Influencer Marketing Campaign – A Case Study with RattanCube & Belle Azzure

TLDR.

Influencer marketing has taken off in recent years and is only going to continue to grow in popularity.

We partnered up with influencer Belle Azzure when working with one of our clients, RattanCube, to run a product giveaway.

If you are a business preparing to engage in an influencer marketing campaign, there are a few things you must finalise.

1. How and when you are going to pay the influencer. 
2. How long you want the campaign to last for.
3. Whose social media account it is going to be run on. 

Then when executing the campaign some things you should also have nailed down include;

1. What CTAs should be included.
2. How and where the campaign is going to be promoted.

With the correct research and planning the results can be hugely beneficial and can grow followers, improve CTR to your website and boost brand awareness, reach and impressions. This particular campaign was a huge success for RattanCube.

The Influencer Marketing Industry.

Influencer marketing has existed for sometime online, but only in recent years has it made its way into the mainstream. Now, everywhere you look online you will see celebrities and influencers promoting products. Think of any of the famous people you follow on social media. Chances are they have engaged in some form of influencer marketing in the last couple of years. There are now even very strict laws and regulations to govern influencer marketing online.

Just to give you an idea of just how big influencer marketing has become;

•  9/10 brands are using some form of influencer marketing.
• In the US, on average a brand that utilises influencer marketing will generate an equivalent earned media of $18 for every $1 spent.
• Also in the US, the average ROI on influencer marketing was $5.87 for every $1 spent.
• The influencer marketing industry was predicted to have reached a value of $10 billion at the end of 2020.
• In 2020, 65% of companies surveyed who were participating in influencer marketing plan on increasing their budget in 2021.

For more information about these trends and general influencer marketing industry news you can read all about it here, here and here!

In this post we will be examining in detail an influencer marketing campaign that we ran with one of our clients in June of 2021. We organised for influencer Belle Azzure to giveaway one of RattanCube’s furniture sets on her Instagram page in a campaign that lasted two weeks.

A Background on RattanCube.

RattanCube are an outdoor furniture retailer based in Dublin that delivers nationwide. They specialise in supplying premium, rattan-style garden furniture to the Irish market. They have a website and are active on Facebook and Instagram.

RattanCube’s primary target audience is;

• Women.
• Aged 30+.
• Have an interest in gardening and the outdoors.
• Possess disposable income to spend on luxury goods such as RattanCube furniture.

A Background on Belle Azzure.

Belle Azzure is an Irish fitness, wellbeing and lifestyle blogger and vlogger. She is married with one child. She has her own website and is currently active on Instagram with a following of over 70,000.

The kinds of content that Belle puts out on a daily basis has led her to having a strong following of Irish women aged between 25 – 50.

So as you can see, RattanCube and Belle had the potential to be a perfect match for an influencer marketing campaign. 

We drew up a plan for RattanCube for an influencer campaign and then agreed upon a budget, KPIs, a duration for the campaign and just generally finalised all of the little details needed. Also, we developed specific criteria and characteristics that we needed to see in our potential influencer to partner with.

Eventually we reached out to Belle via social media to discuss the possibility of partnering up for the project. She accepted our proposal!

Preparing for an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

These are some of the key decisions that need to be nailed down during planning stages.

The Cost of an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

The key question when it comes to any marketing campaign. How much is it going to cost me? With influencer marketing there tends to be more scope for flexibility in terms of how and when influencers are paid. Here are some of the ways in which payment can be negotiated when approaching influencers;

1. Pay the influencer up front for the campaign.
2. Pay the influencer some up front and the rest when the campaign is completed.
3. Split the payment and offer money as well as some of the items they will be promoting as part of payment.
4. Offer payment fully in the form of the goods that they will be promoting.

What works best will vary from campaign to campaign and influencer to influencer. Things that will affect this are whether the influencer is represented by an agency or whether the product(s) on offer can realistically replace potential payment.

There is no one size fits all approach to this. The only way to know what is best for your specific campaign is by pricing around and approaching different influencers directly.

The Duration of an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

Deciding on how long the campaign is going to run for is very important. The duration is also likely to have an impact on the cost, as mentioned above. How long the campaign runs for will likely depend on the overall goal of the campaign.

