Learning from Successful Influencer Campaigns

Take a look at 4 lessons you can learn from 12 influencer campaigns out there.

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Influencer Marketing has become such a large part of the marketing industry that pretty much all brands are embracing it in one way or another. A wide variety of campaigns have been made, from the playful to the serious, but their results have also varied a lot.

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When looking to make your own influencer campaign, you need to look at the winners in this area.

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After all, there is a lot to learn from the campaigns that have come before. In this article, we’ll take a look at 4 lessons that successful influencer campaigns can teach us, and we’ll also look at examples of said campaigns.

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4 Lessons that Influencer Campaigns Teach Us and Their Examples

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Have Some Fun with It

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Influencer marketing isn’t just about showing off your products or brand to people, it is also about entertaining them. Some of the most successful campaigns out there triumphed because they found ways to make things fun. Here are 3 examples of campaigns meant to entertain:

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1. Subaru -#MeetAnOwner

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Subaru created the#MeetAnOwnercampaign as a way to showcase their new Impreza in various different locations, with the aim of attracting the attention of millennial buyers.

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They collaborated with 20 influencers, from artists to adventure photographers, to show a wide variety of posts that had the car at its forefront. Digital magic tricks, professional stunts, pictures, and even doodle stories were used by the different influencers.

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In the end, the campaign generated over 1.9M likes on Instagram and nearly 2.5M views on YouTube

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Making campaigns that encourage creative hashtag uses, challenges or videos can create more engagement and entertainment.

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2. Lagavulin – Ron Swanson’s Whiskey

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A popular whisky brand among whisky aficionados, and also the favorite of actor and comedian Nick Offerman, as well as his popular Parks and Rec character Ron Swanson.

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The two partnered to create a simple yet amusing video. Nick sits in front of a fireplace for forty-five minutes simply sipping a glass of Lagavulin. That’s it. That’s the video. The video still amassed a considerable 3.9M views on Youtube and fans absolutely loved it.

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Inside jokes and absurdist humor can be very effective with today’s users.

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3. Paddy Power -#SaveOurShirt

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A particularly funny example. Paddy Power signed a year-long sponsorship with Huddersfield Town English football. But this wasn’t the normal collaboration. At the start of the season, the teams showed their new shirts which had a giant “Paddy Power” sash covering their front. People were not happy, but that was all part of the plan. The shirt was fake and was a collaboration with Ball Street Network. They then popularized the hashtag#saveourshirtwhich went viral and generated countless conversations about the situation. In the end, the reveal of the real Huddersfield Town shirts received 42k likes, which was almost 4 times higher than what Manchester United got for their own shirt reveal. 

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Sometimes playing with your followers and subverting expectations can do far more than a serious campaign. 

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Create Campaigns that Say Something About the World or Your Brand

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Nowadays people want their brands to be more than just about the products they sell. They want brands that have a message, think about social issues, or try to connect with people in meaningful ways. Take the following 3 examples:

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1. ABSOLUT – Planet Earth’s Favorite Vodka

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This campaign, which was created in collaboration with the influencer agency Collectively, became the gold winner for the Best Food and Drink Campaign at the 2020 Influencer Marketing Awards.

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The campaign mixed a wide variety of topics and influencers, from LGBTQ advocates to eco-consciousness and sustainability issues. They created a series of events that they shared on Instagram showcasing the commitment of ABSOLUT to the planet and its people. These events targeted cities all across the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, and St. Petersburg (Florida).

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This campaign had massive success, with 68.4M total impressions. It shows the power of engaging with people on social topics they care about and working with a wide variety of influencers.

2. Bedrock Real Estate – Anthem of Us

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Bedrock Real Estate thought about a way to increase interest in real estate in the Detroit metro area. They wanted to show people that the city was more than the clichés of a downtrodden city.

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They partnered with Detroit residents and Detroit native Big Sean to showcase what made the city special. The video reached 500,000 views.

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If your brand is local, or you are aiming at targeting specific locations, partnering with those communities in ways that are meaningful can have a great impact.

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3. MTV – Pants Off

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MTV created a SnapChat sex ed show, hosted by Youtube Influencer Laci Green, who has her own sex ed channel with more than 2 million subscribers.

