Influencer marketing is a form of digital advertising that brands worldwide have been prioritizing in the years since social media took off. It allows businesses to utilize the platform and relationships that content creators on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have built. Companies get to bank on the goodwill that these influencers have established, and the influencers have a great way to monetize their platform.

Brands have utilized influencer marketing campaigns to various degrees of success. Some brands campaigns bring in vast amounts of traffic and generate many leads at a relatively modest cost. Some brands don’t see the same ROI, whether it is due to missteps in their planning and execution of the campaign or simple rough luck.

A lot goes into an influencer marketing campaign, and they’re not all going to have the same level of success. If you’re looking to launch this form of digital advertising, learning what you can from brands that have utilized influencer marketing effectively is essential. With that in mind, let’s look at four influencer marketing success stories that showcase how the strategy is most effectively used.

Dunkin’ Donuts:

Dunkin’ Donuts is a major food and beverage company with hundreds of thousands of devoted customers. They also have a significant presence on social media. While Dunkin is a significant brand with a valuation of billions of dollars, it took a different path than some more prominent brands when they launched a recent influencer marketing campaign. In this campaign, they focused primarily on nano and micro-influencers.

Micro and nano-influencers have smaller followings, and in this case, all influencers had less than 50,000 followers. They limited their campaign to influencers in the Philadelphia Metro area and focused on influencers with high engagement rates. The campaign ended up being an enormous success, with 22,000 likes across 25 posts. The campaign had consistent messaging for each influencer and focused on millennials.

Key Takeaway: There is a ton of value to be found with micro and nano-influencers. Also, focusing on engagement rate and narrowing a campaign to a location can bring desired results.

EduBirdie:

EduBirdie is an online paid essay-writing platform that also has proofreading and plagiarism checking features. While the service being offered is controversial, EduBirdie undoubtedly made waves with its influencer marketing campaign. They’ve been called a form of academic dishonesty and are largely condemned by schools. However, their campaign was a smashing success, regardless of some extremely negative press buzz.

EduBirdie secured the influencer marketing services of over 250 YouTube content creators in niches like student lifestyle vlogging and pranks, two sectors where there would be a lot of student viewers. According to a report by BBC, the EduBirdie adverts appeared in over 1,400 videos, attracted more than 700 million views. While EduBirdie’s services led to some of these videos being removed, the sheer number of views and press discourse their campaign generated is massive.

Key Takeaway: Influencer marketing can generate a massive number of views if targeting the right niches and right influencers.

Gymshark:

Gymshark is a U.K based fitness apparel brand that launched in 2012. In the less than a decade that Gymshark has existed, they’ve become a prominent player in the active-wear industry. It is a brand that knows its target demographic, with a large base of fitness lovers that follow all their social media accounts. Part of how Gymshark has managed to rapidly become a major fitness apparel brand so quickly is their clever usage of social media.

Gymshark leveraged its social media clout to get free marketing from fans with a TikTok challenge calling for people to post before and after pictures with a Gymshark hashtag. They also used six different fitness creators, each with TikTok accounts with over a million followers, to post with the hashtag to get their challenge off the ground. These videos received over 1.9 million likes, and the Gymshark hashtag generated more than 45 million views for the brand. Their strategy was a significant success because they utilized the forms of the platform they were focusing on to create high-quality user-created content.

Key Takeaways: Tailor your content to the platform you are promoting on. Creating trends and buzzworthy challenges can yield amazing results.

Subaru:

Subaru is a Japanese car company that is one of the 30 largest in the world. They are a multi-billion-dollar mega-corporation with a huge advertising budget, and they focused some of that budget on digital advertising through influencer marketing. One of their extremely successful influencer marketing campaigns was #Meetanowner. The campaign was intended to appeal to millennial buyers that have aged into the dominant spending demographic in America.

The campaign was focused on 20 influencers on Instagram and YouTube with large followings. The niches they were trying to appeal to were varying but primarily were the outdoors and adventure niche. Subaru amassed about 2 million likes on these platforms and millions more views. The largest reason for their success was the influencers they targeted and the latitude they gave them to create the content they wanted.

Key Takeaways: If you want the content to be as natural as possible, give your influencers a lot of creative freedom. This is the best way to generate a large amount of engagement.