An Influencer Marketing Campaign: Case Study?

Digital Marketing
, ,
#1

The PewDiePie example referred to earlier might have given you an idea of what an influencer marketing campaign can look like. Still, it’s probably tough to see how that kind of strategy can work its way into some of the less sexy areas of the business world. With that criterion in mind, let’s look at an [example — a campaign to drive attendance and awareness of the Content Marketing World conference. A more traditional approach might have focused solely on SEO and Google Ads, as well as some promoted content on Twitter and LinkedIn. Perhaps a blog piece would have been written, something shareable that’s insightful and gets the word out.

Instead, the [Content Marketing Instituteto develop an influencer marketing campaign to spread its message. To be fair, the Content Marketing Institute already has quite an extensive network of influencers they work with; identifying potential collaborators was as easy as looking at who’d be speaking at the conference they were promoting. This is precisely what they did, asking speakers to contribute some thoughts or advice around Content Marketing. The feedback was compiled, along with other educational materials, into four separate eBooks, each with its own unique topic relevant to the programming at CMI’s conference. They made each eBook available to view at SlideShare, or as a downloadable PDF, with links pushed out across social media by CMI, Top Rank, and the influencers themselves. The whole initiative was underwritten by Curata, a software developer specializing in Content Curation and Management Platforms. That’s a lot of players around one campaign, but look how everyone gets something out of it:

  • The target audience, those being recruited for attendance at the conference, got free, entertaining, and valuable information of personal relevance to them. Over 230,000 people viewed the eBooks on SlideShare, while another 4,000 downloaded the PDFs.
  • The influencers who participated used the platform to drive attendance to their sessions at the conference. Sharing out the eBooks gave them more opportunities to make people aware they were speaking, all of which added to their personae as credible and respected people in their field.
  • CMI got the attendance they were looking for and another notch in their belt by putting on (and pulling off) another large conference with them at the center of it all.
  • Curata, who paid for this all to happen, got over 1,000 new leads to whom they could market.