How to Build Category Leadership Through Strategic Influencer Marketing: Lessons from the Robotic Vacuum Disruption

Breaking into a saturated consumer market can seem like an impossible task. The robotic vacuum sector is one such category, long dominated by legacy players like Dyson and Shark, which benefit from entrenched consumer trust, widespread brand visibility, and substantial advertising firepower.

But in 2024, smart home brand eufy, part of the Anker Innovations portfolio, set its sights on challenging that dominance in the UK. This wasn’t a one-off brand activation. It was the next chapter in a multi-year collaboration with SCROll STOP, a creative performance agency that had already delivered several high-impact product launches for all of Anker Technologies' brands across the UK and EU markets.

Having built a strong foundation of mutual trust, performance data, and creative alignment, SCROll STOP, under the strategic direction of CEO Jordan Tew, was tasked with a new mandate: transform eufy from a product-led challenger to the leading robotic vacuum brand in the country. The agency responded with a performance-led influencer marketing framework that not only elevated brand visibility but also redefined category expectations. The result: over 44% market share in the UK and sustained top-five positions across Amazon’s best-seller charts.

This article unpacks the strategy that powered that transformation and provides a blueprint for how brands in any sector can outthink, rather than outspend, their competitors.

Understanding the Challenges of Market Entry

Entering a mature, high-competition category like robotic vacuums requires more than product quality; it demands cultural and behavioural change. Established players such as Dyson and Shark benefit from decades of consumer trust, extensive retail visibility, and entrenched top-of-mind positioning. Their dominance is less about current performance and more about historical credibility.

Despite impressive technological capabilities, including intelligent mapping, voice integration, and powerful suction, eufy was still perceived through the lens of “tech accessories,” rather than smart home cleaning. Bridging that perception gap was not a messaging exercise, it was a reframing challenge.

SCROll STOP, under the strategic leadership of CEO Jordan Tew, identified that to win market share, they needed to win mindshare first. This meant shifting the cultural narrative away from tech specs and toward emotional resonance. The goal was to reposition robotic vacuums from a futuristic luxury to a practical, lifestyle-enhancing essential.

Instead of focusing on what the product does, the team focused on what the product meant for time-starved parents, design-conscious homeowners, and health-focused families. This shift turned a functional device into a symbol of care, convenience and modern living.

Importantly, this wasn’t a one-size-fits-all story. It required a layered, persona-led approach (explored in Section 2) to translate this narrative for different household archetypes across the UK.

Lesson: Challenger brands cannot outspend incumbents, but they can out-narrate them. Reframing outdated perceptions is the most powerful lever in modern brand storytelling, especially in categories where emotional relevance lags behind product innovation.

Research-Led Persona and Message Development

The foundation of the campaign’s success lay in its strategic planning, starting with a deeply analytical research phase. SCROll STOP adopted a multi-source approach, drawing from:

Historical influencer campaign data (across 2,000+ campaign activations)
Performance insights from over 10 billion social views
Social listening trends across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit
Competitor audits of Dyson, Shark and emerging DTC brands
Audience intent signals gathered through CRM and web analytics

Using this intelligence, the team segmented the UK consumer base into clearly defined, purchase-relevant personas, each with unique emotional and functional drivers:

Busy Parents: Pressed for time and constantly juggling priorities, this group valued convenience, automation, and reduced household workload. Messaging centred around ease-of-use, family safety and long-term time savings.
Style-Conscious Millennials: A demographic with strong aesthetic sensibilities who saw tech as an extension of their personal space. Content here focused on sleek product design, smart integrations and how eufy complemented modern interiors.
Pet Owners: Known for repeat cleaning routines and a heightened focus on hygiene, this persona responded to demonstrations of suction power, anti-tangle features and allergen reduction.
Allergy-Aware Households: Health-focused consumers seeking cleaner air and dust-free floors. Messaging here emphasised HEPA filtration, consistent cleaning patterns, and the invisible benefits of smart vacuuming.

For each persona, SCROll STOP mapped not just messaging, but platform preference, content format affinity and creator trust networks. This enabled the campaign to engage creators whose audiences were already primed for conversion, thereby reducing ad fatigue and enhancing content relevance.

Real-time data was surfaced through a master campaign dashboard, enabling agile optimisations throughout the campaign lifecycle. Messaging pivots were executed based on early engagement signals, click patterns and sentiment shifts, ensuring that the creative stayed resonant and responsive.

