How New Scientist is using influencer marketing to boost acquisitions

The US presents a big opportunity for New Scientist, being five times the size of the UK market. We have had a presence there for many years, but our brand awareness has remained low.

We understand the US is a volume play, due to the size and scale of the market with strong, but lower yields than the UK. The US is a long-term investment; to build a sustainable subscriptions business, it requires time and consistent investment. In 2022, we opened our New York bureau recruiting the best editorial talent and investing significantly in our marketing.

Our growth had been challenged by economic changes and it takes time to find traction by investing in marketing to achieve volume growth. Our organic growth has been impressive, but steady; our paid digital marketing slower and more expensive than anticipated. Upper funnel advertising such as podcasts and radio proved underwhelming with the more traditional route of direct mail becoming the dominant channel in the marketing mix.

After two years of steady growth, we felt the time was right to get to know our audience better. We completed a significant piece of audience research to help us understand the ‘why’ of the brand and how best to differentiate from the free content available and target those with a deep interest in science. This was the catalyst for our integrated marketing campaign, our pivot to a digital-first flexible plan that learns through activity and response.

This is where influencers came into play. As part of our integrated digital-first approach, we set out to test the ‘multiplier effect’. Could influencer marketing deliver an incremental uplift in conversion by building brand awareness through upper-funnel marketing activity?

The past — building on influencer history

New Scientist is not new to influencer activity. A few years ago, we tested influencer marketing in the UK: see here and here.

Working in partnership with our influencer agency, we partnered with influencers to help inform their student audiences about how New Scientist is a great tool to read around the subject, to support their studies and to make science more accessible through interesting topics that they can talk about in admissions or cover letters.

Creating content across Instagram and YouTube, the student creators directed their audiences to subscribe. We also sponsored the Sci Guys podcast, integrating a conversation that was spurred by an interesting article they found within the magazine.

Generating a modest volume at an acceptable CPA, this campaign can be considered a success but in truth (and possibly naivety? Impatience?), we were hoping for larger volumes to help fill the gap we were seeing in paid search and paid social activity.

Hoping to drive significant volume, for our second campaign, we partnered with two doctors and a medical student to build intrigue with their audience through a free, digital version of New Scientist.

This first phase of content was then backed up with two more phases of content showcasing the benefits of being a New Scientist subscriber, to help convert the free digital trials.

We also amplified the UNEP partnership (United Nations Environment Program), showcasing the five ‘rescue plan for nature’ features that discuss climate change to help showcase the breadth of information that New Scientist shares.

Our hope was to convert more of the influencers’ audience to a free trial so as to nurture them through their trial and achieve high step-up rates to paid subscription. CPAs increased by 58% and added another year to our LTV. Unacceptable to us at that time and sadly not our silver bullet.

The present

Fast forward to 2024, and you must be living under a rock not to have noticed the significant increase in creator-first social media marketing.

Driving conversations with content that inspires interest, engagement and traffic to sites, using influencers enables you to tap into a ready-made like-minded audience. People trust people, people listen to people, and social media influencers can positively impact digital awareness and conversion; working with credible influencers enables you to introduce your brand to their audience, and if authentic, as they advocate your brand, their followers follow.

With US brand awareness still quite low and our digital marketing agency sharing statistics around the way people spend time on social media changing, such as 60% of time spent on social media platforms is watching short form video and 39% of users watch more creator-produced content than twelve months ago, this type of activity is incredibly attractive, it would enable us to reach a significant amount of ready-made, like-minded people to showcase our content to.

The research stage

We spent quite some time with our agency to understand the dynamics of influencer marketing. It was important for the New Scientist marketing team to be able to articulate what we were doing and why. It was also important to bring our editorial colleagues on the journey too as launching such a campaign requires significant editorial / marketing collaboration.

During the initial research phase, we gathered feedback from internal stakeholders and the agency on which influencers were appropriate, based on credibility and audience type and reach. At one point, there were around 50 influencers to review and prioritise. Once the list is whittled down the next stage begins.

The outreach stage

This stage is when the agency is negotiating, securing the best for your buck. New Scientist is a hugely respected brand and despite low ‘mass market’ brand awareness in US, the influencers we targeted knew New Scientist and were incredibly excited to be given the opportunity to work with us. This meant we were able to secure four hero influencers, influencers with a very large following, typically exceeding one million.

There is then a further review of the talent to ensure alignment, a review of their initial concept, followed by concept refinement, and then comes the piece of content for approval.