• Awareness, reach, new followers = longer campaign (weeks).
• Engaging existing followers = shorter campaign (days, a week at most).

For the RattanCube campaign we thought that two weeks was the perfect amount of time to run the campaign for. We wanted the followers of RattanCube and Belle to see it and enter, but we also wanted to give the competition time to circulate online and organic awareness to reach non-followers of either page.

Where to Run an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

The platform on which the campaign should be run will entirely depend on where your company is active and where you want to grow a larger following.

For this campaign we had a clear goal of growing RattanCube’s Instagram followers. So Instagram was obviously the place to run it.

But more specifically, do we focus the campaign on RattanCube’s Instagram account? Or do we run it through Belle’s account? We elected to do it on Belle’s account for two key reasons;

1. We wanted to grow followers and get the competition in front of a brand new audience.
2. Belle had a much larger following than RattanCube so naturally the results would be better.

With all of this in place the campaign went live!

Executing an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

What Call To Actions Should be Included.

It has been well-documented that online attention spans are shrinking all the time. Meaning that online content needs to get to the point quickly or risk losing your engaged audience.

Similarly to this, people are willing to do less nowadays when asked to carry out an action online. In the past, to win a competition online a company might have asked you to “post to your timeline” as part of the action. Nowadays people are much less willing to post to their timeline or feed in order to win a competition. 

So it was decided for RattanCube and Belle Azzure the actions to enter the giveaway needed to be very simple, effective and could be done very quickly. We decided on a four-step process.

1. Follow Belle Azzure. Most people seeing the competition already were as it was initially posted to her timeline.
2. Follow RattanCube. One of the goals of the campaign was to grow RattanCube’s Instagram following so this was always going to be one of the actions.
3. Tag 2 friends in the comments. To spread awareness of the competition and brand further afield.
4. Share the post to their story. Again to spread awareness of the competition and brand.

Promotion of an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

Once Belle made the initial post and the giveaway went live, it was left to organically circulate and build for about three days. Typically after this amount of time the entries will slow right down as the post will disappear from newsfeeds and stories will run out.

In order to keep entries and awareness coming in, we focused on two main activities;

1. Every second or third day a story went up to remind people there is still time to enter.
2. We highlighted the fact that people could enter as many times as they want by tagging different friends. This gave people who had already entered a new purpose to enter again.

Putting money behind the giveaway and boosting it on Instagram could have also been a legitimate option for promotion. However, as we had made the conscious choice to run the giveaway on Belle’s page, this was not an option.

After the agreed upon two-week period the competition ended and Belle selected a winner at random from the thousands of entrants. It is also vitally important to publicly acknowledge and post who has won the giveaway. It gives transparency and credibility to the brand running the giveaway. It also gives closure to all of the people who entered.

Results of an Influencer Marketing Campaign.

Overall this particular campaign was a huge success for RattanCube. Some of the figures that came about as a direct result of the campaign included;

• At its peak, RattanCube gained 6235 new followers which represented a 150% increase in total followers. The vast majority of these came flooding in within the first 48 hours in which the competition was announced. It is also normal to see a small decrease in the number of followers after the winner is announced.
• 95% of people reached with the giveaway were women, with 77% of them being aged between 25 – 44. This was exactly the demographic RattanCube was trying to reach and shows that using Belle was a good choice in reaching women in this age category.
• Impressions for June 2021 were over 360,000, a 50% increase from May.
• Instagram profile visits for June 2021 were over 14,000, an 804% increase from May.
• Total RattanCube website clicks via Instagram for June 2021 were over 1600, a 469% increase from May.

To Wrap-Up.

Influencer Marketing is huge and will continue to grow over the coming years. Instagram is where influencer marketing has really found a home, but other platforms like TikTok are where influencer marketing is also starting to be seen more and more. You can read one of our other blogs for more information on TikTok and getting started on the platform. 

If you have not done so already, influencer marketing might well be something you will be engaging with in the future.

The influencer marketing campaign between RattanCube and Belle Azzure was a great success for RattanCube. By following the steps outlined in this blog, your business can implement a successful influencer marketing campaign.