Recently, we powered a social media campaign for New Balance promoting the launch of an online priority sale of the #NB420 re-engineered sneakers in Singapore. Due to its nature and product, the core of this campaign was social selling – ‘the development of relationships as part of the sales process’ - on Instagram and Facebook. Persollo’s instant checkout technology behind social selling helped to transform the pre-existing connection between social media personalities (Influencers) and younger consumers into sales, and this became the key focus of the marketing direction.
For campaigns involving renowned brands such as New Balance, we have three main goals: to generate excitement around the product launch, to drive as much traffic to the e-commerce site as possible, and to optimise overall conversion rates.
All three of these goals are achievable through the use of our powerful technology and the benefits of Influencer marketing. We partnered with 12 Singapore-based Instagram Influencers with high engagement rates and briefed them on the expected style of content, captions, and aims of the sale itself. As a result, the Influencers were able to timely post bright and inspirational images which ultimately formed the basis of New Balance’s email and social media campaign. With a collective audience of almost 1.4 million young consumers, the response and interactions with the produced content were extraordinary from the get go.
The success of the Influencers in meeting our three goals likely came from a single factor – their ability to catch the attention of a wide, yet specific group of consumers. In this case, we were able to leverage their reach and relationship with young, stylish fans, which proved to effectively create hype and tendency to purchase.
So how exactly does our technology fit into this marketing campaign?
The pairing of our instant checkout technology with the Influencers allowed them to sell the new sneakers straight from their Instagram profiles, which was a major motivating point towards increasing conversion. Since this sale emphasised the limited availability of the sneakers, the ability of consumers to access a single-page checkout and complete the purchase within 30 seconds was an attractive approach to online shopping. By simplifying the typical online checkout, – which usually involves around 3 steps and a ‘cart’ – we were able to streamline the process and retain consumers by enhancing their ease of access to the product. Within the 72-hour promotion, we ensured that our customers would be able to latch onto the product hype and purchase within a small window of time.
A well-thought out combination of influencer content sparked consumer desire, and our instant checkout technology resulted in selling 60% of all pre-sale stock in just 4 days. Overall, we averaged a total of 100K likes and peaked conversion rates at 2.3% via email campaigns and 14% via influencers. It was also interesting to note that a few of our influencers generated higher conversion rates in comparison to New Balance’s organic posts over their controlled social media profiles such as Facebook.
Whilst we were strongly invested in the performance of the Influencers, links to the Persollo check out were displayed on all of New Balance’s Singaporean social media channels. Thus, it still stands that the most effective approach to a campaign such as this, is an integrated one. The mixture of content through Influencer profiles and New Balance’s organic promotions was vital in the ultimate success of this experience due to its unrivaled ability to engage audiences via a multitude of methods.
If there were any doubts within our team about the power of social selling prior to this campaign, they were swiftly eliminated. Our success with New Balance has driven us to experiment further with Influencer marketing and its chemistry with our instant checkout technology. The Persollo Team is excited to embrace and drive the future of sales and marketing– we’ll be sure to keep you posted.
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