Three phase approach

• Phase 1: organic delivery. To engage both our established and newly identified target audiences — predominantly ABC1, skewing male, we partnered with four credible and engaging macro influencers: Kyle Hill, AsapSCIENCE, Ashley Christine and Felecia For The Win.

Each creator has a unique style and therefore the content concept must be well matched to ensure authenticity. Aside from Kyle Hill, whose content was a deep dive around a subject with a mid-way interruption mentioning New Scientist as the episode sponsor, the rest were themed around articles explained.

This content was phased across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, delivering a total of four Instagram Reels, two TikTok videos, one YouTube Short, one YouTube video, and 15 Instagram Story frames. The content was designed to create buzz and excitement around the subscription offer, ensuring it reached a wide and relevant audience from the outset, this strategy successfully introduced New Scientist to new audiences, increased positive sentiment, and reinforced our value as an essential resource in the STEM community.

(Instagram posts: Kyle Hill; AsapSCIENCE; Ashley Christine; Felecia For The Win)

• Phase 2: influencer paid boosting. Built into the overall campaign is paid advertising where influencers expand the reach by showing the content to a wider audience beyond their existing followers on social media platforms. This allows the campaign to reach more potential customers through the influencer’s credibility and established audience.

The agency targeted people who had interacted with the influencers over the past year; this builds on the trust the influencer has already created with their followers, making the ads feel more relevant and engaging. It’s a simple but effective way to connect with a warm audience and drive stronger results.

• Phase 3: paid delivery. The final stage is supercharging your own paid social. We used partnership ads to supercharge the activity, driving greater reach and frequency amongst influencers’ follower base. This means you can target the influencers’ followers specifically.

The clever use of creative adaptations transforms paid social. Our agency told us, in the past, they had seen 84% uplift in performance metrics using this type of paid campaign with 4x higher click-through rates and 50% reduction in cost-per-click.

The results

Our aim to create buzz and excitement around the $10 for 10 weeks digital subscription offer, ensuring it reached a wide and relevant audience right from the start, was a success as a result of leveraging the diverse reach and engagement of these influencers’ audiences.

Overall, the campaign exceeded the majority of our KPIs including achieving an 8.65% engagement rate, surpassing the industry average of 2%.

What we learned

With impressive click through and engagement rates, this demonstrates the value and impact of leveraging influencers within our marketing approach.

As expected, some influencers performed better than others.

Ashley’s content delivered impressive results across all platforms, achieving a fantastic engagement rate of 7.73% — well above the 2% industry average for influencers. Instagram proved to be her strongest platform, with her Reel outperforming other formats. This strong performance is likely due to how seamlessly the content she created for New Scientist aligns with her usual style. By embedding naturally into her feed and maintaining the look and feel of her organic posts, the content avoided coming across as too promotional, resonating more effectively with her audience and driving its overall impact.

Similarly to Ashley, Felecia’s content for New Scientist was carefully crafted to align with the look and feel of her usual organic posts. Felecia’s signature ‘FaceTime’ style — which is casual, conversational, and relaxed, creates the impression that she’s speaking directly to her audience as if they’re friends. This unpolished, low-production approach feels genuine and relatable, which likely contributed to her impressive engagement rate of 10.44%.

Additionally, Felecia drove the highest number of organic clicks amongst all influencers demonstrating not only strong engagement but also her ability to inspire action from her audience.

Kyle was a standout performer in this campaign, driving an impressive 74% of the total impressions singlehandedly. His YouTube audience proved to be highly engaged, making him the second-highest driver of organic clicks after Felecia. Kyle integrated the New Scientist content seamlessly into his video, placing the integration mid-way through, which likely contributed to its success. Audience retention data further supports this, with 50% of viewers staying engaged for the entirety of the video. Notably, the largest drop-off occurred just two minutes before the video’s conclusion, indicating strong sustained interest throughout.

AsapSCIENCE had the lowest engagement rate of the campaign, but it was still highly impressive and well above the industry average.

Looking at the results of BAU paid digital marketing activity, this type of marketing clearly resonates with our audience; in comparison to our typical BAU activity, we saw a significant increase in interaction and time spent watching these videos. We also saw a 29% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA) and we did see an uplift on our BAU average subscriptions when measuring before and after activity.

What’s next?

We want to implement our learnings from this activity to support our overall marketing strategy and complement our paid digital strategy. In addition, we are working with our agency on the next phase of influencer marketing, building New Scientist ambassadors by identifying long term relationships with creators. I’m keen to see if there is a future where our journalists become the creators? Watch this space...