Lesson: Campaigns grounded in granular, intent-driven persona modelling outperform guesswork. When brands build messaging around real motivations, relevance becomes inevitable, and conversions follow.

The Strategic Role of Influencers in Shifting Perception

Rather than rely on mass-appeal influencers, SCROll STOP developed creator clusters aligned with each persona:

CleanTok experts
Mumfluencers
Pet content creators
Interior lifestyle voices

Beyond intelligent segmentation, SCROll STOP’s success was underpinned by access to an extensive global creator network. With over 250,000 personalities across 30+ verticals, spanning home, lifestyle, wellness, parenting and tech, the agency was able to rapidly match eufy with influencers whose audiences already trusted their content. This vast pool allowed for hyper-specific targeting, ensuring authenticity and resonance across every campaign vertical. Whether the goal was allergy-focused education or millennial home inspiration, the talent infrastructure enabled agile yet deeply aligned executions across platforms and demographics.

Additionally, with over 2,000 campaigns executed and more than 10 billion social views generated, SCROll STOP has built a data-rich ecosystem capable of predicting influencer performance with high accuracy. This intelligence spans click-through rates, conversion likelihood, and audience sentiment, allowing the team to prioritise creators who consistently deliver sales impact. This strategic application of historical campaign data was instrumental in selecting talent who could convert interest into measurable outcomes.

Influencers were onboarded not just as amplifiers, but as advocates. Custom creative packs were distributed not to script content, but to inspire personalised storytelling. Product training empowered each creator to speak credibly and informatively.

Crucially, the campaign featured Dr. Emeka, a medical professional and popular TV personality, who emphasised the hygiene and wellness benefits of robotic vacuums. This added scientific authority to the message and cut through typical scepticism.

Additional highlights included:

Lesson: Creators become influential educators when given the freedom, training and strategy to succeed.

Integrating Paid Media and Offline Tactics

To complement the influencer-led storytelling and extend the campaign’s reach, SCROll STOP executed a sophisticated cross-platform paid media strategy. The goal wasn’t just to amplify awareness; it was to drive measurable conversions across the consumer journey.

Rather than rely solely on boosted posts, the team employed a tiered approach that used native ad formats to preserve authenticity while scaling performance. TikTok Spark Ads played a central role, enabling the team to repurpose organic influencer content into paid placements that retained high engagement and social proof. These assets performed exceptionally well, with standout CPMs and CTRs.

Meta’s Partnership Ads, meanwhile, delivered consistent and scalable results across multiple activations. By connecting influencer handles to ad placements, SCROll STOP maintained trust while maximising reach and precision targeting. These ads were particularly effective at moving users from mid-funnel curiosity to purchase intent, contributing a significant portion of the campaign’s 33,000+ units sold.

YouTube was deployed for deeper storytelling. Long-form demonstrations allowed creators to explain features in detail, address objections, and showcase the real-world utility of eufy’s products. Though scale was smaller, intent was high, with some placements achieving CTRs above 10%.

What unified the paid strategy was SCROll STOP’s performance-first mindset. Every piece of content was monitored via the campaign’s master dashboard, allowing the team to rapidly identify high-performing assets and optimise spend in real time. Paid formats were chosen not by channel loyalty but by purpose Spark Ads for reach, Partnership Ads for retargeting, and YouTube for consideration.

This digital infrastructure was mirrored in the physical world. Billboard placements across central London elevated the campaign’s brand presence, while real-time influencer reactions to the OOH moments added a layer of organic virality. The roadshow and live demos further closed the gap between digital touchpoints and in-person trials, reinforcing trust and driving on-the-ground excitement.

Lesson: Paid media should mirror how people move through the real world gradually, socially, and with trust. Select ad formats that reflect intent, and let performance data guide your investment.

Measuring Influence — What Actually Matters

Unlike traditional media campaigns that rely on impressions, this campaign tracked meaningful behavioural shifts. Verified results via the live dashboard included:

