TREK BARS: INFLUENCER CAMPAIGN
- Achieving 60 items of earned social media posts from a single campaign.
- Campaign reach of over 815,000 with no influencer fees or ad spend invested.
- Building a carefully curated list of over 100 advocate-influencers who are highly engaged with the brand and naturally champion it through a range of support activities.
Partnering with influencers is a powerful way to reach an engaged audience and increase brand and product awareness. However, as most marketeers know, it typically requires substantial budgets too. As part of our latest NPD launch campaign for TREK, we leveraged the power of influencer marketing to deliver engaging but cost-effective results by tapping into TREK’s pool of advocate-influencers.
Building a brand’s advocacy programme and finding advocate-influencers doesn’t happen overnight. Our long-standing relationship with TREK has allowed us to build a loyal and engaged fan base of influencers and advocates. The process involves rigorous monitoring of social media platforms, blogs and YouTube channels, as well as regular interactions with influencers who post about TREK. We have provided influencers with samples for their own use or at events that they organised, such as meetups, yoga classes or charity events, and we have also invited them as VIP guests to events such as Tough Mudder, which TREK sponsored. This has enabled the brand to form meaningful, longer-lasting relationships with these contacts, many of whom have become progressively more influential over the years.
This pool of loyal influencer-advocates is an extremely valuable asset and gives us an ideal platform to generate authentic and meaningful influencer coverage for the brand’s NPD, while only incurring nominal budget for postage and product.
This was demonstrated by the advocate-influencer activity to support the launch of Trek’s new Protein Nut Bars. Following a strategic selection procedure from our wider community, we collated a list of 100 influencers who we knew loved the TREK range and had engaged with the brand historically.
We organised for gift boxes, including the products and bespoke hand-written notes incorporating the brand’s key messages, to be sent out to the influencers. We tenaciously followed up for feedback to encourage our contacts to review the bars on their social channels. As a result, more than 60 pieces of earned social media content have been generated to date by on-brand content creators, delivering a total reach of over 815,000.
The results show that putting the time and effort into connecting strategically and curating communities is well worth the effort for small or bigger brands alike.
