There’s so much how-to content on forming a successful influencer marketing strategy, finding relevant creators, and managing influencer relationships. But it’s crucial to see how other brands actually implement these tactics. Here are 16 real-life influencer marketing campaign examples to inspire you.

1. Aumio

Campaign type: Aumio has an affiliate program, but 60–70% of its influencer marketing initiatives are fixed-fee campaigns.

Platform: Instagram

Aumio is a sleep and relaxation app for kids partnering with affiliates and influencers for fixed-fee campaigns. Most affiliates (60%) come via inbound queries and fixed-fee creators are primarily found via talent agencies (50%) and Modash (40%). The company’s choice of platform is Instagram, so they mostly find Instagram influencers.

Aumio’s goal with influencer marketing is to increase app signups. They mostly practice long-term influencer partnerships. Almost 70% of promo code redemptions come via creators who’ve already collaborated with Aumio 5+ times.

But still, few influencer collaborations last longer than three months. Why? Since Aumio has only one product, the audience might get tired of seeing it pop up on the same influencer’s feed again and again. Plus: the Aumio team wants the option to stop influencer collaborations to account for a dip in sales due to seasonality.

In our podcast episode with Anna-Maria Klappenbach, Anna also highlighted how she focuses on an influencer’s growth rate when finding micro-influencers. This helps her find influencers who are rapidly growing at a more affordable cost and also pick up tidbits from their social media strategies to implement with the rest of the influencer partners. Anna also moves fast-growing influencers from their affiliate program to their fixed-pay if the creator requests or if their growth warrants that as a reward.

Modash's influencer discovery tool has a “growth rate” filter to make this process even easier for Aumio.

Try Modash for yourself at no cost for 14 days.

Campaign statistics: Influencer marketing is Aumio’s biggest acquisition channel. And since the company focuses on strategically collaborating with fast-growing influencers, they’ve had several instances where creators generated positive results for 12+ months in a row. One of their affiliate partners started working with them when they had roughly 8K followers and over one year, they had over 35K followers! She still consistently brings 20 – 30 code redemptions per month for Aumio.

Key takeaway: For small businesses, it can be hard to collaborate with mega influencers with their large reach. Take a page out of Aumio’s playbook and partner with relevant micro-influencers with a high growth rate. This way, you’re investing in affordable content creators that will give you compounding reach in the long term.

2. NordVPN

Campaign Type: Sponsored posts  

Platform: YouTube

NordVPN, a virtual private network, relies heavily on influencer marketing on YouTube — 85.3% of Nord VPN's social traffic comes from there.

With the YouTube campaign, NordVPN focused on the macro-influencer program and secured some of the biggest names as their ambassadors. As a side note & disclaimer, NordVPN uses Modash to find creators to partner with. We spoke to Influencer Marketing Manager Laura Garsdal and she notes that their most important criteria when sourcing influencers are audience demographics.

By finding the right creators and using sponsored posts, they were able to scale their influencer marketing program from 1 to 14 global markets and is scattered across 23 different verticals — entertainment, tech, and gaming.

Mayuko Inoue, who focuses on creating technology with empathy and compassion, shared a day in her life and seamlessly integrated NordVPN in the video.

NordVPN exclusively ran "limited time offer" campaigns with a direct link to the purchase page that customers could access from the influencer's video description. Influencers created story-like dilemmas and built a narrative arc around the brand in their integration, increasing engagement.

Check out PewDiePie’s video, sponsored by NordVPN — it has 4M+ views and 11,000+ comments.

Campaign statistics

Nord VPN sponsored 598 videos and received 5.7M likes, 91.5M views, and a reach of 2.2B.

Key takeaway

✅Let your influencers speak about the brand naturally and spontaneously. If you provide an influencer campaign brief, ensure you allow for maximum creative freedom. That way, influencers don't feel like a branded microphone reading from a script. Using simple and natural language makes the brand messaging sound authentic and understandable.

3. Gymshark

Campaign type: Challenge / contest

Platforms: TikTok and Instagram

Gymshark is one of the most active gym wear brands using influencer marketing throughout the past years. Their campaign — 66 Days: Change Your Life challenge — was a massive hit on TikTok and Instagram.

The idea behind #Gymshark66 was more than a trend. It was built on engaging the community in the most meaningful way.

The campaign asked the audience to challenge themselves for 66 days through positive habits and an active lifestyle. What would they get in return? A year's supply of Gymshark.

