Last week we talked about Adidas’s play with influencer marketing with elaborate plans to conquer dark social. And this week we have Starbucks demonstrating influencer marketing with Youtube Stars Rosanna Pansino along side YouTube personality iJustine
Social media is becoming an integral part of everyone’s life including your parents. It’s infiltrating almost every aspect of one’s life and global brands have started to recognize this. With the rise of the influencer, brands are looking for easy publicity and brand recall by turning internet’s biggest stars into talking pieces for their brand – and you bet Starbucks is one of them.
Last week, the global coffee chain turned heads by bringing together Youtube Stars Rosanna Pansino and iJustine to engage audiences in an organic looking coffee taste challenge.
The blindfold challenge saw the two youtube stars battle it out to see which influencer could identify the most amount of Starbucks drinks correctly. The eleven-minute video is enough time for one to build a craving for one of the drinks (I was done as soon as I saw the Chocolate Smoothie at 2mins) Once you step out of the trance, you realize this is a brilliant example of influencer marketing. The video gathered over one million views and forty thousand upvotes, hinting to the clear success. I truly believe..Influencer campaigns work best when you leave the creative to the creator.
Influencer campaigns work best when you leave the creative to the creator.
Now most small businesses would not be able to bring together Youtube Stars to do something like this because of small budgets. But there are plenty of ways to engage influencers for small businesses, take example of Springbone Kitchen which saw a surge in new customers asking for strawberry rhubarb ice cream. This happened after the owners crafted a social media marketing strategy centered on Instagram food influencers. A foodie Instagram account had posted a picture of the flavour to its hundreds of thousands of followers, which had dozens follow Springbone Kitchen right to the door.
Influencer marketing is fast becoming an increasingly common outreach method for big brands which offer free products/services or payment to key digital influencers in order to gain visibility with their audience. A lot of people believe that influencers should publically announce of any such arrangements similar to that in US where FTC (Federal Trade Commission) requires explicit disclosure of compensation but that does not generally impact their effectiveness.
Due to the recent changes in how people access and share information these days, and the numerous advantages that influence marketing offers it just can not be ignored by brands anymore.