Sometimes you rock it and count yourself among the Influencer Marketing winners. And sometimes you lose. Take a peek at a few influencer marketing case studies to see what makes for a winning campaign and what causes a campaign to flop.
At this point, it’s safe to say that if you’re not using influencer marketing or social media marketing in your content marketing strategy, you’re missing out. Forbes recently reported word-of-mouth and influencer marketing leads to twice the sales of traditional advertising and leads to a higher customer retention rate.
These days, influencers are everywhere. When you’re putting together your own campaign, it helps to look at the results of others to see what works, what doesn’t, and what leads to a massive headache.
Influencer Marketing Winners: DJ Khaled Visits Vegas
DJ Khaled has been called the king of Snapchat. As the New York Times noted, he’s more famous for his Snaps than he is for his music career. So it’s little surprise that when the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority wanted to launch its own Snapchat channel, it hired DJ Khaled to get the word out.
The influencer campaign started with DJ Khaled getting the key to the city, then continued with a two-day tour of the city and a virtual visit to a few of his favorite sites. After the two-day campaign, the new Las Vegas Snapchat channel had 400,000 views and 25,000 new followers, AdWeek reported.
Influencer Marketing Winners: Styld by Gap
One popular influencer marketing technique is to use a lot of influencers to spread the word about your product or campaign. Gap’s Styld by project is a great example of getting the word out by using a sea of influencers. The Gap campaign even goes a step further by encouraging influencers to self-submit their posts, using a hashtag to catch the attention of the marketing team at Gap.
This style of influencer marketing helps both the influencers and the brand. Gap has lots of people showing off its clothes and coming up with cool and creative ways to wear its basics. Meanwhile, influencers who end up on the Styld by site get the chance to increase their reach and gain even more followers.
Influencer Marketing Winners: Jolly Rancher’s #Keeponsucking
Jolly Rancher’s #keeponsucking campaign shows that sometimes the unexpected works. The candy company, which is owned by Hershey’s, took what you might consider to be a negative, edgy approach with its campaign — focusing on the fact that life can, well, suck, sometimes.
The campaign targeted Millennials. One component of the campaign focused on college finals and featured around 50 college-age influencers, with followings both large and small. The candy company’s #ValentineSucks campaign led to 643,000 engagements and more than 23 million impressions.
Loser: Scott Disick and the Copy and Paste Incident
Rule one of influencer marketing: Make sure your strings aren’t showing. While your influencers do need to disclose that they are getting something for product sampling or promotion, they shouldn’t take a page from Scott Disick and simply copy and paste, verbatim, the instructions given from the influencer agency.
On the one hand, oops. On the other hand, his post managed to get nearly 4,300 likes and over 100 comments before someone pointed out the mistake.
Loser: Kim Kardashian West’s Cure for Morning Sickness
Sometimes, an influencer’s gaffe can be a major cause for concern. During her pregnancy, Kim Kardashian West posted a photo of herself holding a bottle of Diclegis, a prescription morning sickness medication.
Not only did Kardashian West neglect to mention that the post was sponsored, but her posts (there ended up being two of them) neglected to include all the side effects and other warnings required on an ad for a prescription medicine. The FDA quickly took action and sent a letter stating that the post was in violation and asking that it be taken down.
Loser: Chriselle Lim and the Bad Fit
It’s not just the FTC and the FDA that influencers need to be concerned about. Sometimes, a campaign will flop because it’s just not a good fit. Take a look at the partnership between Chriselle Lim and Volvo. Lim’s a fashion, beauty, and lifestyle blogger known for her inspirational but still authentic images.
Her post promoting Volvo, a car manufacturer, just didn’t ring true to her followers. In the post, the authenticity was gone, and a lot of commenters complained. The backlash was enough that Lim had to edit her original post, pointing out that she was doing her best and was far from perfect.
No one wants their influencer campaign to go down in history as a #fail. Take a look at what techniques have worked and make sure you and your influencers avoid the mistakes of other influencers.