Digiday recently announced that ZURU Mini Brands is a finalist in three categories of the Digiday Marketing Awards. Mini Brands is in the running for Best New Product or Launch Campaign, Best Influencer-Generated Content, and Best User Generated Content. This makes ZURU a contender among reputable names such as Airbnb, WM, Samsung, Verizon, and Viacom. Along with their submission, the company also created a brand video.
In this Q&A, Jim Silver interviews ZURU Senior Marketing Manager Jeremy Lopez about the Mini Brands launch and working with influencers.
Q: What led you do to an influencer based program for this launch?
A: Influencers have long been part of our product launch strategies. However, as the space is more cluttered than ever for 5 Surprise Mini Brands, we shifted our entire focus on the emerging platform TikTok. The Miniatures trend had already taken hold of pop culture and with 5 Surprise Mini Brands shrinking some of the most nostalgic and beloved brands in perfect detail, from the packaging shape and labels, to the barcodes and ingredients, we believed TikTok content creators would feed the frenzy.
Q: What social channels did you focus upon and which did you feel provided the best ROI?
A: We’ve been watching the rapid growth of TikTok since its launch from Musical.ly. The sheer number of its downloads, its core demographic to the short, fun content and engagement itself. We felt that a comprehensive 5 Surprise Mini Brands push with TikTok influencers, where we gave them complete freedom to create the content they desired, would net fantastic results. It was a risk, but well worth it. We were blown away that #minybrands and #tinythings soon became the number one trending hashtag on TikTok.
Q: How do you gauge success as you analyze every influencer you used? What metrics did you use?
A: We gauge influencer success based on delivering views above the planned goal. In other words, how “sticky” the content they create is and how much it gets shared/goes viral. To date, the campaign overall generated over 1.6 billion impressions. We also look at how well the influencer can bring the brand message to life in their own creative way. Influencers are tremendously creative, and we love when they bring their creative twist, while still delivering the brand message clearly.
The recognition by DigiDay for ZURU as Best in Class Launch Campaign, Influencer and UGC Marketing efforts further illustrates the success. It’s an honor to be in competition with Airbnb, Samsung, Verizon, Viacom, among others. Of course the ultimate measurement is retail sales. This items continues to sell out!
Q: Going forward, what’s the biggest learning experience you gained from running this program?
A: This campaign reaffirmed the power of social influencers and the importance of organic content, while teaching us how to seed and maintain trends and its popularity. We had a perfect trifecta — a great product feeding a popular trend and a hot new social platform. We’re extremely excited for the launch of Series 2 coming this Fall with over 100 new brands on board. We have put a lot of effort to maintain the virality and we will look to replicate this success.