Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
In April of 2024, Diamond PR put together an extensive, and second of its kind, influencer marketing campaign which we called, TikTok Hawaii Hop. We brought together 10 influencers across different verticals and parts of the US and coordinated an entire trip with them across two Hawaiian islands and two different resorts. With this influencer marketing campaign, our goal was to promote the client through a new medium: social media.
TikTok and social media in general has taken influence on travel, fashion, beauty, and more by storm, so we looked to utilize this reality in our favor. By taking influencers on a trip to our hotel client, The Sheraton Kauai Coconut Beach Resort, we were able to offer first time experiences, excursions, and memories in exchange for social media content posted on accounts with a fan base between 500 thousand followers to over 11 million followers.
This was all done on an exchange basis, which is rare to see in the industry today. Because this activation was so unique and most influencers are accustomed to paid partnerships and brand deals, offering them an experience and the opportunity to travel presented a new point of view of how collaborations could look like in the future. We aimed to flood this viral social media channel with beautiful imagery and footage of our hotel client through the eyes of different influencers from all kinds of verticals, backgrounds, and demographics in order to maximize the audiences we were reaching.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
We achieved the goal of reaching a wide range of audiences and demographics through this campaign. We also offered our client more exposure and a new perspective of how coverage can look in today’s generation with the rise of influencers and content creators becoming the modern day video and photo journalists.
We achieved this through negotiating contracts with each influencer in attendance which outlined a number of deliverables they would have to share with their followers in exchange for the trip. In order to maximize coverage and exposure as well, we negotiated a timeline in which the deliverables would have to be posted, spacing them out to guarantee more coverage at a later date to continue to keep the client on their, and their audiences’, radar.
The agency primarily targeted lifestyle influencers who have strong followings within different markets. 90% of our group of influencers surpassed the one million threshold with followings ranging from 1 million to over 11 million! Therefore, we achieved the goal of garnering a large reach all over the country.
We measured the effectiveness of this campaign through KPI tracking and monitoring any updates in reach, impressions, likes, and comments. Due to the deliverables contracted being static posts, it allows more opportunity for growth and life on the influencer’s accounts so overall impressions and engagement can change with each day.
Many of the content creators also organically shared across other platforms like Instagram, despite only being contracted to share on TikTok. Through the exchange of this once in a lifetime trip that we offered the influencers, they took it upon themselves to share on other platforms which, in our experiences of building out these campaigns, we have learned that these kinds of collaborations help all parties involved. It gives the creator’s new content to capture and share with their followers and helps our client get more bang for their buck.
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
When conducting outreach for this trip, we heard from a number of influencer management teams negotiating deliverables, contracts, and the overall exchange. As influencer’s typically work on paid campaigns and we were only offering this trip on an exchange basis, we received many “no’s” and passes due to the nature of this collaboration. However, we did not let that stop us from achieving our goals.
Through our outreach efforts, we learned influencers (depending on their follower count) typically charge anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per video. Based on the follower counts we secured and the quality of influencers we gathered together, we can estimate this campaign to have generated anywhere from $300,000 - $500,000.
This well-exceeded our goals and expectations of revenue for this trip, but by keeping our group to 10 influencers and focusing our efforts on intentional invites to quality creators, we were able to maximize our efforts reaching over 30 million followers total. With a smaller group, we did not think we would reach this many people, but we were quickly proven wrong.
Through partnering with hotels and airlines and offering them deliverables from the influencers in exchange, we were able to maximize our budget, making the overall ROI much greater. While a trip of this magnitude would typically cost anywhere between $50,000 - $100,000 with the inclusion of flights, accommodations, activities, food and beverage, transportation, and more, out of pocket expenses were only about $10,000 - $20,000.
That spend in comparison to the revenue value of $300,000 makes for a very positive ROI. The clients also saw a major increase in followers on their own social media accounts as well as an increase in bookings and website traffic. On the PR side of things, we also noticed an increase in visit inquiries from other influencers.
Division
Public Relations/Communications - Influencer Marketing
Category
Public Relations/Communications