A Masterclass in Influencer Marketing: Inspiring Examples to Fuel Your Strategy

The Art of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that uses an individual with a solid following on social media to promote a brand, service, or product. In recent times, this form of marketing has exploded, and it remains as lucrative as ever. Indeed, it has earned a crucial place in your marketing toolbox due to its unmatched ability to sway online consumers and transfer the trust followers have in an influencer to a product, making a brand feel more personal and credible.

But what makes influencer marketing such a powerhouse? In the past, famous faces did basic endorsements to a wide audience. Since then, strategic changes have turned merely recommending a product into a phenomenal selling strategy. How? By narrowing the target market and using an influencer whose followers are the likeliest demographic to make a purchase. 

Examples of influencers hired today include people in the fields of fitness, fashion, travel, luxury, lifestyle, beauty, cooking, entertainment, and more. The core promotion strategies they use include reviews, tutorials, unboxing, storytelling, giveaways, and live streaming.

Influencer Marketing Success Stories

There are so many different successful influencer marketing success stories out there, but a few stand out to us that we want to highlight here.

Subaru’s “Meet the Owner” campaign in 2017 aimed to showcase the versatility of the new Impreza built with the on-the-go lives of millennials in mind. So, to reach their target audience effectively, the car manufacturer teamed up with influencer Zach King who is well known for the “magic” videos he creates, which he calls “digital sleight of hand.” The video, posted to his Instagram account, shows King trying to impress a date with his Impreza and creatively incorporates his signature “digital sleight of hand” so the video doesn’t feel like a typical advertisement. This collaboration King was just one of several other influencers Subaru worked with across various social media platforms to target millennials, and the content centered around their vehicles infused with an authentic voice resulted in thousands of comments and millions of likes.

Like Subaru, Dunkin’ Donuts also wanted to target a younger audience with their “Sipping Is Believing” campaign in 2018 that put their coffee front and center. To do this, they partnered with macro-influencers in the city of Philadelphia with more personal followings. Working with these smaller influencers who all lived in the same city enabled Dunkin’ to reach a very specific target audience with highly tailored content. Overall, 1.1 million users were targeted, and these posts resulted in over 21,000 likes and close to a thousand comments. While the reach of this campaign was obviously smaller, the 5.2% engagement rate of these posts was significantly higher than the average, and the responses from followers were more intimate.

Lessons Learned

So, what lessons can you take away from these successful influencer marketing stories? Something both these campaigns have in common is that the authenticity of the influencers was not lost. Maintaining authenticity is key to a successful influencer marketing campaign because it and audiences won’t feel like they are being sold something or advertised to. Both campaigns also kept the focus pretty tight and did try and include too many goals or agendas that could complicate the content influencers created. These campaigns also demonstrate the importance of finding the right influencers who have a following that aligns with a brand’s target audience. 

Leveraging Mandala AI for Influencer Marketing

With so many influencer campaign examples, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed–but that needn’t be the case. Mandala AI is a premium tool that you can leverage to make your influencer marketing plan a successful reality.

The analytics module, called Mandala Analytics, is a particularly potent way to gather real-time data that brings you social listening insights like never before. With the best information at your fingertips, you can make decisions with confidence and create content that soars.

However, any successful campaign also needs to monitor the levels of interaction and engagement happening on different social media platforms. Mandala AI provides two excellent features to give you a holistic overview in this regard: Top Channels and Top Mentions.

Top Channels are selected by Mandala AI as the best-performing channels due to mentions (Engagement Mode) or channels that publish new content more regularly (Mention Mode). Mandala AI provides you with analysis, calculation, matrices, KPIs, and analytics. Top Mentions automatically shows relevant mentions that are based on engagements. The mentions can even be sorted by engagement types, allowing you to swiftly find those based on preset campaign keywords. Similar to Top Channels, Mandala AI provides calculation, analysis, KPIs, matrices, and analytics.

As a leader in the field, Mandala AI offers you cutting-edge solutions to get ahead in a very competitive and often complicated type of marketing. For this reason, we provide you with opportunities that are intuitive to work with and also give you the results you need to succeed. We invite you to explore all of Mandala AI’s solutions that are designed to optimize your influencer marketing strategies.

Influencer Marketing is Here to Stay

In conclusion, influencer marketing remains a potent strategy because it uses the reach, authenticity, and trust of influencers to boost a company’s growth. Its true power lies in its flexibility as it can be tailored to support virtually any product and brand, making it an indispensable tool for marketing experts.

We’ve covered many influencer marketing examples here today. We encourage you to leverage the influencer marketing strategy example and insights that best suit your values and goals and springboard your exciting journey from there.

It’s clear that influencer marketing is here to stay because it has the unique ability to keep pace with consumers who are becoming increasingly discerning. Influencers can maintain the trust of followers by promoting products they believe in and using these genuine connections to reshape the future of brand-consumer relationships.

What are your thoughts and experiences when it comes to influencer marketing? Please share them in the comments with us! Don’t forget to visit our website to explore the best of Mandala AI’s influencer marketing tools to energize your next campaign.