Pegasus Case Study

The Challenge

Pegasus is an award-winning health communications agency. The agency supports healthcare clients by developing powerful integrated communications campaigns that inspire people to make healthy choices.

In 2015, Pegasus began fielding increasing requests from clients for influencer marketing guidance. Given the agency’s experience in strategic communications, Pegasus was well suited to respond to clients' needs. However, as demand and competition grew, it became mission critical to differentiate Pegasus’ offering by delivering compelling data-driven influencer pitches, while scaling the agency’s ability to deliver high caliber programs.

“Desk and manual research were time consuming, which meant the process was slow and hindered our ability to identify the best fit influencers for the brief,” said Simone Stevens, Senior Influencer Strategist at Pegasus. “Influencers were often chosen based on follower numbers, personal connections or unverified hunches.”

By 2017, Pegasus decided to formalize its influencer marketing practice and began exploring ways to:

• Respond to client briefs more successfully and in a timely fashion
• Discover the best influencers for each campaign
• Provide data-driven rationale for influencer selection
• Maintain an agency-wide record of influencer partnerships
• Report results clearly to clients
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The Solution

While Pegasus had the art of influencer marketing down, the agency sought a technology solution to serve as the foundation for its quickly growing influencer marketing offering. Traackr was selected for its global database of influencers spanning all industries and niches, its deep audience analysis capabilities and insightful reporting suite.

“In order to be truly strategic and genuine when proposing influencer options to our clients, we treat every brief as a new project, spending time to research and identify the best possible influencers to meet the campaign objective, whilst being in line with the brands audience before," says Stevens.

“To ensure this process is authentic, we remain neutral by not managing a set roster of influencers or talent or having affiliates to any particular talent agencies. This provides authenticity at each stage within the influencer service we offer and our clients are assured that we do the due diligence when it comes to the work we deliver.”
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Today, Pegasus’ influencer marketing practice consists of a five person team which supports account teams across all areas of the agency’s business. For every brief, the team relies on Traackr to search for influencers best suited to the campaign, whilst also using their expert knowledge in the health sector. Shortlists ranging from 5 to 100 influencers are pre-selected based on the client’s brief and proposals are augmented with the vetted lists and supporting insights. The Pegasus team also runs reports in Traackr to set a baseline for their future clients and identify insights that shape their creative process.
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“As experts in health communications, it’s essential for us to be extremely confident in our influencer recommendations,’’ says Stevens. “Given how important our health is to us, authenticity has to be at the forefront of every campaign and by using Traackr we ensure we avoid off-brand, ineffective individuals.”

To create winning proposals, Pegasus employs the following key Traackr capabilities:

• Full Content Search
  Finding influencers based on the content they produce across all major social platforms and blogs, not only in beauty and wellness but also for niche searches pertinent to pharmaceutical and other health topics.
• Audience Demographics Filters
  Narrowing results by influencer audience location, gender, marital status, as well as interests, brand affinities and historical engagement rates. This is especially helpful for finding regionally relevant influencers.
• Audience Quality & Brand Values Match
  The ability to quickly determine the health of an audience and screen out fraudulent influencers. Brand values matching makes it easy to provide peace of mind to clients.
• Influencer Performance by Brand & Category
  Flexible reporting is used to source insights for proposals and streamline project reporting to clients.

“The platform enables us to accelerate proposal development and demonstrate our data-driven and compliant approach to prospective clients in a way that instills confidence and earns us their trust and business.”

Results

Ultimately, Traackr enables Pegasus to demonstrate its expertise to the client, establish trust and win the business. In the two years since bringing on Traackr, Pegasus has nearly tripled its influencer marketing business. “Scaling our influencer marketing business would not have been possible without Traackr,” says Stevens.
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“The platform enables us to accelerate proposal development and demonstrate our data-driven and compliant approach to prospective clients in a way that instills confidence and earns us their trust and business.”
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Pegasus can deliver winning proposals with on-brand influencer recommendations in sound time, which has contributed to raising the profile of the agency across the globe. In 2019, Pegasus won two awards for client influencer marketing work, including Best Health Campaign for an energy and sleep support supplement brand and Best Food and Drink Campaign for their work on the Manuka honey campaign, both of which leverage Traackr to support the strategies.

For reference, download a copy of Traackr's case study with Pegasus.
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“We identified that our clients needed a service that offered specialist and strategic consultation when it came to influencers in the health space. To deliver and build this as part of a thriving communications agency in today’s market, we needed to augment our long-standing expertise in the health sector and blend this with best-in-class technology. Working with Traackr has meant we’re able to differentiate ourselves with a data and expertise lead approach. This has ensured we can deliver value to our existing client base and win some exciting new business.”
—Simon Hackett, Managing Director, Pegasus

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