Influencer Trust Marketing: How home cleaning marketplace app increased purchases 4.9x with social media collabs

SUMMARY:

You don’t primarily sell consulting services. Or car parts. Or babysitting services. Or whatever your product or service actually is.

The main thing you sell is trust.

Customers will only bet their business on your service once they trust you. They will only allow your product into their home or car once they trust you.

To give you ideas for how to build that trust, today we bring you a behind-the-scenes look at how a home service app startup used both mom bloggers and milk cartons to increase trust.

by Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute

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Rozie is an Uber-style marketplace for home cleaning.

“If your product involves strangers entering private space (cleaners, babysitters, dog walkers), budget first for trust fuel – faces your customers already know or objects that live inside their homes. Fancy funnels can wait,” advised Aleksandrs Tuls, Co-founder, Rozie.

Tuls gave MarketingSherpa a behind-the-scenes look at how his team did just that.

BEFORE: Google ads

When Rozie launched in October 2024, the company had an app published in the Apple Store and Google Play with very little feedback and reviews, almost no content on Instagram/Facebook/TikTok pages, and the only ad campaign was Google Ads pointing straight to the app stores or to a landing page

Ads had messaging like ‘Request cleaning, just like a taxi or meal, with Rozie.”

Creative Sample #1: Sample of Google Ad creative

A screenshot of a blue and black web page

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The ads got 40 to 45 people to install the app and register every day, about 1,200 registrations per month.

However, their ultimate conversion goal is a paid booking. And only about two percent of searches on the app went through every step of the process (user opens app à enters property address à waits for offers à chooses an offer) and made a paid booking.

The team interviewed early users to understand why they were not getting more paid bookings, and they heard feedback like ‘Is this cleaner real? Is your company even real?’

They realized that Rozie was brand new and had zero brand equity.

AFTER: Building trust by using influencers and offline advertising

The partners brainstormed together and decided that this lack of trust was their biggest conversion hindrance.

They figured showing real-life examples with influencers would lead the ideal customer to the conclusion that the company and its cleaners were ‘real.’ “People trust people, not pixels. A five-star badge means nothing until someone they follow lets a stranger mop their kitchen,” Tuls said.

They focused their efforts on Instagram. “Our core users are 30+, working parents. In Malta that crowd scrolls Instagram way more than TikTok. TikTok’s audience is younger, so Instagram was the choice. We checked the topics potential influencers cover: lifestyle, family, hobbies – and picked the best fit,” he said.

The team focused on micro/mini creators, which they defined as having 2,000 to 20,000 Instagram followers because they wanted their ideal customer to feel like the influencers were ‘one of us’ and not just celebrities.

How influencers were selected

The team tracked brands with a similar audience and wrote down every creator those brands hired twice or more (which indicated to them that the brand was happy with the collaboration). They checked fake-follower ratios with online tools but also considered their gut feelings.

The team started with a couple of influencers to test results and saw positives very fast: people emailed in questions, asked support about specific app features, and they got more searches for cleaners in the app. So they ultimately chose 18 influencers with a combined 260,000 followers.

Influencer deal structure

The team approached each influencer differently, offering varied deals along the way. Some wanted a one-time payment, others wanted several free cleanings. The most common deal was a free deep clean of the influencer’s home plus a $100 to $400 payment per post based on their reach and engagement. The team made sure each influencer only posted once every week or every other weeks so their Instagram feed never felt spammy.

Once a collab was approved, the creative brief was simple – ‘we want honest feedback.’ If the influencer liked the service, they should post natural feedback and suggest using the app. They were given total freedom on how and what to film/post so the content matched their style.

Milk carton advertising

While the campaign was very digital, mobile, online, social, etc…the team realized that offline advertising could also be very good at building enough trust to get potential users to invite a stranger into a home.

First, they invested $1,200 and three Saturdays of staff time handing out coupons near shopping centers, but that did not move the needle.

So they focused on a communication device that the ideal customer brought into their home regularly – a milk carton.

They bought a milk carton ad, and in March 2025 appeared on 250,000 bright-yellow milk cartons with the headline ‘Too busy to clean your house?’ along with a QR code.

Creative Sample #2: Milk carton ad

A hand holding a box

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The cartons had to be designed two months before the ad ran, so they kept influencer posts going all winter.

RESULTS: Conversion up to 9.8%

Let’s look at a comparison of the October-to-December-2024 timeframe when the team was only using Google Ads to the April-May-2025 timeframe after the influencers + milk carton advertising campaign had been rolling:

Installs increased 81% – from 3,600 per month to 6,500 per month
Initial search-to-order conversion was 4.9x better – from 2% to 9.8% (the conversion rate began growing in month two of the influencer campaign and plateaued by month four)

In addition, they onboarded 4.4x more service providers, growing from 45 to 200.

The Google Ads cost $4.25 per registration versus $3.80 per registration for the Instagram campaign, but the influencers also lifted final conversion.

Instagram follower size did not necessarily correlate with results

Some influencer collabs almost crashed the app from traffic while others had zero effect. “The only posts that tanked were over-produced reels with voice-overs we clearly didn’t ask for,” he said.

One 15,000-follower mom blogger outsold a 90,000-follower beauty guru 6:1. One influencer looked perfect on many platforms but had zero effect and even bought video views.

The best result came from an influencer with normal follower numbers but a super-engaged audience – 1,000 registrations and several hundred cleaner searches in two days. Now they’re signing the influencer as a brand ambassador for regular content.

“Feedback on Trustpilot and app stores is not enough. You need real-world advocates and nothing is better than feedback of someone you might know or follow,” Tuls said.

Offline builds trust

“Seeing the same logo on a phone screen and on breakfast milk flips a mental switch: ‘these guys must be legit,’” Tuls concluded.

The milk carton ads also helped build credibility with influencers. “The milk ads didn’t bring instant traffic, but feedback from creators was great. Some even said our app is ‘everywhere’ now,” he said.

Survey feedback now shows that trust concerns are far less prominent than they were six months ago.

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.