Victoria Harrison is a Co-founder of The Exposure Co., one of Australia’s first full-service influencer marketing agencies. At 23 years old, Victoria took the risk of turning her hobby project into a full-time business. Nearly 2 years on, The Exposure Co. is now at the forefront of the industry as one of Australia’s largest full-service influencer marketing agencies with a network of over 2,000 digital influencers.
Can you tell us a little bit about your idea and what made you decide to take the plunge and make it happen?
I met my business partner, Tara Kingi while working in a digital marketing agency in Brisbane. It was there that we started working on The Exposure Co. as a side project. A former colleague was struggling to promote an e-commerce business through Instagram – influencers were running off with the product, not following briefs and just being unreliable. We all agreed that there had to be a more efficient way to leverage the power of influencers and thus The Exposure Co. was born.
Around the hours of full-time work, we started building the business from the ground up, spending countless hours trying to get key influencers on board. 6 months in and still no clients, we were faced with a 24-hour ultimatum from our boss – give up on The Exposure Co. or quit our current full-time jobs.
With nothing to our name and no experience running a business, leaving the safety of full time employment to build a business from scratch was a huge risk – but one we will never live to regret. We resigned the next day and began our entrepreneurial adventure.
Could you explain your business model to us?
The Exposure Co. specialises in building brand influence by creating strategic alliances and leveraging the power of digital influencers. We help brands establish relationships with their target market through influencers on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and blogs. As a full service agency, our team of specialists manage our client’s campaigns end to end; from strategy development, to influencer recruitment and post campaign analysis. Our network of influencers consists of a range of intimate influencers with 5000 followers or more and top tier influencers with up to 4 million followers. These influencers craft beautiful, native content to visually showcase our client’s brand across the beauty & fashion, lifestyle, health & fitness and family verticals.
What are you working on right now and what are you most excited about in the next year?
As Influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity, the market is becoming more and more competitive. To stay ahead of the game, we are very excited about the recent launch of our comprehensive audience data insights.
While most brands focus on follower size, engagement rate and niche to determine which influencers are a good fit, our new insights allow us to delve one step deeper into our influencer’s active follower data. The insights allow us to break down our influencer’s most engaged followers and uncover detailed audience data such as gender split, age, geographic location, language and other specialised data that no other services currently offer.
The stats are very interesting – some female models, who are engaged to promote female-centric products, can actually have more active male followers than females – a key takeaway that most brands would be unaware of without our data.
How do you make ideas happen?
Write them all down on the big whiteboard in our office, put them in a list (in order of priority with due dates), sigh to myself about the long list, get a coffee, delegate anything I don’t have to do myself (Upwork and Freelancer are the best for small tasks!), then rip into what needs to be done!
What does your typical day look like?
Every day is different depending on what projects we’ve got going on but there’s never a day without emails, coffee, and social media!
What challenges have you faced when starting a business in Australia?
After a year of full-time entrepreneur life, things got really tough. The company was operating at a loss, we had a loan to pay back, and our third co-founder checked out.
Tara and I gave ourselves 4 months to turn the business around or we were out. It took a lot of hours and hard work, but within the next 4 months, we’d billed over 100K, became debt free and launched multiple international campaigns. It was a tough time but we learnt a lot along the way.
What’s one idea you are willing to give away for free?
Don’t try and work through a bad headspace – go for a walk, get a coffee and come back with a clear head.
What 3 websites would you recommend to our readers?
Do you currently have any opportunities for people to get involved with your idea?
Definitely!! We are always on the hunt for helping hands. We love people contributing to our blog and we’re currently on the hunt for a sponsor for an industry first influencer marketing survey we are conducting in the coming months. Feel free to get in touch [email protected]
Do you have favourite café?
My local coffee shop in Hamilton, Brisbane. Don’t know where I’d be without them.
