Building Better Full-Funnel Influencer Marketing Campaigns

There’s no doubt influencer marketing campaigns can help build up brands as an effective digital brand strategy, but there are often concerns around whether or not they can lead to considerable bottom-line growth and ROI.  In a recent article from Think with Google, the search engine shared ways Edgewell Personal Care leveraged audience targeting techniques for two of its brands to create full-funnel influencer marketing campaigns that actually resulted in bottom-line growth.  Edgewell’s digital-first approach to each campaign offers important lessons for digital marketers to consider when mapping out the consumer journey for full-funnel influencer marketing campaigns. 

Raising Awareness In The Right Places

According to Google, 90 percent of shoppers say they discover new products and brands on YouTube. According to Instagram, 60% of people say they discover new products on the platform. So, we know customers are searching on social media for product recommendations and reviews. With such ample opportunity to start raising awareness about their products and brands, Edgewell leaned on YouTube for influencer marketing opportunities. Schick razors, one of Edgewell Personal Care’s brands, leveraged YouTube’s platform using FameBit by YouTube to determine what creators and what content best aligned with their brand. By doing so, Schick sponsored creators to feature their product in content that felt like it belonged on the creators’ channels, and in turn, got the attention of viewers and were able to generate 50 percent of the campaign’s organic views from viewers looking at content through YouTube’s browse section. We took a similar approach with our client, CREDO Mobile. We knew that their target audiences had very strong reasons to connect to the company's progressive mission. However, their audiences' values were different enough that without the correct messaging at the right time, their customer journeys stalled out long before purchase. In short, we needed to personalize the messaging beyond supporting progressive change to identify specific causes. Knowing this, we focused on top-of-funnel opportunities with influencers that showed an ongoing commitment to women's rights--an issue that CREDO passionately supports. Focused on Instagram posts and stories, we identified and contracted with influencers to share CREDO's brand story in a way that felt natural and authentic. They told their followers about CREDO Mobile's donations to organizations like Planned Parenthood, their commitment to fighting for change and how purchasing a phone from CREDO Mobile was a way for anyone to join the fight. The influencer campaign provided support to larger mission-driven, full-funnel marketing the phone company was doing across channels.

The Power of Paid Promotion

Both of Edgwell’s brands’ campaigns did not solely rely on influencer marketing to promote their products and leveraged an integrated digital marketing strategy. They turned to paid promotion in the form of six-second bumper ads and 15-second cutdowns that were targeted toward consumers who had previously engaged with sponsored influencer content.  They also included consumers who hadn’t engaged with the sponsored content but fell within their target audience to maximize the campaign’s scale and potential impact. Building a full-funnel influencer marketing campaign can have a positive impact on your bottom line, but it requires knowing your audience’s interests, where (on YouTube or Instagram, for example) they go to consume content, and how to seamlessly get your brand and product are in front of them when they’re ready to make a purchase. As an agency, it's our belief that influencer campaigns need to be integrated into a complete cross-channel strategy to make the most impact at every point in the customer journey. Talk with us to find out how you can leverage content marketing, SEO, influencers, paid advertising and more to connect with and convert target audience.