Influencer Marketing and Content Creation
For the past six years, a global nonprofit has engaged our team to conceptualize and orchestrate an integrated marketing campaign to inspire and change the behaviors of people around the world. To break through the stress and busyness of the holiday season, we created easy ways for people to give service and spend meaningful time with loved ones, ultimately helping them experience more joy during December. In disseminating these messages, we leveraged our partnerships with more than 600 social media influencers.
As a result of this campaign, millions of people all over the world have been inspired to engage in acts of kindness. In partnership with our client, local and global charities have received more than $9 million in new donations.
This is an integrated marketing campaign, utilizing best practices in changing consumer behaviors. Behavior change success was possible through the active collaboration of our experienced creatives, strategists, media buyers, public relations professionals, social media managers, data analysts, influencer marketers, and most importantly, our clients.
To kick-off and engage influencers for the 2019 campaign, we planned and hosted a pre-launch showcase event several weeks before the public launch. This event brought together more than 300 guests with a combined following of 40 million. Throughout the evening, our partner influencers shared exclusive, behind-the-scenes details of all aspects of the campaign, early access to the campaign’s signature experience, and a preview screening of the campaign’s short film. Influencers were encouraged to share elements of the preview event with their followers and were given more assets to share as the seasonal campaign got underway.
One portion of the evening was dedicated to giving back to the community. The attendees contributed to a service project to build 300 household cleaning kits for refugee families receiving assistance through a local refugee organization.
Throughout the six weeks of this seasonal campaign, our team was in regular communication with influencers through email and messaging to keep the initiative top of mind for them. They were reminded of key campaign milestones and given fresh details to share with their followers. Emails routinely achieved a 70% open rate.
To encourage acts of service as a way to bring more meaning to the holiday season, we created specific service suggestions every day for 25 days. To broaden the reach of this element of the campaign, we activated 14 micro- to macro-influencers as original video creators. They each selected a service prompt and created a video of their experience performing that act of service, inspiring others to do the same. This engagement led to elevated campaign awareness among the influencers’ combined following of more than 1 million.
To extend the spirit of this holiday campaign, we partnered with a tiny influencer with a big reach and engaged her to create a music video of a traditional Christmas carol. Seven-year-old Claire Crosby sang "Silent Night" as our client's president played the piano alongside her in his own home. The video, which was posted on our client's and Crosby's social pages, amassed more than 2 million views. The post served as a tentpole moment of the campaign, timed specifically to garner renewed interest and prevent campaign fatigue.
Influencer content was an important component of the overall social media content strategy. More than 50 posts and videos generated over 2 million social actions and represented a 174% year-over-year increase. There were nearly 130,000 pieces of user-generated content, including video, posts, and hashtags, an increase of 17% over last year.