+ 12 Businesses share their Real-Life Influencer Marketing Examples
Related Services
Credits
Writer: Gabriela Vankova
Research shows that 3.8 billion users spend over 2 hours per day on social media. Brands want to take up some of that time by engaging with you and getting noticed.
So, how can your brand break through the clutter on a limited budget and resources? The answer is Influencer Marketing.
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where a brand collaborates with influencers (people or organizations with a large following on social media in a similar niche as the brand). They have gained the trust of their fans, which they turned into an engaged and dedicated follower base. Their audiences come to them for recommendations and inspiration. They already have the audience you need and will help you by creating user-generated content.
Similar to Guerilla Marketing, the idea is to resonate with the influencer’s audience in a meaningful yet memorable way. To inspire you, we reached out to 12 businesses and shared their experience below.
Adam Pardel
The “Book Compas” (Knizny Kompas) is a campaign we have done for Ikar, a publishing house. The Campaign was supposed to show the benefits of reading books and indirectly support the selling of books. We wanted to come up with a creative way to reach and engage casual readers through social media. We came up with a contest and promoted it through famous Slovak influencers.
The task was to take a picture with a book, add a post on IG, use the hashtag #kniznykompas, and add a description on why they enjoyed the book. Selected winners received a prize from Ikar publishing house. The campaign was very successful. In total, the posts had more than 4 million views, 65,000 likes, and 1779 shares. As a bonus, the client gained close to three thousand new followers.
Natalya Bucuy
Last summer our team actively engaged with a number of customer experience influencers. For a few months, we actively engaged with professionals such as Shep Hyken, Jeff Toister, and Nate Brown as well as others. Our engagement with these influencers consisted of social media interactions, reading and discussing their works, and using their expertise in our content.
This strategy alone provided a boost in our website traffic, social media generated engagement with our audiences and an overall boost in our online engagement and connections. Our readers and customers enjoyed the value these customer experience professionals added to our content and engaged with it more actively. At the end of the summer, we held a virtual summit, #SmallBizCX2019. In a one-day live event, we connected with eight of the customer experience influencers over video conferences and discussed all things customer service. People who signed up to participate were able to watch all sessions live on Youtube and ask questions.
After the summit we took the valuable insights we gathered through the sessions and took it even further into our content. We created detailed blog posts with each professional’s insights as well as webinars for our website visitors to view.
Overall our influencers campaign was a success. We received another boost in traffic prior, during, and after the virtual summit that resulted in increased brand awareness, readership, and engagement from our customers.
Nicholas Holmes
I am the founder of ProductReviewer.com.au, a leading Australian consumer review site. We know people respect their favorite influencers and are keen to listen to them. We tried to leverage that info by conducting the influencer interviews on our brand’s page. This boosted engagement and increased ROI. Our brand focused on big names because micro-influencers are less known.
In this regard, interviewing several micro-influencers would not give us as much benefit as merely having one or two big fishes on board. If you use a similar approach, try to make the interviews interesting by adding humor or come up with questions which their fans are more likely to be unaware of. It will grab the audience’s attention, and those videos or podcasts could spread like wildfire.
Bradley Stevens
LLC Formations is run by a team of successful entrepreneurs and lawyers whose sole focus is making business ownership easy for everyone. We contacted a female Instagram model with 5 million followers to help us market our services. We gave her an introduction to our products and services for which she provides valuable opportunities to grow our business.
For some events, we called her as the VIP guest at our exclusive launch parties. We organized InstaMeets with her, where she shared the experience with our brand and motivated her audience to buy from our brand. By partnering with her, we got the chance to engage with the millions of her followers on social media, and in a considerable way, we saw a boost in our growth and increase in brand awareness.
Romana Kuts
Recently one influencer posted a poll on Instagram “Recommend someone to develop the website, pls”. We used our Instagram page to tell him that we can make a website within 7 days. In a few hours, we got a reply from the influencer in private messages! He wrote that he will promote us on his social media channels but in exchange, we will make the website with a 50% discount. After analyzing his audience and key Instagram indicators, we understood that this opportunity is the right fit for us! As a result, we got one more project to the portfolio, native promotion on Instagram influencer’s account, and a few new clients after he mentioned us as the developers of his new website.
Hasan
I’d like to share my influencer marketing example. Email marketing: We have previously done influencer marketing through email and it worked out pretty well for us. We connected with our subscriber’s list to know if anyone is interested in reviewing our product on their blog, social media, or YouTube. We got over a 25% open rate from this email and many responses from subscribers interested to promote our brand. Overall this was a success.
