Entertainment
The 4 Best Performing Influencer Marketing Campaigns of 2017
Which influencer marketing campaigns have performed extraordinary this year? Our data nerds looked into thousands of brands, various hashtags, and countless postings to detect the top of the class influencer marketing campaigns of 2017!
The Data
We analyzed:
- 203,257 Instagram posts, labelled as sponsored posts with the respective hashtags like #ad, #sponsored
- 24,572 Instagram channels which published these posts
- 1,737 brands which have been mentioned in the posts
Then, we focused on the best performing 10% regarding likes, comments, and earned media value, and detected the four best influencer marketing campaigns of 2017!
The Winners
Best Overall Influencer Marketing Performance: Daniel Wellington
The award for the best overall performance in influencer marketing in 2017 goes to Daniel Wellington!
The world famous watch brand was among the first companies who started building their brand in the ‘golden age’ of influencer marketing.
Neglecting other marketing activities, Daniel Wellington put all their eggs in one basket and went all in with influencer marketing. Influencer generated content is used not only for the brand’s social media channels but also for their owned media channels and further parts of the company.
What makes Daniel Wellington so incredibly successful?
The brand started with a holistic approach early on and chose their influencers wisely, focusing on high-quality influencers as well as cooperating with celebrity influencers like Kendall Jenner later on.
Nowadays, Daniel Wellington pushes performance-driven influencer marketing to the next level and generates an astonishing number of sales with each campaign.
The brand used influencers all year round in 2017, but increased their activities for e-commerce peak days like Black Friday. Of our four winners, Daniel Wellington had by far the highest number of sponsored posts.
Keeping in mind that not every influencer labels paid cooperation as sponsored posts the number of posts which were produced for Daniel Wellington is even higher!
What is noticeable is a high number of these postings include discount codes.
Daniel Wellington uses these codes not only to measure the effectiveness of each influencer (which influencers manages to generate the highest number of sales?) but also as a way to benchmark their team members (who chooses the best influencer and allocates their budget most effectively?)
Best Influencer Marketing in Beauty: Yves Saint Laurent Beauty
Our second winner is prestigious beauty brand Yves Saint Laurent Beauty.
In contrast to Daniel Wellington, YSL beauty focuses on a PR approach to position the brand the brand in a prestigious environment with the help of modern, young, and edgy influencers.
For their fall campaign, Yves Saint Laurent Beauty acquired male influencers to promote the brand’s new fragrance ‘Y’. The posts focused less on the product itself than on spreading the brand’s message of coolness and edginess.
Generally, the brand executes less campaigns than Daniel Wellington and is particularly picky about the influencers they cooperate with. An excellent brand fit and a high-quality audience is an absolute must-have for the brand when choosing influencers.
Best Influencer Marketing in Fashion: H&M
The winner of our third place, best fashion influencer marketing, is global fashion brand H&M. As H&M can be considered as one of the best known fashion brands worldwide, this is probably no big surprise.
Compared to the other winners it has by far the highest follower count which is still growing rapidly (follower growth 31%).
What is surprising though is that their influencer marketing strategy on Instagram appears rather low and more subtle but the brand still scored one of the most successful campaigns.
For their fall campaign, H&M chose some well-established fashion influencers as testimonials, such as @sincerelyjules and @elavelden.
But as H&M is a brand for everybody and not just for fashion addicts, their target group is extremely broad.
That’s why they didn’t limit their campaign to fashion influencers only but used some more mainstream channels as well to reach a broader audience. And as the numbers show, with a huge success!
Best Influencer Marketing Newcomer: Paco Rabanne Parfums
Our final winner as best influencer marketing newcomer is the perfume brand Paco Rabanne Parfums.
Paco Rabanne is probably well known to many through other advertisement channels such as TV commercials and took over Instagram with their influencer marketing strategy just recently.
But what qualified them for best newcomer? The answer is clear when looking at the huge number that represents their follower growth.
At the beginning of December this year, they had a follower count of 57,767 which leaped up to 66,555 in only two weeks.
The channel’s 2017 growth of 42786% can be traced back to very effective influencer marketing.
The brand has selected the right influencers, who created visually appealing images. Paco Rabanne Parfums really made sure to push their influencer marketing to the next level this past year!
The Takeaway
Interestingly, our best performing campaigns of 2017 present a variety of different approaches to influencer marketing. While some brands rather trust in performance-focused approaches, other brands really hone in on the influencers’ brand fit and audience quality to build up a relationship.
No matter which influencer marketing strategy you’ll chose for your 2018 influencer marketing campaigns – we wish you an extraordinary successful year, creative campaigns, and great new influencer connections!
