Does the mining disaster in Chile’s Copiapó ring a bell? 33 miners were immured 625 metres underground in a mining chamber for as long as almost 70 days! Coming up to the surface, they were wearing custom-designed Oakley sunglasses that protected them against loss of sight.  A coincidence ?

Moreover, NASA prepared a dedicated menu for the immured miners, an Irish company called Mincon designed and produced the drill that made a hole enabling contact with the miners, while UPS delivered it at an accelerated rate. What is more, Real Madrid and Manchester United football clubs invited the guys to their matches, and Coca-Cola treated the rescued miners to their drink.

You probably wonder why exactly I am writing about this at the LangLion  blog. I just want to show you how you can promote your school in an effective and original way. The companies I referred to above took advantage of the fact that the event was followed by millions of people all over the world. On the other hand, you have an opportunity every day to take advantage of cooperation with Influencers, who will make your language school known to millions of people.

Who is an influencer?

This is a well-known, influential person from the industry (or not), who makes impact on their recipients and can easily recommend and persuade them to buy your product/service. Influence marketing assumes cooperation between brands and such people aimed to reap mutual benefits.

 

Why does it work?

Today it is very difficult to stand out and break through advertising messages of other brands. Advertising in the form of pop-put windows is frequently blocked by dedicated plug-ins. Facebook restricts free reach. A human to the rescue.

It has been long known that recommendations are the most effective form of advertising. No advertising campaign or a leaflet may substitute for a real person who took advantage of your language course and is fond of it. It is all based on trust and authenticity.

 

Transition to Digital?

Presently cooperation with Digital Influencers has become the most popular form. We do not need to reach out for “elite celebrities”, and it suffices to look into Internet. Experts of social media, popular YouTubers, bloggers or just people well-known in the industry are today’s top stars. They generate involving content – reaching millions of recipients – and thousands of comments. You do not have to focus on the most known ones (who promote multiple brands thus decreasing the recipients’ trust, who keep asking if this another attempt to smuggle some advertising) Therefore, it is worthwhile to start cooperation with lesser ones – those who have direct influence over your target group.

 

What form should you use?

In my opinion the most effective practice is to use product placement, as was the case of Oakley sunglasses mentioned in the beginning (use of Real-Time Marketing). As a rule, a star uses the product being promoted, e.g. cosmetics and takes a photo of herself/himself with this product and then reviews it.

Language schools may attempt to take advantage of a recommendation of the language school. Such cooperation aims to arouse emotions and consequently to lead to the call for action, i.e. purchase of lessons in your school.

Yet another good idea may be comprised by cooperation consisting in testing of a service/product, presentation of its functions (you can use this if you have e.g. a tool for foreign language teaching).

Quite an easy method consists in promotion of an event, documentation of the preparation process, followed by a coverage of the event or opinion about the training.

 

3 Case studies

1. Lariirezende – #IELS Malta

 

Larissa Rezende gained enormous popularity by running a blog and a YT channel. A smiling female student with curly hair regularly reviews there the cosmetics she uses. Apparently it would be hard to find here any element shared with promotion of language teaching. Wrong! Lari’s profile has 167 thousand followers and those are mainly young people. And young people are one of the target groups among customers of language schools. No wonder that one of the biggest language schools on Malta decided to rely on cooperation with the blogger. At @lariirezende Instagram account one can find a full coverage of the stay on Malta in the IELS language school. Each of the posts shared at the profile with tags: #iels and #ielsmalta generated approximately 2 thousand likes , while a record post was liked by more than 6.5 thousand people.

The school took perfectly advantage of the fact that the message is not one of multiple ads running unnoticeably at websites, and instead it reaches the end recipients directly.

 

2. Tribetyler – #lingoda

Tyler Shelton is a travelling, independent artist specialising in social media, designing of ads, photographs and cinematography. At his YT channel one can watch a video titled „Getting Robbed In Paris”.

In the video Tyler tells how he managed to avoid a theft of credit card data during his stay in Paris. There would be nothing surprising in this if it were not for the fact that the video promotes an online language school named Lingoda. In the video he states that owing to courses and language learning he managed to survive the entire situation without any problems. The video generated more than 9 thousand views and was perceived very positively by channel’s subscribers.

Tyler Shelton is not the only influencer promoting courses of Lingoda. After entering #lingoda at instagram, more posts from bloggers appear, encouraging people to take advantage of the courses. Those bloggers include among others: @bellabucchiotti (183 thousand followers) and @red_autumn (70.7 thousand followers). Owing to them, the school effectively expands the reach of its promotional campaigns.

 

3. Dulceida – #EF Rocks

 

She has just exceeded a mind-blowing number of 2.5 million followers at Instagram and generated 228 thousand likes at FB. Aida Domenech, better known as Dulceida, is one of the most influential people at Instagram. Dulceida is a fashion blogger, who has developed the most in recent years, becoming an exemplary model of how to create own brand via social media. Not only top fashion brands, such as Dior or Tous, cooperate with her. In 2016 the following post: ROCKS # AUSTRALIA. http://www.dulceida.com/2016/01/ef-rocks-australia.html, appeared at her blog

In her post, Aida Domenech describes a month spent with EF at an English language course in Australia. The post also included a specially generated competition link, which the blogger signs with her pseudonym. After registration and completion of a form, one could win a two-week English language course for two people in any place in the world.

Information about the competition can be also found at the blogger’s Instagram account.

 

The post generated enormous interest and the non-trivial number of 202522 likes and endless number of comments. Every month the blog is visited by thousands of users – this number shall be multiplied by dozens of friends at Facebook, who saw the likes, and accidental visitors. Those numbers speak for themselves.

 

Do you think it is worthwhile to start cooperating with influencers?

 

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The companies that take advantage of cooperation with social media stars, see a wider perspective than just the reaches generated by influencers. The response from followers clearly demonstrates that whatever bloggers advertise through their social media accounts has a real impact on consumer behaviours of the followers.

Within the recent few years the topic of influence marketing has become so popular that dedicated rankings have been created to assess the platforms offering to us various tools for initiation of cooperation. From dedicated databases of influencers to platforms enabling valuation of a campaign and finding of the right person matching our search criteria, like e.g. Upfluence. However, this is such a vast topic that we will be elaborating on it in future articles.