The business of blogging: How Lorraine Murphy launched Australia’s first blogger talent agency - Women's Agenda

The business of blogging: How Lorraine Murphy launched Australia’s first blogger talent agency

In the past six years the online “blogosphere” has exploded. Mums, fashionistas, professional travellers, and even cats are blogging these days. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish who the movers and shakers are, but Lorraine Murphy has them picked and she’s sharing her knowledge with some of Australia’s most prominent businesses.

Murphy launched Australia’s first blogger-only agency, The Remarkables Group, in May 2012 and business has boomed. Having worked in PR and communications strategy for eight years, Murphy started to notice clients were keen to work with bloggers and vice versa, but neither party knew how to communicate with each other.

For the first four months, Murphy spent her time educating brands about how to benefit from relationships with bloggers, as Australian companies were still “catching up with the United States and the United Kingdom”.

When the business started last year Murphy had five bloggers on board, now The Remarkables is composed of 15 bloggers from diverse backgrounds and sectors and works with companies such as Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, Woolworths, Wotif and Toyota.

The Remarkables turned over $1 million in its first year and Murphy spoke to Women’s Agenda sister publication SmartCompany about finding the right staff, burning out and forging a new business in an unknown environment.

Mornings

Six months ago Murphy was all about work, but she quickly realised things needed to change.

“My mornings are very different to what they would have been three to six months ago.

“In March I was just exhausted, I don’t like to think of it as a burn out, but I realised I needed some balance,” she says.

Now, Murphy rises at 5am – and she confirms this early start is actually relaxing.

“I have recently been learning qigong tai chi, and I do that when I wake up and I meditate as well, which I find really powerful for myself.

“Then I get to the gym at 6.30am and I’m in the office at 8.15am. It makes such a difference – I get home at 10pm and I’m still going,” she says.

Daily life
In just over a year, The Remarkables has grown from just Murphy to a team of five, and with this growth, Murphy says her role has changed dramatically.

“I’m not as involved in the day-to-day implementation anymore and I also recently hired a business development manager,” she says.

“I focus on client relationships. I oversee the relationships with our clients and bloggers. I’d like to spend more time on building the business – I have a lot of ideas and want more time to bring them to life.”

When The Remarkables launched, Murphy was fortunate to have good relationships with three bloggers who went on to be part of her initial group of five.

“They introduced me to another two bloggers and then to get to the next ten it was a mixture of bloggers approaching us and then I also had a few on my radar who I approached.”

For each campaign launched with a blogger and a client, Murphy sets KPIs with targets for how many people they want to reach.

“There are a few different ways we measure the success of a campaign, but we don’t look after advertising. Our focus is the blogger using their voice to talk about the brands. This can be in the form of sponsored posts once or twice a week.

“The second way is content creation where the blogger creates content for the brand channel,” she says.

Hair Romance blogger Christina creates regular content for the Schwarzkopf website and Murphy says her posts are designed to attract the everyday woman.

“The idea wasn’t for it to be all fancy schmancy, instead she tries out styles on her own hair,” she says.

Hair Romance posts step-by-step tutorials showing readers how to construct the hair styles themselves. Murphy says this has resulted in a 200% increase in traffic to Schwarzkopf’s website.

As well as creating content and writing sponsored posts, some of the bloggers act as brand ambassadors.

“This is where brands will sign up bloggers on a partnership basis. Woolworths has signed up five of our bloggers for the whole financial year,” she says.

“They’ll blog each month and host events and create content for Woolies. Another blogger will be in a TV ad for a big brand and we’re seeing more of that as well.”

Murphy measures the success of a campaign across four different pillars: exposure, interaction, ROI and action.

Exposure relates to the reach of the post, while interaction is measured by the number of comments, tweets and likes a post gets. ROI is the key objective and in many cases it’s measured by click throughs. Action involves people engaging with the brands through things like competition entries, coupon redemption and newsletter subscriptions.

When Murphy devised her business plan initially, she went into such detail she even described the characteristics of who her first employee should be.

Creating a positive team environment has always been one of Murphy’s goals, having come from an agency with a “great culture”.

“We do a yoga class together and we do a social event once a month. I also organise an ‘inspire lunch’ every two months or so where we go to a nice restaurant and have lunch with someone who knows their stuff,” she says.

“Another thing we do is deliver on our values. There are four values and we each have a vision board of things which bring the values to life. Whenever we see someone meet the value we give them a gold star, and then if you get 20 stars you get gold class tickets.”

Murphy says the initiative is “largely just a pat on the back”, but it’s effective and keeps team morale high.

Leisure time
Murphy works till around 7pm each evening, but has a rule that when she’s home, she’s home.

“I love cooking, cooking is like my meditation.

“I love getting into the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. I’m also involved in (knowledge sharing program) The Entourage, founded by Jack Delosa, and I go to school every two months with them and we connect and share experiences, there are 100 members now.”

“The Entourage is like a mentorship, we all mentor each other.

“Lisa Messenger from The Messenger Group has also been a great mentor. She’s really exciting and she does her own thing despite what market trends are saying.

“I tend to write to successful entrepreneurs for possible mentors and people have been really generous.”

Future
Murphy wants to explore overseas markets, but is aiming to keep the agency to a small number of bloggers and primary clients.

“I think the beauty is bloggers are global and I think that’ll be something we could easily do. Then I guess it’s really just solidifying what we’ve been doing and continuing to be leaders in the space and having the freshest campaigns.”

But it’s not all smooth sailing. Murphy says a potential challenge on the horizon is getting the balance between sponsored content and independent posts correct.

“The reader will think it’s boring and switch off. We’re careful to maintain that balance and we’ve found that the bloggers have increased their readership, one has actually doubled, but it still needs to be an organic nature.

“Another challenge will be connecting with the bloggers which have true influence, and determining who these people are. Some are more exclusive and harder to get a hold of,” she says.

 

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