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The aim of the show was to provide young people on SnapChat with real information and advice about sex education. They invited other influencers as guest starts to talk about sex and relationships. The authentic nature of these conversations resonated with the audiences, which caused each episode to receive between 3 and 5 million views, as well as be shared thousands of times.

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Tackling topics of interest to people can be an effective way to generate more engagement and shares.

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Going for Micro-Influencers for Macro Results

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When people think about influencer marketing their minds often go to the biggest names on the market, but you can have excellent results by targeting smaller influencers instead, especially on a limited budget. See how these brands made use of micro-influencers to strike gold:

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1. Tom’s of Maine – Snowball Effect

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Tom’s of Maine makes personal care products and approached micro-influencers to increase awareness for their brand by encouraging them to try their products and talk about them. These influencers then encouraged their own followers to do the same. This quickly snowballed and reached 4.4 million potential customers within 3 months. Today Tom’s works with over 20,000 micro-influencers and through them has a total reach of 19 million people.

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2. RadioGlobe – DesignSpark

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RS Components was planning an event to celebrate the 10th birthday of their engineering community, DesignSpark. However, due to the Covid pandemic, their plans had to be canceled only four weeks before the date. They decided to hire the micro-influencer and creative technologist Jude Pullen to create a replacement with less than a$1K media budget.

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However, Pullen enlisted the assistance of the engineering community and created an open-source project called RadioGlobe. This physical globe worked as a radio that you could tune to over 2000+ web stations around the world by spinning the globe around. They ended up reaching 1 million members by October 2020, 3 months earlier than their original goal.

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A small budget can be very effective if you enlist the help of your community to create something with a bigger reach.

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3. OTBT

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Off The Beaten Track is a brand that designs and sells travel and casual shoes for women. They have grown in popularity incredibly quickly by using a marketing strategy that focuses on micro-influencers.

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They started with this approach in 2017 when they reached out to influencers that had 5000 or fewer followers. They have signed over 400 influencers, and have stated that social media accounts for 44% of their gross ecommerce revenue.

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Micro-influencers often have a lot of engagement from loyal fans. This can in turn foster communities that will go a long way towards pushing the value of your brand.

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Unlikely Partners Can Bring Great Results

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When crafting an influencer marketing campaign sometimes you have to think outside of the box. Creating campaigns that are not targeted at your usual audience can have unexpectedly good results. See how it worked for these brands:

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1. Buick – Pinboard to Dashboard

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Looking to appeal to a younger demographic, Buick targeted food, design, and fashion bloggers to create posts illustrating how the Encore model helped them express their personal style. But these weren’t just posts on Instagram, their main focus was creating boards on Pinterest. This campaign drove more than 17 million unique site visitors. They chose Pinterest because it had the right demographic and an emphasis on color that matched their proposal. Clearly, this worked.

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Sometimes working with different platforms or influencers outside of your product’s area can have surprising results, it’s all about finding ways to make a connection. 

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2. SodaStream – Join the Revolution

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Sodastream makes tools that allow at-home carbonation. Meaning, people can make their own carbonated drinks through their tools. They had mostly marketed their product to families. However, their sales data showed that their product was very successful with millennials that didn’t have children. So with that in mind, they created a quirky campaign called “Join the Revolution” and partnered with actor Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, who played “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones. This had an excellent reception, generating more than 50M views and 100,000 shares.

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This shows that you shouldn’t limit yourself to approaching your product or brand in one way if you see data that supports trying something different.

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3. Mercedes – Loki the Wolf Dog

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Your next campaign partner doesn’t need to be a person. Have you thought of partnering with a pet instead? That’s what Mercedes did when they partnered with the account of Loki the WolfDog, the canine companion of Kelly Lund. The Loki account has over 2 million followers, which Mercedes considered when they invited Loki and Kelly to be part of their#MCPhotoPasscampaign. They showed a mix of videos, pictures, and VR of Kelly and Loki traveling through the mountains of Colorado. This campaign generated a massive 173M impressions, plus 2.3M likes and comments.

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This shows that sometimes, the right partner can be one of our beloved companions.

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Wrapping Up

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Influencer Marketing is an incredibly useful and powerful way to reach more people than ever nowadays. But before you create your own campaign it is important to learn from successful examples like the ones we shared.

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The best place to start is by collaborating with a platform that allows you to find the right influencers for your budding campaign, like Vling. Reach out to us today to find the help you need to take your campaign to the next level.

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