How a niche startup leveraged nano and micro influencers to launch in major EU markets

About Hello Jack

Hello Jack is a German D2C pet food supplements startup on a mission to improve dog health with a range of sustainable, tasty treats. The brand was founded by dog lover Pierre Baryla after he realized that most pet food supplements were modeled on human products, and not adapted to the specific needs of dogs. Hello Jack offers a range of supplements targeting issues such as dog arthritis, hair loss or digestive issues that are manufactured using plant proteins instead of animal protein to reduce their carbon impact. Since its launch in late 2021, the brand has relied on a comprehensive social media and influencer marketing strategy to convince thousands of dog lovers in France and Germany to try its products.  

Challenge #1: Build a community around millennial dog lovers identified as the brand’s core target consumer 

Any successful launch of a DTC startup relies on building a strong community to spread the word. In the case of Hello Jack, the brand’s message was both emotional and scientific. Dog lovers are keen to do the best for their pets, but serious work needed to be done to explain the detailed design and manufacturing processes that the brand is built on. Fostering understanding of the concept is also crucial when offering a niche product at premium prices. 

Digital native Hello Jack quickly identified millennials as its core target market, being the fastest growing cohort of dog owners and the top consumer cohort buying products from online brands. All it needed to do then, was to use Kolsquare to find the right influencers to reach them.

Taking a deep dive into the KOL audience data on Kolsquare enables brands to gain insights such as where an audience is located, their age and top interests, and reachability, for example. When absolute reach is the goal, as is the case with Hello Jack, brands and agencies can also use the audience overlap feature to check what percentage of an influencer’s audience also follows other influencers earmarked for the same campaign. 

“We work organically on Instagram and TikTok but it’s harder to go viral on these channels. Therefore, it’s important to find the right influencer partners to increase our reach and give our brand credibility,” commented Hello Jack Founder Pierre Baryla. 

“Kolsquare helps us to correctly identify people with the right keywords and makes research much easier. Once we’ve identified the profiles, it’s easy to qualify them using Kolsquare’s credibility score, engagement rate, and the region where the audience is based. It really simplifies the task.”

Challenge #2: Launch Hello Jack on a limited marketing budget 

By nature, any startup must deal with the key challenge of a limited budget and the necessity to control costs. Investing in an influencer marketing tool like Kolsquare — which offers special rates for startups — is a downpayment on future savings. 

Kolsquare offers users an extensive database of millions of3M+ vetted KOLs which can be quickly identified through the semantic engine, and analyzed using a host of the most up-to-date data and content. 

“If you want to make influence marketing a key channel for acquisition or marketing in general, it's important to have a tool like Kolsquare, which gives you control over your influencer marketing campaigns,” says Baryla.

The Solution: Use Kolsquare to target nano and micro influencers on a massive scale

To spread the word far, wide and fast, startups need to invest heavily in creating brand awareness. And when you’ve got a limited budget, the most efficient and cost effective marketing channel today is influencer marketing. 

For its launch campaign Hello Jack adopted a mass nano and micro influencer strategy to generate awareness. Over two months, the company searched, identified, contacted, and sent products to more than 500 dog-loving KOLs on Instagram and Facebook. 

“With a limited budget, we decided to activate as many influencers to achieve a sufficient reach. For a small startup, sending out 500 products is a lot, and identifying 500 pertinent profiles is really difficult. Kolsquare was particularly helpful in identifying the right influencers, verifying their audiences, and also for contacting them via the Gmail plugin,” says Baryla. 

“The results were very positive. I think that’s down to the fact that, from the beginning, we used Kolsquare to qualify the profiles, approach people who had good credibility scores and who had worked well with other brands.” 

Challenge 3#: keep track of the flood of content and engagement

Clearly, any influencer marketing campaign involving 500 KOLs is a massive amount of work. After identifying the right KOLs for the campaign, the next step involves contacting them individually to check their willingness to participate, and sending out the product best suited to their needs. 

With an organic campaign, where there is no obligation on the influencer to post content, it’s also difficult to know when, how or what content was posted, or even if they did post something. Again, this is where Kolsquare comes into play. By creating and managing the campaign in the platform, brands like Hello Jack can automatically collect all the content created as part of the campaign.   

“A campaign like this means you are contacting around 200 influencers a month, and it quickly gets difficult to follow the content produced by the influencers. With Kolsquare we could see all the content produced by our influencers and were able to analyze it,” comments Baryla.

The Results: A woof woof success!

Two years after its first influencer campaign, Hello Jack boasts an active Instagram community of some 8,000 followers and has a steady roster of enthusiastic brand ambassadors who regularly talk about the brand to their audiences.  

“An Instagram influencer with 20,000 followers loved our Shine product so much she began posting before and after content, which drove an explosion of visits and sales. What we hadn’t known — and hadn’t checked first in Kolsquare — was that she had 500,000 followers on TikTok!,” marvels Baryla. 

To find out more about Hello Jack and its strategy, read Pierre Baryla's interview with Kolsquare.