John Frigo
I’m the Digital Marketing Lead and also handle the Affiliate Marketing and Influencer Marketing for Best Price Nutrition and several other brands of online and brick and mortar vitamin and supplement shops.I’ve pretty much switched entirely to finding influencers among my own customers, kind of a hybrid between UGC and influencer marketing. I’d much rather have one of my customers who uses my business and products with no monetary incentive to be the ones telling people about me, though I am willing to pay them or provide them with a free product. This results in authentic posts and real engagement.
I use an app called Carro which finds influencers among my email list, customer lists from Shopify, and my social media following. These are people who’ve purchased from me in the past or at the very least have interacted with our brand. This leads to a more authentic promotion or recommendation and is substantially cheaper.
Rachel Nelson
Margaux Agency kicked off 2020 by producing an experiential event activation and influencer marketing campaign for BOXHAUS. The campaign broke a 7-figure potential reach, received over 250k impressions, and 17k+ engagements – the campaign was a massive success.
To stay within the budget, I strategized influencer compensation by offering giveaway boxes that were purely crafted by items gifted from our partners. Boxes priced at $500 each and included items from brands such as Nike, Lululemon, Gorjana, Nekter Juice Bar, Sephora, and others.
The brand ambassadors alone brought the potential impressions of the event to surpass 7-figures. Each brand ambassador participated in the workout and abided by the contract to post a story and feed photo. We could not have chosen any better brand ambassadors and can’t wait to work with them again.”
For your campaign to be successful, it is important to partner with influencers that you trust to represent your brand well and offer them the freedom to create content according to their audience’s needs. But don’t forget to draw up a contract to make sure you’re on the same page and that your business needs are met as well.
Sandra Hurley
Working With Influencers Is a Win-Win! I don’t think there’s any apparel company that hasn’t worked with influencers yet. We have worked with influencers before, on YouTube, and Instagram. Because we produce children’s clothes in particular, we seek influencers that have an audience that is mostly comprised of mothers. “Mommy bloggers”, if you will. There are hundreds of amazing women who are putting out valuable content out there for other mothers, and we were lucky to be able to work with some of them.
We occasionally send clothes for consideration – no obligation to feature or review positively – but the posts we’ve done were paid and we saw great conversions from them. It’s a win-win situation – the influencer gets paid to feature a product they already believe in, and we can partner with people who produce quality content and who are able to introduce their audiences to us.
Christina Strickland
One of our favorite influencer marketing projects was for raising awareness for LVAD’s for St. Jude Medical (formerly Medtronic). As part of a larger campaign initiative with Signal West PR, we worked with niche influencers to tell their personal story about congestive heart failure and encouraged their followers to participate in a video submission sweepstakes that raised money for the Mended Hearts Organization. Using personal stories instead of blatantly promotional posts captured and held the attention of the very specific demographic we were trying to reach and yielded great results.
Kevin Tung
Experience working with Influencers as a fashion brand.
I’m Kevin, founder & CEO of Nomad Creative Works, a New York based brand dedicated to creating premium garments that inspire people to travel. We’ve worked with a variety of influencers in the fashion industry, specifically the streetwear niche.
We find people who meet our target market by using feature & meme pages, like @outfitgrid or @outfitsociety. These pages feature people who post outfits, sneakers, and lifestyle content and are looking to get discovered. After finding people who fit our needs, we then reach out with a quick message asking if they’d be interested in a collaboration. If they are, they usually respond back and let us know their terms.
We’ve found that micro-influencers (less than 10k followers) have very engaged audiences and are genuinely interested in learning about and sharing new products. They’re also very passionate about their pages as it isn’t their main source of income. Beware of people who will promote any product for money. Their interests don’t align with yours and you’ll usually end up paying more for less value (whether it be sales, followers, reach, etc.).
Here are some examples of influencer marketing we did with @diegoxpulido, @woodreaux, and @lovesimplydave
Daniel Kremsa
Pastilla
Before influencer marketing was even a term, our client Wizard World, producer of pop-culture conventions across the United States, leveraged their celebrity guests to reach out to their fans across their social channels inviting them to the convention and offering an exclusive discount. It worked really well helping us to reach over $3mil in sales the few years except for one instance.
One of the popular guests we had didn’t bring anywhere close to the sales we expected. It was surprising. He did make the right posts, he had the followers, thousands of likes but no sales. Looking into our analytics, we realized that he had so many people trying to sign up that he took down the entire e-shop. Further analysis showed that there were over $100,000 in failed orders! I will only add that the e-shop was built and managed by a separate company, not us.