For this campaign, Gymshark partnered with six sports and athlete influencers with a strong presence on TikTok and Instagram to raise awareness around the challenge. Influencers Twin Melody shared the following video promoting Gymshark activewear with #Gymshark66 — the video has 751k+ likes and 4950 shares. 

Apart from TikTok, Gymshark used Instagram's IGTV for the "Stories of the 66" video series highlighting individuals and their experience of adopting healthier habits in 66 days.

Campaign statistics

With a focus on video content, #Gymshark66 has 252.6 million views on TikTok and 785,000+ posts on Instagram.

Key takeaway

✅ Throughout the challenge, Gymshark continued to share helpful resources and tips to encourage participants. With a challenge campaign, you must focus on increasing audience participation, providing them with helpful resources along the way. It will help them remain motivated to complete the challenge.

4. Deeper Sonars

Campaign type: ambassador program and paid partnerships.

Platforms: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and niche websites. 

‍Deeper Sonars sells portable sonars and are core leaders in the angling world. They have an ambassador program which gets 70% of their total marketing budget.

The ambassador program at Deeper Sonars has three levels:

• Deeper Squad is an open community for any fishing hobbyist and/or fan of Deeper
• Deeper Heroes are pros who use Deeper sonars
• Paid partnerships are influencers with whom Deeper has negotiated a long-term deal

The largest number of ambassadors are housed in the Squad level, followed by Heroes, and paid partnerships are the fewest. Almost all Squad ambassadors and 90% of Heroes come from inbound methods. For the paid partnerships, 90% are sourced via an outbound recruitment strategy using Modash.

Inbound influencers join the self-serving ambassador program, reducing the company’s admin load. And paid partnerships are usually collabs with bigger creators — involving thorough vetting, negotiating, and briefing.

Campaign statistics: Deeper Sonars recruits over 7K+ ambassadors from 30+ countries. This, despite having only a total of 5 marketers on the team.

Key takeaways: Deeper Sonars is an excellent example of how to build brand ambassador programs at scale. The crucial lesson you can mimic from their approach though is creating a self-serve program that keeps running like a well-oiled machine without admin load. Setting up and refining such an ambassador program might take some time, but the compounding results are worth it.

Want to learn more about how Deeper Sonars finds, recruits, and manages its 7K+ ambassadors? Read our article that goes in-depth on their strategy.

5. Last Crumb

Campaign type: influencer product seeding.

Platform: TikTok

‍Last Crumb is a luxury cookie brand based in Los Angeles. Their business model is about getting customers to join their waitlist for buying cookies via email or SMS. Cookies sell out within minutes in exclusive batches sold to people who signed up. They used an influencer product seeding strategy to get Last Crumb cookies in the hands of every TikTok food influencer.

It’s crucial for Last Crumb to justify their price point and also maintain the vibe of “luxury” that’s core to their company. To accomplish this, they also consistently publish high-quality content on their own TikTok channel that taps into trends and fits the overall theme of their brand.

Campaign statistics: Many Last Crumb reviews on TikTok have over a million views. The keyword “Last crumb review” on TikTok generates hundreds of videos from food influencers — every creator swooning over the taste. After launching their own TikTok account and doing influencer collabs on it, Last Crumbs became one of the primary “TikTok made me buy it” cookie companies. TikTok also soon became Last Crumb’s lead generation source. 

‍Key takeaways: You can model your influencer seeding model after Last Crumbs by shipping your product to niche and relevant creators for an honest review. The best benefit here is the only cost you’d incur is your COGS. Last Crumbs is also great at showing how to simultaneously incorporate a TikTok and influencer marketing strategy to grow at whip speed. A great example of food influencer marketing.

6. ABSOLUT

Campaign types: Hosting events

Platforms: Instagram and Twitter

ABSOLUT, a Vodka brand, created this campaign to plan a series of people-and planet-centered influencer activations. The campaign was hugely successful and was the Gold Winner for the Best Food and Drink Campaign at the 2020 Influencer Marketing Awards.

The campaign lasted for more than eight months and collaborated with influencers who were eco-conscious sustainability champions, LGBTQIA advocates, and allies. ABSOLUT focused on influencers with bold tastes — having a passion for protecting the planet and its people.

The campaign's primary objective was to drive buzz, awareness, and social engagement for ABSOLUT, sparking conversation online.

Jess Bowen shared the following post celebrating Pride and ABSOLUT.

Planet Earth's Favorite Vodka campaign came to life with experiential events — prompting an emotional connection between ABSOLUT and the participants. The events showcased ABSOLUT's commitment to Earth, sustainability, and the people.

