If you’re not a fitness geek, that’s OK. You don’t need to be because you’re here for marketing tips. Totally understandable.

To give you a little background, Henry Cavill is the actor of one of the most-watched series on Netflix — The Witcher. So what does an actor have to do with marketing, you asked? Great question.

I stumbled upon his branded Instagram Reel content as I was scrolling my stories. I’m not a fitness geek. I consume his content on Instagram only because I was a fan of The Witcher series.

The fight scenes in the series were so good that I couldn’t help myself from looking into what he’s doing on a daily basis. I became his fan, so to speak. Not in a creepy way of course.

Back to his branded Instagram Reel content. In short, he got injured on set and there’s this bodybuilding supplement (MuscleTech) company that helps him with his injury. And they decided to do a collaboration in conjunction with these physiotherapy sessions.

I’ll leave the link to the Reel here. Watch it so you get the most out of this article. With that being said, here are the 4 key takeaways to improve your marketing.

1. He Pre-Sold the Audience Before the Pitch

Before you bring your traffic to your sales page, make sure they are pre-sold in the ads or the content you’re directing from. This will take away part of the heavy work from your sales page which results in better and higher conversion.

Think of it as a Christmas gift. Your pitch is the content inside the gift and it’s wrapped with a nice-looking wrapper. Just looking at the well-wrapped Christmas gift makes you excited enough to want to open it.

Henry did exactly that. He didn’t open up the Reel talking about the company. Instead, he started with his hamstring injury on The Witcher set — and further transitioned the content to the pitch, naturally.

I believe that’s what makes the pitch successful. It’s not because of the quality of the products or their benefits, but because Henry leveraged the hype from the series and pre-sold his audience before the pitch.

2. Soft Selling and Hard Selling

When Henry pitched the products, he didn’t go over the top telling his audience how good the products are. He did it naturally while holding his phone and recording himself at the same time. That’s the difference between a successful influencer campaign and a terrible one.

Influencers aren’t salespeople. They do what they’re good at and that something could be anything but selling. Henry soft sells the products while the company does all the hard selling. That’s how they do it.

Depending on your product, you should do soft selling and hard selling accordingly. If you’re selling a low-ticket product, your ad should only do soft selling (pre-sell) and leave the hard sell to your landing page.

Conversely, if you’re selling a high ticket product, a sales call should be your hard selling while the educational content is your soft sell. Of course, you have your own sales funnel. I’m only giving you a general idea about soft selling and hard selling.

3. Be Specific To Be Persuasive

Whoever is specific to the audience, wins. The reason being your audience needs to trust you before committing to anything. They want to know if you know their problems well and if you have the solution to free them from their misery.

What Henry did was a perfect example. He first stated the injury with his words. But words don’t show everything so he showed an MRI of his injury. He explained what happened and the condition of his left hamstring based on the MRI in detail.

It turns out the middle part of the left hamstring was injured while sprinting on set. He didn’t stop there. He further explained the physiotherapy exercises he went through to recover from the injury. You can see him in action too if you watched the Reel.

The specificity he included is beyond words. That’s what makes this marketing campaign compelling. Marketers, keep this in mind — specificity is highly persuasive.

4. Relevancy

We’ve covered most of the successful components of this influencer campaign, but there’s one more component that’s key to this campaign. I believe the branded content won’t be as impactful as it should be without it — and it’s also what marketers tend to overlook most.

That key component is relevancy, not topic-wise but production-wise. Henry’s Reel content is shot by him holding his phone while talking. It would be better if it was shot by a production crew, I agree. But that will defeat the purpose of the branded content.

The Reel is supposed to look natural and as if it were shot while Henry is at home for his physiotherapy sessions. The camera angle is one of the key components of this influencer marketing campaign, and they nailed it perfectly.

Henry’s fans would be able to relate and resonate better with that specific camera angle. It’s a typical influencer-giving-an-update-to-his-fans kind of shot. This results in better receptivity of the marketing message, especially the products’ pitch.

Wrapping Things Up

To be successful in marketing, you need to approach things intentionally. From the production to the pitch, every single thing must line up according to plan to yield a higher ROI on your campaigns. Before you go all busy with your content, ask yourself what you can do better.