Influencers are powerful partners for brands to increase brand awareness, promote their products, and deepen customer loyalty. Working with influencers can be critical to reaching new audiences or markets.
Influencer marketing has grown in popularity over the years and is an important marketing initiative for many companies. Especially when it comes to younger audiences. According to a study by Morning Consult, 72% of Gen Z and Millennials follow influencers on social media.
We spoke with Alex Garcia, Head of Partnerships at Insta360, about how Brandwatch has helped them improve their influencer marketing and partnerships.
Read on to hear how Insta360 use Brandwatch to:
- Manage 4,000 partners with ease
- Speed up campaign reporting (it is now 90x faster)
- Achieve costs for campaigns significantly below industry average at 0.0004 dollar cost per view
- Save time on reporting, allowing the team to better manage relationships and business decisions
About Insta360
Insta360 is a camera company based in Shenzhen, China, with offices in Berlin, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Insta360 creates boldly innovative products that help people capture and share their lives. With a "Think bold" mindset, Insta360 is reimagining the limits of action cameras, 360 VR cameras and traditional photography solutions. Powered by AI, the brand's video editing software is revolutionizing the way creators make engaging content. Insta360 is dedicated to helping a new generation of athletes, creatives, adventure travelers and professionals bring their ideas to life. In 2019, NASA used Insta360 cameras to live-stream the landing of their Insight Mars Lander, and the campaign was awarded an Emmy.
Managing influencer campaigns before Brandwatch
When Insta360 collaborates with influencers and brands, Alex Garcia's team manages the process from start to finish. Insta360 has a wide range of products and a broad target audience. From teenagers to retirees, hobbyists to cinematographers, their products cover a variety of audiences and use cases.
Influencer marketing is a key promotional channel for Insta360, which uses influencer campaigns for seasonal campaigns like winter sports or Black Friday, and product launches. The variety of campaigns makes influencer management increasingly complex, and as the company scales and enters new markets, Alex's team needed help managing the growing workload.
In the past, he and his team managed their partnerships manually using spreadsheets. As the number of partnerships grew, this process became inefficient and overly time-consuming. There was too much information in too many documents, and not everyone on the team was comfortable working with the spreadsheets, making the system prone to error.
Skilled team members spent a lot of time manually keeping those spreadsheets up-to-date, which took away from more important tasks. They needed a solution that could manage influencer campaigns at scale, streamline operations, and make processes easier and less time-consuming for Alex’s team.
Driving partnerships at scale
Fast forward to today, where Insta360 manages their partner relations at scale with Brandwatch Influence. The partnership team runs over 60 campaigns a year and currently manages around 4,000 partners in Influence. Some campaigns contain as many as 3,000 social posts and generate a massive amount of data over a short period of time, which they can now easily analyze.
The team uses Influence on a daily basis to manage their partner relationships, track ongoing campaigns in real time, measure the performance of campaigns, and generate reports for management at the click of a button. This saves them a lot of time that they can invest in other things.
Before Brandwatch, the team had to manually put together campaign reports, typically at the 24, 72, and 120-hour marks after each launch. Now, they can quickly pull these reports, make adjustments, and meet their deadlines with ease. So instead of spending all their time putting together reports, they can use it to analyze the results, answer questions from management, and make smart decisions for future campaigns.
As Alex put it: “We can now do performance reports with one click. Before, it took five hours every time we wanted to do these reports. That's a minimum 15 hours of reporting for one product launch. Now, we spend around ten minutes. That was a very big thing we wanted to improve, and why we contacted Brandwatch.“
"We can now do performance reports with one click. Before, it took five hours every time we wanted to do these reports. That's a minimum 15 hours of reporting for one product launch. Now, we spend around ten minutes."
With Brandwatch Influence, Insta360 can monitor the results of a campaign over time and surface results that wouldn’t necessarily have been flagged in the past. Previously, all campaign reporting would cease after a specific date, so if a post went viral later, they wouldn't know about it and wouldn't have been able to track it. Now, they can see when a post takes off even after the campaign’s initial run. They can also easily compare ongoing campaigns with the performance of past campaigns.
Another feature that Alex and his team frequently make use of is audience analysis. This is helpful, for example, when they want to see where a partner's primary audience is located. This data can provide valuable insights that could be hard to collect manually. It may turn out that a partner from Australia has their primary audience in Europe. With this type of data, Insta360 can choose the right partners and optimize their influencer campaigns.
Smarter business decisions and better results
Last year, several videos went viral of customers holding their Insta360 cameras with their mouths while running around, making their heads appear huge with funny expressions. It didn't take long for these funny videos to go viral on TikTok.
Insta360 seized the opportunity and created a dedicated campaign around the trend called The Insta360 Nose Mode campaign. They reached out to their partners and asked them to create their own “nose mode” videos, and they released hundreds of videos showing off the trend via TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts.
With Brandwatch Influence, they were able to track campaign results immediately after launching and in real time. The automated process saved them a lot of time and resources, which allowed them to react fast to a popular trend.
“We spend so little time tracking influencer output that we could spend that time managing better relationships, pitching new influencers, getting together new releases."
“We spend so little time tracking influencer output that we could spend that time managing better relationships, pitching new influencers, getting together new releases. We got a better cost per view thanks to the automatic tracking because we could spend more time on the business side and get better deals,“ Alex explained.
The campaign was a huge success with 320 million views through their partners and 680 million views in total, including content from other users who jumped on the trend.
The campaign achieved a cost per view of an incredible 0.0004 dollar, which is well below the industry average. The campaign even garnered Insta360 a nomination for a YouTube Streamys Award in the "Brand of the Year" category.
"We got a better cost per view thanks to the automatic tracking because we could spend more time on the business side and get better deals."
Alex and his team plan to keep scaling their partnerships to gain exposure and drive sales. Influence helps them meet their campaign goals, improve their ROI, make smarter business decisions, and make the day-to-day work run smoother. On top of that, the user-friendly platform of Influence also helps new team members get quickly up to speed.
As Alex explains it: “The Brandwatch platform is easy to understand, easy to use, and a very fluid experience. We have newcomers coming to the company every few weeks, and they get it very quickly. The user experience and UI are very intuitive and simple. I would say it's a very easy and user-friendly platform.“
"The user experience and UI are very intuitive and simple. I would say it's a very easy and user-friendly platform."