Events included a four-day immersion in ABSOLUT's devotion to sustainability at its Swedish production facility. The event also had a photoshoot recreating the historic march at Stonewall with renowned artist and advocate David Lachapelle.

John-David Brown shared this post from Climate Week NYC — highlighting the climate-conscious ABSOLUT.

Campaign statistics

Over the course of 8+ months, 95 influencers created 612 posts. The campaign generated 68.4M total impressions, 7.714M passive engagements, and 739.5K active engagements (comments, likes, shares). With a 15.16% engagement rate, the campaign's total impressions were 8.6M.

Key takeaway

✅ Make your next campaign a huge hit by not only collaborating with influencers who are the right fit for your target audience but also planning events, immersive experiences, and challenges that are interesting to them (and are right up their alley). 

7. Touchland

Campaign Type: Influencer gifting  

Platform: Instagram

Instead of spending their marketing budget on paid collaboration with celebrities and mega-influencers, Touchland did something different. The brand gifted its products to celebrities, including Kris Jenner, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Naomi Campbell.

And they didn't have to spend a dime on paid collaborations.

Touchland's strategy worked wonders because they didn't send their products to any random celebrity. With Naomi Campbell's airplane sanitizing routine going viral a couple of years ago, Touchland's luxury hand sanitizers were exactly her type of product.

In addition to these mega-celebrities, the brand targeted nano and micro-influencers who do hair and makeup and work directly with celebrities — reaching a wider and more diverse audience.

During the last two years, Touchland donated over 5000+ hand sanitizers to hospitals, healthcare workers, and public schools. The brand has grown through word-of-mouth and had 34,000 people on its waitlist at one point.

The campaign focused highly on delivering a personalized experience with a great unboxing experience. Touchland's strategy has always been to reach out to influencers, educate them about the brand, and hope they like the product enough to share it with others.

Campaign statistics

The gifting strategy resulted in 2000+ collaboration requests in a single year. After analyzing social media conversions to determine network effects, the word-of-mouth coefficient resulted in one of their best channel conversion rates, at over 5%.

Key takeaways

✅ To make sure people are showcasing your gifts, deliver an extraordinary unboxing experience. Since it's not a paid strategy, use custom branded boxes to inform the recipients of your brand and include a personalized card with one to two lines about who your company is, what you create, and the values you stand for. 

✅ To make the most impact, find the right social media influencers. One way to ensure you are on the right path is by asking yourself, "Are the influencer's audiences interested in seeing products like mine?" 

You can use an influencer discovery tool  — like Modash — to find influencers with the right target audience. Filter the database of 200M+ influencers and content creators and see whose audience is relevant to your business. With additional filters like engagement rate, follower count, etc., you can refine your search and find the best influencers for your campaign. 

8. Animalhouse Fitness

Campaign type: Influencer gifting

Platforms: TikTok and Instagram

Animalhouse Fitness is a health and fitness-based company that develops innovative products to help athletes and health enthusiasts achieve their goals.

When launching its product MonkeyFeet, the brand invested in building meaningful relationships with influencers. The campaign goals were to create hype and awareness around the new product launch and to get the product in front of the target audience.

Noah J. Richter shared the flexibility of using MonkeyFeet with his 66.4K followers.

For the campaign, AnimalHouse Fitness sent MonkeyFeet as a gift to 100+ fitness influencers. The brand incorporated user-generated content into its ads and increased brand awareness and sales through it.

One of the influencers, Ben Patrick, shared the product which eventually caught the eye of Joe Rogen. MonkeyFeet was mentioned four times on the Joe Rogan Experience — a podcast with an audience of around 11 million people worldwide.

Campaign statistics 

Overall, 1471 influencers posted about MonkeyFeet, and about 3710 posts (images and videos) were shared. Through this campaign, AnimalHouse Fitness raised revenue of $7 million and became the top 1% of Shopify's fastest-growing companies.

Key takeaway

✅Focus on building influencer relationships by giving, not asking. With free products to relevant influencers, you can get user-generated content that you can use in your marketing ads, social media posts, and other collateral. So, it’s a win-win for both you and the influencer.

💡 Resource: learn how to do influencer product seeding like Animal House Fitness!

9. Bobbie

Campaign type: Celebrity collaboration 

Platform: Instagram, Outdoor ads (billboards)

Bobbie, an American organic baby formula company, collaborated with model Ashley Graham for the "Your Best is Best" campaign. The campaign focused on expanding and normalizing the conversation about how parents choose to feed their babies.

