Calming Comfort
Calming Comfort created a Weighted Blanket to ease difficulties with sleep, calm restless minds and get those elephants off your chest. The Calming Comfort™ Weighted Blanket applies an even amount of pressure over your body to facilitate production of serotonin and melatonin (the body's primary sleep hormones), which simulates Deep Touch Pressure Stimulation. The resulting sensation is often compared to a warm hug that immediately sends you into a state of comfort and relaxation.
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Challenges & Goals
The client tasked us with promoting their weighted blanket in a way that would find a balance between driving profitable sales, increasing brand awareness and educating consumers on a product that is new to the CPG market. In order to achieve all three of these goals, we needed to find high quality influencers that possessed a high reach in addition to a truly engaging audience that would listen or read detailed explanations as to how the blanket has benefited them and why they believe everyone should try it. Aside from the three goals, we also had to create an organic stream of Calming Comfort-related posts within the influencer community to generate buzz from account to account. This allowed us to gain an even bigger following and level of trust from consumers. The idea of making the paid posts appear more organic and true to the influencer’s platform was a huge help in instilling faith in the Calming Comfort brand.
Approach, Strategy & Solution
We approached the Calming Comfort campaign with the mentality that we were going to make this brand synonymous with our selected influencer community. We wanted to accomplish this in the most organic way possible, while still generating brand awareness but more importantly, sales.
The initial step was choosing which type of influencers we wanted to go after. Instagram accounts with high female/high USA audiences ages 25+ were the primary targets. Our influencers ranged from 17,000 followers to 3,600,000 followers. An extensive research period accumulated a healthy list of influencers that would soon become the major promoters of the Calming Comfort brand.
After mass outreach and successful negotiations, our central social media strategy for the campaign began to take shape. As for posting, we decided to have one influencer post an image/story per day throughout the month, creating an ongoing buzz on people’s feeds every day. When they posted was critical as well because we wanted maximum engagement. So, we reviewed data that told us when an influencer’s highest rate of engagement occurred; i.e. the day of the week and time of day. Each month was scheduled out by the day and influencers were assigned to their respective dates. This type of strategy created a loop of content that’s constantly attracting interest through numerous different ‘funnels’.
When it came to the specifics of the actual Instagram post, there were a few driving factors. First off, every influencer was given a unique promo code that featured a 15% off deal to give their followers. This was crucial for ensuring that each influencer produced an ROI. We also allowed our influencers to submit their own captions but not without our approval. We did this because we wanted the posts to be as organic as possible. The caption had to possess the influencer’s tone of voice or else it wouldn’t be believable to the consumer. We found that in the eyes of the Instagram user, a copy/pasted caption seems lazy and generic. We did implement a hashtag strategy within the caption to drive a sense of familiarity from account to account. However, we didn’t want a hashtag overload, so we suggested only using one or two for the caption. In addition, we had a goal to have the maximum engagement on each of the influencers account, so we showed them specific examples of historical posts that did really well. We then asked the influencer to take a similar strategy to ensure high performance. This was a key for our success. If you allow the influencer to have the content control, the program won’t be successful.
Each influencer post gave us quality insights into who was driving traffic to our Calming Comfort page. This revealed which accounts made a truly significant impression on their followers. We obtained this information through data matching across key performing indicators for optimal performance. Each post would give us ‘interactions’ and ‘discovery’ data that told us exactly how many actions were taken on our account and the number of accounts reached as well as likes and comments. This also aided our progress in other areas by telling us if specific copy or images didn’t work well the first post but were effective when slightly tweaked on an influencer’s second or third post.
When starting an influencer campaign with no previous data, the first things we look for are targets or segments of audiences that perform well. After reviewing the data from that research, we double down on what works and zone in on that sector of Instagram influencers. Once we know for sure which accounts are getting the most sales, we resign them to another post the following month. This was an integral element of our strategy because once users see their favorite influencers post about a product again, it builds this sense of trust between the consumer and influencer. We saw a lot of success from our influencers’ second and third posts because by that time, the consumer felt comfortable with the idea of a new product to buy into. While we would reuse successful accounts month to month and discontinue the ineffective ones, we also sought after new and bigger accounts to achieve a balance between familiar and new.
Results
Increased awareness for the brand and introduce a product that is new to the CPG market while driving profitable sales. On average, our tracked influencer CPA was $35 lower compared to FB/Google channels.