I don’t recall who said it but I remember someone saying something like “it’s not about the number of followers but the amount of engagement an influencer has”. Time and again, this has proven to be true from campaigns that we’ve ran and from case studies we’ve read. For this week’s company spotlight, here’s another example of an influencer marketing campaign success!
Give us the background of your company – what is it and who is it for?
Bikinis have always been a passion of mine, and living in Miami Beach I quickly realized there were many local designers that had little to no online presence.
I created Bikini Luxe to showcase these amazing designers and it has been successful beyond my wildest dreams with currently just under two thousands different types and brands of bikinis from designers all around the world.
Tell us the background of the influencer marketing campaign?
We use a number of techniques to encourage our brand ambassadors. Firstly we offer the highest commission of all swimwear affiliates of 15 percent.
Any visitors that they send we track via refersion (our affiliate program host). A one month cookie is then stored in their visitors browsers.
Any sales that are made for up to one month later we pay fifteen percent to our ambassadors for. As you can imagine this can add up very quickly for them.
What were the marketing goals of the campaign?
To create a long lasting relationship with our influencers and brand ambassadors that benefits them as well as us.
How did you target influencers aka what metrics and information did you use?
The number one metric we look at when we decide on if we are going to “Collaborate” that being us giving them free products in return for posts and promotion of the company is always interaction.
Interaction being defined as generally the number of comments that they get when they post.
We get approached multiple times a day by influencers who want free products so we have to be vigilant as there are many many fake accounts with fake followers.
Did you provide anything to the influencers in return for their help?
We find that fashion bloggers tend to do the best with our affiliate programs, and depending on the number of followers we will often gift them products in return for posts and promotion of Bikini Luxe.
Surprisingly models generally don’t convert to sales for us, we believe this may be due to the high number of male followers.
What we normally do is read what type of comments the influencer is getting before we decide what to give them.
Lots of comments like “where can I get that” versus “your so hot” are what we are looking for.
How long did the campaign last?
We field tens of emails a day from prospective brand ambassadors, unfortunately we have seen a high number of people with little to no followers asking for free products.
We generally do not give free products to anyone that has less than 50,000 followers.
Again this decision is done on a case by case basis, depending on the amount of interaction the influencer gets and the type of interaction that it is.
Did you use any tools to make your campaign easier?
Lately we have been loving Ninja outreach, the ability to quickly filter our influencers as well as find new ones is absolutely incredible.
What was the hardest part of running the campaign?
Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, literally. We have had influencers approach us requesting $5000 to do a promotion who have ended up doing the same promotion for one bikini.
There is a lot of push and pull when it comes to “Collaborating”, and it can be tricky to find the right balance of the amount of money invested by us versus the amount of products an influencer will sell with their promotion of the product.
What was a major takeaway you learned about influencer marketing?
It seems incredible but a fashion blogger with 20,000 followers can easily outsell a model with 500,000 followers.
