The Federal Health Department became the first Australian Government agency to use influencer marketers for promotional purposes when it employed 27 social influencers for the Girls Make Your Move campaign.
The social media component of the integrated campaign involved contracting young, popular female Instagrammers to encourage involvement in sporting and outdoor activities.
There are some lessons from the campaign that you can use if you are thinking of engaging influencers for your own business.
The rationale
Columbus, the marketing company that created the campaign, said the strategy “specifically tapped into the idea that perceptions are a powerful influence on intentions to change behaviour”.
“With research further revealing that social media has a more powerful influence on teenage girls than traditional media because of its pervasiveness and interactivity, our social team devised an inventive and collaborative social media strategy to drive maximum engagement and create a groundswell of support,” says the agency on its website.
The approach
The Health Department was reported to have spent more than $600,000 on influencers over 18 months, with some thought to have received up to $3000 a post. Many of the influencers were reported to have more than 100,000 followers.
The social influencers were charged with creating original content that showcased the key themes of the campaign and included calls to action.
They were also invited to attend sponsored events “to help drive collective involvement, inspire physically active behaviours and strengthen their endorsement of the campaign,” says Columbus.
Results
Columbus says the delivery of influencer content and campaign community events saw a significant increase in the use of the campaign hashtags. It said the campaign resulted in more than three million online engagements via Instagram and Facebook as well as improvements in target audience attitudes and behaviours.
“By achieving maximum organic uptake with both hashtag usage and content sharing, Girls Make Your Move received extensive unprompted support from stakeholders and industry alike,” Columbus says.
“In fact, across all elements of the campaign, social media provided a centralised platform around inclusion and sought to inspire physical activity among peers – most clearly evident through the incredibly high volume of positive responses received during the campaign, with content both created and shared by the target audience on their individual social channels.”
Quality influencers?
However, the campaign’s success was publicly contradicted by data analysis company Lumio, which concluded that many accounts of followers were not ‘valuable’ from an advertising perspective.
Lumio DEO Dan Anisse said the Government spent money on influencers without checking to see who was actually following them: “What you need to analyse is how many valuable followers they’ve got, so how many followers are actually going to interact with the post.
“Some Influencers have built a real following organically over time. Others have bought their way to the top – and the difference only really becomes apparent after you do a campaign with them, which can be both disappointing and costly.”
The campaign’s influencers were also scrutinised by media, which found previous posts of some paid influencers had endorsed drinking, often in partnership with alcohol brands. Another influencer had also previously been forced to apologise for using racist and homophobic language.
