overview
A female-centric Instagram account with the backing of a large sports entertainment company was looking to grow their followers through the use of influencers and whitelisted paid social. The final campaign direction involved contracting female artists to create inspirational graphics, which would then be given away to a number of followers as framed prints.
kpis
The main metric of success was the amount of followers gained over the course of the flight; however, as you cannot guarantee Instagram followers the campaign was contracted on a specific number of Engagements (counted as clicks, likes, comments, shares, and video views).
media approach
As the main giveaway requirement and campaign KPI was followers, all promotions needed to link directly to the client’s Instagram account. We initially targeted our media to three buckets: women dedicated to empowerment, women who have shown an interest in famous female athletes, and a lookalike audience modeled after women who had engaged with the client’s account in the last 365 days.
optimizations
While the empowerment audience drove strong performance from the start as a result of their alignment with the overall account mission, the female athletes bucket was less successful in generating engagement among its users. We realized that many of the people who were identified\ as interested in our chosen athletes might be fans of them in the context of their celebrity rather than due to their accomplishments in their sport. In light of this understanding we pulled back from this audience and instead set a new targeting bucket live that consisted of women who are fans of traditionally female sports and leagues (i.e. the WNBA, fastpitch softball, rhythmic gymnastics and similar).
With the new female sports audience implemented in the last week of the flight, its users’ strong response drove high engagement that boosted the overall campaign engagement rate. The campaign also saw its largest follower growth the day that this new audience was implemented indicating that the influx of new users coupled with their strong alignment with the account’s overall content and mission were the key factors in creating followers.
result one
engagements
58% overdelivery on contracted number of engagements
result two
engagement rate
28% improvement in engagement rate over previous campaigns’ benchmark
result three
followers
7.20% increase in followers over 26 day flight, among the highest growth rate for that time frame among a group of six competitors
learning one
audience building
While initially the Female Athletes audience seemed highly on target with users who would find the account’s content relevant, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Many of the athletes that were part of this audience have become celebrities in their own right and may pull in users who are not actually fans of their sport, leading to overall lower engagement. Be sure to consider all potential interpretations of an audience when building targeting buckets and look for ways to attack it from all sides.
learning two
campaign set up
By optimizing for engagements we were able to prove the strength of the creative and its resonance among our target users by driving a large amount of overdelivery and high engagement rate. However the strong engagement rate did not necessarily equate to the same volume of new followers. Future follower campaigns should be purchased on a traffic and CPC auction model to ensure the majority of actions taken from our ads are directly funneling people to the page for growth.
learning three
maintaining results
After an initial surge of followers when an audience launches, users quickly tire of campaign ads and daily follower growth drops despite creative being viewed at a relatively low frequency (<1.5x). Rather than implement a large number of audiences at once, cycle between targeting groups every 2 weeks in order to keep bringing in fresh people to view campaign content and avoid stagnation among current audiences.