback’ers. We’ll be measuring everything from social media conversations to the conversion rates on our pages. For us to deem this campaign a success, it must complement our current strategy and help both new and existing members save even more money.
Lastly, congratulations on being shortlisted for the Best Influencer Campaign at the IPMAs. How does it feel to be involved in this category?
EH: We’re very excited to be shortlisted for this award. Influencer marketing is a very new channel for us where we’ve seen great ROI. As a team, we’re always on the lookout for new channels and we wanted to find one that would bring a new, younger audience to the site. Influencer marketing has exceeded our objectives, allowing us to reach even more members, and to be shortlisted so early into our work is an amazing achievement for us, and one we are very proud of.