Influencer Marketing in Action: Daniel Wellington

The volume of companies we’ve seen who have had explosive growth on social media continue to rise as social media becomes one of the most important tools to drive brand growth, sales, and product differentiation. One of the most well-known success stories is a watch company called Daniel Wellington. Daniel Wellington is a Swedish company that sells basic quartz watches with a classic minimalist design. Filip Tysander, the founder of Daniel Wellington, invested $15,000 to kick start the company in 2009, which quickly grew to a $220m revenue company. Daniel Wellington’s success can be attributed to their strong presence on social media. They took advantage of the mostly untapped and extremely cost-effective advertising channel by growing their online advertising strategy and campaigns primarily through social media. Their success can be demonstrated by the engagement map below, which shows Daniel Wellington’s engagement growth on Instagram as they grew their brand from day one. The interesting thing about Daniel Wellington’s growth strategy is that fact that the majority of their content comes from a segment of posts called “user-generated content”. In fact, 71% of the content they post on their main page comes from influencers or users of their product. Not only does this build a strong brand reputation for Daniel Wellington, but it enables them to have fresh content without spending incremental in-house dollars on content creation.

Furthermore, this analysis shows the high dispersion in their engagement. What we have found is that engagement dispersion is a leading indicator for authentic and highly engaged audience audiences.

Influencer Selection

Daniel Wellington’s strategy of influencer identification is directly correlated to their success on social media. In fact, the hashtag #danielwellington has over 2.1 million posts, giving Daniel Wellington a virtually unlimited content pool for them to repost and directly engage with their users. When they first started out, Daniel Wellington gave out watches for influencers of all sizes to wear and post. Their strategy then focused on influencers who matched their target audience, enabling them to grow their own social presence and take advantage of the organic traffic they generated from posting on their own page.

Campaign Strategy

Daniel Wellington’s campaign strategies are extremely interesting and were novel when they first started. One of their most popular campaigns was to prompt their customers to post the watch they bought or received, and use #danielwellington to enter into photo contests where they would give away a wide variety of things. For the most part, this is how they amassed so many posts on their hashtags, and in the eyes of Instagram’s algorithm, became a trending brand that would receive more attention from other audiences.


Reach out to the Smartfluence team today to find how you can help your brand effectively grow through influencer marketing!

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