Where Do Influencers Fit In?
MSR Case Study
Building a truly authentic digital community from the ground up sometimes seems like an impossible task … and keeping it fresh even more daunting, not to mention expensive…. but it doesn’t have to be. That’s where social media influencers come in.
The Challenge
Create a social program and cultivate community that can match the legacy of one of the most technical, highly regarded outdoor brands on the market.
Outcome
As an integrated part of our social marketing strategy we developed and continue to nurture varying levels of influencers. Not only are they woven into our day to day narrative, we are able to leverage them for campaigns, launches, product testing and more.
Background
We began working with the Mountain Safety Research team in 2012. At first the work centered around establishing an organizational understanding of the role that social media could play as a part of its brand ecosystem. With limited channels and even more limited resources, we learned as much as possible from the internal team about the brand and its perceived audience and customers.
Using historical brand documentation, on channel analytics, and sentiment, we began to tap into the social brand voice and positioning that eventually grew from a small presence on Facebook and Twitter, to a industry leading content marketing engine anchored by a robust blog and ecommerce experience, only to be rivaled by an Instagram channel leading the way in outdoor community conversation and storytelling.
A brand is only as good as the community that it's a part of and a core tenant of our practice is to ensure that all social marketing strategies are inclusive of true and authentic interaction with and representation from the community.
With the idea behind MSR being to build better, safer, more reliable equipment to help its community and customers to unlock greater adventures, we knew that it was necessary for us to reinforce this idea through showing real adventures, from real people actually using the gear.
Developing Story Pillars
Understanding that we needed to find a way to drive and inspire the narrative that we could harness from our wider community we needed to start by developing lanes of conversation, our story pillars that allowed us to frame our annual narrative, inclusive of all core brand, product, customer messaging.
Unfolding Narrative
After establishing our pillars, we are posed with the question and challenge of producing that narrative. Outside of our owned messaging, campaigns and brand launches, we need to breathe life into the storytelling.
The brand focused only on itself and promotions and little about the community it served. That’s the point in which we saw a great opportunity to develop a platform for long form narrative around owned content which would be inclusive of closely aligned pillars as the social story pillars, in fact these would soon become the pillars that guide brand wide narrative moving forward.
The end result, what became known as “The Summit Register” blog, became the heart and soul of the MSR digital ecosystem and brand storytelling hub. Working alongside the MSR team we developed a mission and charter to guide our efforts, workflow and systems, and identified a pipeline of content sources that existed that we would channel to the blog and proposed a number of new initiatives that we would eventually launch.
Extensions of the Brand - Partners in Storytelling
Blog Contributors - We developed a budget and an operational framework, prospective partners and activated current partners that would get paid to contribute to our blog.
Activating Athletes as content partners - Historically athletes were left alone to be athletes, but over time they found themselves competing for seats on brand teams and for the dollars, and social following and their ability to produce content became more of a priority. Early on we began looking for ways to further leverage our existing athletes as part of this new digital platform. We found a way to get them to both share unique and rich content for us to use as it related to our narrative, and upleveling their channels, activating in social on our behalf.
Dedicated Social Micro-Influencers - As social engagement, more dynamic content needs and algorithms became more of a thing for everyone, so did micro-influencers. We worked with MSR to develop the “Away Team” which will be activated in order to establish a presence across more communities, showcasing the many voices that make up the MSR story. We can’t ignore that these folks have the ability to develop and contribute content at a higher volume than athletes, as they typically have less commitments with other sponsors and tend to be engaged because of an authentic love for the brands in which they work with.
User Generated Content - After a period of showing our fans who we are, what it looks like and what we are looking for, we began to get an influx of user generated content that soon became a core part of our social narrative and strategy to include community in the conversation. Outside of the obvious brand win, algorithmically it adds a ton of value, increases reach and exposure for the brand and channels.
48 Hour Epic x Trailshot Launch - One key element to growing an authentic and organic audience is being able to activate them. We Asked, and the Community Delivered. We concepted and framed a campaign to celebrate the launch of the TrailShot inspiring people to embark on micro adventures of their own and share them with MSR and the world. The launch effort was inclusive of a landing page, milestones/timeline, roadmap of the summer campaign and influencer activations.
The campaign asked, “What would you do if you had just 48 hours and an ultralight pack of overnight gear? How fast and how far would you go—and where? What epic human-powered adventure would you conquer?”
With the idea that we wanted to prime the content submissions and set the tone for what we were looking for, we called on our influencers to activate some content…. And they delivered.
Visits: 31,800+
The average person visited the site 3.3 times
Votes: 3,200 votes were cast
Over 1,500 high-quality images submitted for later UGC usage
#48hourepic has over 1,000 posts on Instagram
The campaign tied in a product launch, the community, public relations, athletes, and activated across all digital channels. All driving traffic to the MSRgear.com, supporting brand, SEO, sell-in and sell-through.
Takeaway
MSR is driven to engineer gear for those who believe a trusted companion is a non-negotiable when it comes to their gear, and we set out to be that trusted companion. In care of their life out in the field, and in storytelling in care of their content and their individual stories, our digital community has continued to prove that including the community in the narrative is a non-negotiable. There is no one thing we would attribute to the success of the MSR social program other than their commitment to build a healthy digital ecosystem.
There are so many advantages that accompany utilizIng micro-influencers. One of the most obvious of the discoveries that we’ve made is that micro-influencers can generate a higher ROI for your marketing dollars. A lot of folks might think that you have to spend a crazy amount of dollars to build and attract influencers, but if do it right, you can attract true fans and evangelists of your brand that would be impassioned and motivated to spread the word should you give them the right tools and incentives. There is a fine line between leveraging folks for posts and free content, and truly nurturing partners. Through specializing in niche activities, micro-influencers typically have a highly targeted audience behind them. The authenticity of their content leads to high conversion rates and better levels of engagement. Recent studies show that having breadth and volume of engagement with smaller accounts actually surpasses the engagement levels of larger accounts. This is likely due to the perceived levels of authenticity and credibility from micro-influencer content. Micro-influencers are generally early on in their influencer career, so they are still looking for exposure to new audiences. Because of this, micro-influencers work for low costs or in exchange for products or services from the brand they are working with. Due to this low cost pay-to-play, it is not unusual to employ multiple micro-influencers for a single campaign. If you are not currently utilizing micro-influencers in your social media efforts, we highly recommend looking into doing so.