Multi-Year Influencer Marketing Program
Scaling creator size and platform mix drove significantly broader audience reach as the program matured.
Platform benchmark: 3% to 5%. Top performers in the program delivered engagement rates between 10% and 12%.
Flight 1 Instagram ER: 3.84%. Flight 2 Instagram ER: 7.55%. Industry benchmark: 2%.
Express Employment Professionals is one of the largest staffing companies in the world, with hundreds of franchise locations connecting job seekers to employers across North America. The challenge was not brand size. It was brand relevance with a digitally native, younger job-seeking audience that discovers opportunities through social media, not job boards.
Traditional media was not reaching this audience at the moment they were actively thinking about their next career move. Express needed trusted voices speaking on the platforms where job seekers already live, framing Express as a fast, easy, human solution to a frustrating problem.
Job seekers on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn follow career and finance creators because they trust their advice. A recommendation from a creator they already rely on carries more weight than any paid ad. The job-seeking niche on TikTok in particular had a highly engaged, loyal audience with genuine intent and no meaningful brand presence to speak to them.
The opportunity was to place Express inside the conversations that job seekers were already having with creators they trusted. Authenticity of voice was the variable that would determine whether this program earned real engagement or got lost in the scroll.
Over the life of this engagement, AcrobatAnt has researched, vetted, and activated more than 20 creators across career coaching, personal finance, HR expertise, and job-search strategy. Each flight began with a disciplined vetting process: audience authenticity, content credibility, engagement quality, and whether a creator’s voice could carry an Express recommendation naturally. We present a curated short list to the client for approval before any outreach or contracting begins.
Creator selection is intentionally diversified by tier—micro, macro, and mega influencers—and by platform. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn are each activated based on where a specific creator’s audience lives, not by assumption. The program has grown more sophisticated with each flight, incorporating learnings about which creator categories, content formats, and platform combinations produce the strongest engagement for this audience.
“A full-service influencer program built and managed from strategy through reporting, sustained across multiple years.”
20+
Unique creators activated
Contracted and deployed across the full program spanning career, finance, HR, and job-search content categories.
3
Platform mix
TikTok, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn — each activated based on creator audience fit.
4
Creator categories
Career coaching, personal finance, HR expertise, and job-search strategy — diversified by audience intent.
AcrobatAnt manages the full outreach and negotiation process: initial contact, media kit review, deliverable scoping, price negotiation, and contract execution. Influencer agreements include usage rights, FTC compliance requirements, content approval terms, and clawback provisions.
Content direction gives creators a clear strategic brief while preserving their authentic voice. Each influencer receives messaging guidelines, required brand mentions, UTM tracking links, and FTC disclosure requirements, then builds content in their own format and style. The result is sponsored content that looks and feels native—because it is. Audiences engage with it as career advice, not advertising.
The most consistent finding across the program: engagement rates have run well above platform benchmarks at every creator tier. Top TikTok performers delivered engagement rates between 10% and 12%, against a platform average of 3% to 5%. On Instagram, the program outpaced a 2% industry benchmark by significant margins in both flights. On LinkedIn, a combination of repurposed content in long-form format and co-hosted LinkedIn Live events built a professional audience layer the platform could not have reached through paid alone.
Two content formats have consistently outperformed single-post activations: multi-video contracts, which create double exposure and allow audiences to encounter the brand at different moments; and LinkedIn Live co-hosted events, which generate live attendance as well as sustained post-event viewership that continues to accumulate after the event closes.
Influencer content does not stop working when the organic posting window closes. On every flight, AcrobatAnt layers paid media on top of influencer organic deployment. Meta awareness boosts and LinkedIn traffic boosts run in parallel with each creator’s posting window, extending reach beyond organic followers to targeted job-seeker audiences—the same trusted voice, amplified to a broader audience that has not yet found it.
Each creator is assigned a unique UTM tracking link, giving the program full attribution by creator and platform. This data feeds directly into flight-over-flight optimization, informing which creator categories, content formats, and platform combinations are driving the most qualified traffic and should be scaled in subsequent flights. The program gets more efficient with each iteration because the data tells us exactly what is working.
200%+
Reach growth, Flight 1 to Flight 2
Combined TikTok and Instagram unduplicated reach more than tripled as the creator mix scaled and platform strategy sharpened.
888%
LinkedIn impression growth
Flight-over-flight LinkedIn impression growth as the creator roster expanded and posting volume scaled across the program.
3+
Years and growing
An active ongoing engagement with new creator flights deploying monthly through the current year, with program strategy evolving each cycle.
