A Gifting Campaign is when you offer your product as a gift in return for a social media post

A gifting campaign (also known as an ‘unpaid collaboration’ or ‘product for post campaign’) is where you offer your product as a gift to an influencer in return for a social media post about your brand.

If you’ve read our post on the pros and cons of paid vs. unpaid campaigns, then you’ll be familiar with the fact that in unpaid campaigns, there is no guarantee that the influencer will post a product you sent to them. Kinda similar to PR where you send out hundreds of press releases and not every media publication picks them up.

So, how do you pull off a successful gifting campaign?

Tip 1: Use Micro Influencers (<30,000 followers) at scale

Our first tip is to use micro-influencers at scale (often below the 30,000 follower mark). Here it is going to be the most effective strategy as they are more often willing to post, without payment, simply in return for being gifted your product.

Micro-influencers may be more likely to enter into an unpaid or product only collaboration if they already love your brand or use your product, if the product has a high retail price they would rather not pay, if they want to be associated with a larger brand to leverage to get more brand work, if they want the potential exposure of being reposted to your brand’s social channels or if the product is high cost and they want to get their hands on it to try out for free.

Tip 2: Track your results

Our second tip is to track your results. To track the results of a brand awareness campaign, focus on the following metrics:

• social engagements
• content
• campaign reach
• brand mentions
• to measure social engagement, you could look at post impressions, likes, comments, saves, shares, depending on the social channel the campaign is active on
  
  

For a content campaign, look at:

• how many pieces of content were created
• the quality of the content: a good quality measure is how many times you’re able to repurpose this content for your brand.
  
  

It’s good practice to ask influencers to submit their content to your brand once they’ve posted, but sometimes they will forget and you will need to follow up with them.

When it comes to other trackable metrics, it’s also good to keep an eye on your social media follower growth for the channel your campaign is live on, as well as any increases in website traffic, social referral traffic and sales, but these are not the focal point of a brand awareness campaign.

CASE STUDY: Drop Bottle Brand Awareness Strategy

Again, in a brand awareness campaign, your goal is to get your brand in front of as many people from your target audience as possible. It’s an important step in brand building and results will also show over time.

Before launch, Drop Bottle sent out 100 Drop Bottles to micro-influencers(5000- 50,000 followers) in the health and wellness space. Some results achieved from this strategy include:

• A completion rate of 85%, meaning 85 out of the 100 influencers posted.
• Between the 85 influencers that did post their combined reach was over 2 million followers.
• Some posted more than once, totalling over 100 brand mentions.
• As a result, Drop Bottle was able to gain an additional 15,000 followers before we launched.
• 85 pieces of branded content to repurpose with credit across our social channels, in our paid advertising, in EDMs and on the website.