77X+ ROI: This exceptional return on investment clearly underscores the campaign's profound commercial efficacy and strategic impact, far exceeding typical industry benchmarks.
12 million+ views: Across both organic and paid digital channels, this figure reflects a widespread content resonance and extensive audience reach, indicative of highly engaging creative.
3%+ engagement rate: Notably above industry averages for consumer electronics, this metric demonstrates that the content genuinely captivated and connected with its audience, fostering meaningful interaction.
386,000+ link clicks: Showcasing high levels of consumer intent, this volume of clicks established a clear, effective pathway from initial engagement to deeper consideration.
33,000+ units sold: This substantial figure provides tangible proof of the campaign's direct commercial success and its robust ability to convert widespread interest into direct purchases.
44.29% UK market share: This dominant share represents a significant and rapid leap, fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape and firmly positioning eufy as a leader within the robotic vacuum sector.
Amazon #1 Bestseller status: Consistently holding multiple top positions (1 through 5) for its key products, this is a clear, real-time indicator of immediate consumer preference and robust purchasing volume on a critical UK retail platform.
Recognised by ChatGPT as the UK’s top robotic vacuum brand: A unique and telling contemporary indicator, this recognition highlights how deeply eufy had embedded itself in the collective digital consciousness, establishing an authoritative brand presence within the category.

"Working with SCROll STOP has been an absolute game-changer for our brand,"

affirmed Yuhan Pan, Regional Marketing Manager for Anker Innovations.

"Their proactive and deeply analytical approach to campaign execution and content creation made all the difference, particularly in our X10 launch. We’ve genuinely never witnessed a campaign drive such rapid sales acceleration and category shift before."

Crucially, this campaign transcended the mere achievement of impressive KPIs. It fundamentally redefined what success looks like within the robotic vacuum category. By its conclusion, a palpable shift in consumer behaviour had taken root across the UK. Audiences were no longer grappling with the initial, often hesitant, question of whether they should invest in a robotic vacuum at all; instead, they were actively progressing to an informed decision-making stage, asking which specific eufy model was precisely right for their individual household needs. This transition speaks volumes about the campaign’s success in fostering education, trust, and brand specificity.

"We weren't merely trying to 'win the internet' with fleeting viral moments,"

Jordan Tew reflected on the long-term vision.

"Our strategic imperative was to meticulously build profound, long-term trust and foster genuine community around the eufy brand. That underlying commitment is precisely what makes the post-campaign impact even more exciting, because that vibrant community we carefully nurtured? It's still there, thriving and continuing to champion eufy long after the initial campaign waves. This enduring engagement proves that when marketing moves beyond transactional goals to cultivate authentic connection, its ripple effects can far outlast the initial campaign period, establishing a legacy of loyalty and advocacy within the market."

Lesson: The best indicator of success is sustained behavioural change, not viral reach.

Key Lessons for Marketers in 2025

The eufy campaign offers a clear blueprint for how challenger brands can unlock category leadership through intelligent influence. For marketers navigating saturated markets in 2025, the following principles stand out:

Lead with insight, not assumption. Deep audience research should be the first line of action, not a post-launch fix. Understanding motivations, objections and lifestyle context drives stronger creative alignment.
Use creators as educators, not amplifiers. Influencer marketing is no longer about visibility alone. Select creators who hold real authority within niche communities, and empower them with tools to inform, not just entertain.
Design creative for fluidity across channels. Today’s most effective assets are those that can live natively in organic feeds, convert under paid media pressure, and remain relevant in longer-form discovery environments.
Fuse digital with tangible experience. Brand trust doesn’t begin or end on screen—real-world activations, whether billboard takeovers or in-person demos, close the credibility loop and deepen emotional impact.
Optimise for behavioural metrics, not vanity ones. Success lies in shifting perceptions, driving clicks, and ultimately influencing purchase decisions. Use dashboards and data to track meaningful movement through the funnel, not just reach.

Lesson: When marketers prioritise cultural relevance over noise, and strategic insight over legacy playbooks, they don’t just gain awareness, they change buying behaviour.

Conclusion

The eufy robotic vacuum 2024 campaign demonstrates that in today’s fragmented, fast-moving market, challenger brands don’t need bigger budgets; they need better strategy. With the right blend of audience insight, creator alignment, and performance-first execution, it’s possible not just to compete with category leaders but to overtake them.

At the core of this transformation was a creative framework built by SCROll STOP a modern digital agency that continues to set new standards in influencer-led performance marketing. Under the leadership of Jordan Tew, the campaign evolved from a traditional product push into a cultural moment that redefined an entire category.

For brands seeking scalable impact in complex markets, the lesson is clear: success isn’t about following trends, it’s about setting them.

About the Author

Nadica Naceva

Writer

Nadica Naceva writes, edits, and wrangles content at Influencer Marketing Hub, where she keeps the wheels turning behind the scenes. She’s reviewed more articles than she can count, making sure they don’t go out sounding like AI wrote them in a hurry. When she’s not knee-deep in drafts, she’s training others to spot fluff from miles away (so she doesn’t have to).