When people speak about Influencer marketing it’s sometimes with a negative undertone. We notice this especially on Twitter. To be completely honest, we also stumble upon some influencer cases that make us skeptical. However, we are convinced that we should not write off influencer marketing that quickly, and that there are luckily also a lot of examples where influencer marketing is used in the right way.
For example, a while ago we and SOS Children’s Villages were able to raise a considerable sum of money thanks to an influencer campaign for the Simba House, which provides shelter and guidance to families who are temporarily unable to guarantee the education of their children. We were able to do this with the help of a large number of influencers. Let’s explain how this influencer campaign worked.
Bloggers auction for SOS Children’s Villages
For the benefit of the Simba House, we have set up a bloggers auction. The idea came from Anna Nooshin, who discusses a similar concept in her book On Top. The first thing we did was ask a large amount of bloggers the following question: ‘Are you willing to offer a product or service for sale for a good cause, being the Simba House of SOS Children’s Villages?’
The response we got was truly heartwarming! A lot of bloggers suggested all kinds of fun activities or items that we could use for the auction. Among them were some well known faces such as: Erika Van Tielen, Yentl Keuppens, An-Katrien Casselman, Anne Cornut, and Hannes Coudenys. After a while we noticed that bloggers started inviting other bloggers, and that some of them contacted us to be part of the auction. At the start we hoped for about 30 bloggers, but in the end 70 bloggers participated!
What was offered varied for every blogger. Some examples: dresses, workshops, cozy dinners, surprise packages, manicure vouchers and much more! All the items or serviced were offered through the Instagram page of SOS Children Village’s. You can’t buy directly from Instagram, so that’s why we made the pictures shoppable through “Like2Have.It“. On the Instagram pictures we referred to the bio, where there was a link to the Like2Have.It site. This is also how we make items shoppable for our webshop So Baggy.
When someone clicks on the link they get redirected to Like2Have.it. There you get a list of all the Instagram pictures and can choose which item you would like to buy.
So Baggy shoppers get redirected to our webshop, but in the case of the Bloggers auction for SOS Children’s Villages we redirected the people to Ebay. There they could, for a period of ten days, put out a bid. After ten days the highest bidder got a message with very pleasant news!
With the help of all our bloggers we were able to raise € 3 500. In the beginning we were hoping for € 2 000 so you can imagine that we did more than one happy dance! Besides the profit, our participants also shared a lot about the bloggers auction. Which had as a result that we also raised awareness for SOS Children’s Villages!
Every blogger could’ve been part of the bloggers auction, considered that every blogger has his own audience. We admit, for other projects it can be really difficult to find the right influencer for the audience or product. It requires a lot of research to see if that one blogger is still active and whether that other influencer still has two children, or a new pet. In addition, it is often difficult to estimate whether the influencer fits the brand or product that you want to put in the spotlight. We had enough of all that research and developed a database tool for this called So Bloggy. With So Bloggy we can quickly identify the right influencers or bloggers for your project through relevant filters.
Do you also have a cool influencer case? Good, and bad examples are always welcome!