I have been a marketer for a long time and noticed that the bar for marketers is being raised every year. You can no longer depend on ad hoc marketing strategies that are put together by a team of professional content marketers. You need to rely on case studies.
Over 70% of customers make decisions based on the input of relevant social media influencers and nearly three-quarters trust them more than celebrities. My friend Ryan Kh recently wrote a post stating that, in 2017, marketers need the support of trusted experts with a strong social media following.
Engaging with social media influencers isn’t easy. Here are some case studies that will help you see what works and how to replicate it.
Bach Flower promotes a wide range of natural remedies, including RESCUE Remedy, a line of natural stress management products. They enlisted the support of a number of holistic living and lifestyle bloggers to endorse their products. These bloggers were given a free coupon for sharing their stress management tips, along with an endorsement for the RESCUE Remedy products.
By tapping these influencers, they were able to get over 130 million social media impressions and boosted their Instagram following by over 250%. This campaign proves that offering small incentives to a number of prominent influencers can have massive results.
Prominent influencers will rarely back your brand by themselves. I can count the number of times they took initiative to do so on one hand. Successful influencer campaigns require a strong outreach strategy. There are a number of tools that they can leverage, such as HootSuite. However, it will be a very involved process either way.
InspireBeats shows that you need to put in a lot of effort to earn an influencer’s attention, but it can pay handsome dividends afterward. Alex Berman, the Chief Marketing Sumo for InspireBeats, said that this outreach strategy helped the company generate over $12 million in B2B leads.
“I came on as the Chief Marketing Sumo over here - joining a small team and expected to make a huge difference in terms of new leads and opening up additional marketing channels. Since the company does outbound email as its core, I figured it could work for building brand equity as well. Marketing goals at a high level were to drive more leads to InspireBeats.com that were interested in using lead generation or outbound emails to help grow influencers. In addition to that overarching goal, I added a few KPI-driven goals: 10 podcasts, 10 blog features, and 10 guest blogs per month that I have the team aim for.”
Leesa, a luxury mattress company that sells directly to consumers, wanted to penetrate the growing market of millennial consumers. They realized that every generation listens to different influencers, so they needed to identify a set of influencers that related to their target market.
The marketing team worked closely with a trusted vendor to identify a list of influencers that middle-class millennial consumers would listen to. They reached out to these influencers for support and received charitable responses. The company attributes its robust growth in 2014 to the campaign, which drew over 100,000 clicks to its website.
Influencer marketing has helped many companies boost their bottom lines. You can get great results by leveraging the right people. You just need to know who to target and how to pitch them.