With 64% of parents feeling judged for using formula milk for their babies, the campaign wanted to reassure parents that their best is best. The campaign shared Ashely's personal story with her twin boys through warm and passion-filled content pieces. 

One of the most powerful campaign images was placed on billboards in New York and Los Angeles and showed her feeding one twin a bottle and the other her breast at the same time. 

Campaign statistics

The campaign helped parents feel seen through the billboards and promotional content on Ashely's and Bobbie's socials. The campaign video on Ashley Graham's Instagram received over 5.8M views, and the campaign received press write-ups in Vogue, AdWeek, and other media outlets. 

Key takeaway

The campaign "Your Best is Best" was a huge success because it felt relatable to millions worldwide. The topic of formula milk is stigmatizing, and mothers feel ashamed admitting they have to rely on formula to feed their babies. 

This campaign started the conversation around doing your best and reassured parents that how they choose to feed their babies is the best way.

10. Honey

Campaign Type: Sponsored posts, brand ambassadors

Platform: YouTube

Honey, a coupon browser extension, has built a solid social media presence through influencer marketing, especially on YouTube.

In 2020, Honey worked with 56 influencers and sponsored 63 videos. Influencers had their own "Join Honey" link for the viewers to click and join for free. Honey also stood out by strategically integrating their ~60 seconds ads in the influencers' videos — rather than at the beginning or end.

Look at this video by Mr. Beast, which has 2M+ views — it’s engaging and encourages the audience to give Honey a try. 

Honey collaborated with top YouTube influencers such as The Ace Family (18.8M subscribers) and MrBeast (100M subscribers). Their best performing sponsored video was with PewDiePie in September 2019, which attracted 59 million views.

Campaign statistics 

Overall, the brand appeared on 100+ podcasts and over 400 YouTube channels and drew 60M+ total views on YouTube.

Key takeaway

✅Instead of in-your-face ads, come up with creative ways to show off your brand so it doesn't feel intrusive and annoying to your audience.

‍

11. HelloFresh

Campaign Type: Sponsored posts, celebrity collaboration

Platform: Instagram

HelloFresh, a home-delivery meal kit subscription service, has heavily relied on collaborating with celebrities and macro-influencers to get their brand in front of their target audience.

The Refresh with HelloFresh campaign won the 2020 Influencer Marketing Awards for Best Food and Drink Campaign. It was launched in 2019, and the face of the campaign was Davina McCall. 

HelloFresh worked with 15 micro-influencers to participate in a 21-day challenge to cook healthy meals from scratch and try out various HelloFresh recipes.

The influencers posted a series of cooking videos and photos throughout the three-week campaign with the tag #RefreshWithHelloFresh. The campaign goal was to target the UK market, and with their audience being 80% women, primarily between the ages of 30 and 50, HelloFresh strategically collaborated with influencers to target busy moms and young professionals.

Jenna, a lifestyle blogger and mom of three, shared her experience with HelloFresh and encouraged her followers to try it out using her exclusive discount code.

Campaign statistics

With 461 influencer posts, the campaign generated 5.5 million impressions, and 20% of the influencers' followers mentioned HelloFresh on Instagram. The branded hashtag #HelloFreshPics has generated over 260,000 Instagram posts.

Key takeaway

✅Understanding your audience and what drives them ensures your campaign's success. Make a note of the pain points of your target audience (making healthy food in a short time) and revolve the campaign around solving that pain point.

12. Daniel Wellington

Campaign Type: Influencer gifting, user-generated content 

Platform: Instagram

Daniel Wellington, a global watch brand, started with a meager $20,000 in cash. The brand generated $228 million in just three years with strategic influencer marketing and showcasing user-generated content.

Daniel Wellington employed influencer marketing before it was a thing. In 2010, with the launch of Instagram, the brand started reaching out to influencers and gifting them watches. The company reached out to everyone with an engaged audience — from models to artists and painters.

Paula, a Warsaw-based content creator, shared her love for Daniel Wellington with her 30.7K followers.

DW also doubled down on UGC campaigns which became so popular that influencers started buying watches and posting with #DWPickOfTheDay to get featured on the brand's official profile. The brand featured user-generated content on its website to show authentic images from customers.

Campaign statistics

#DWPickOfTheDay has 61,000+ posts on Instagram, while #DanielWellington has more than 2 million posts. DW's influencer marketing resulted in a 4700% growth and helped them reach a milestone of one million timepieces in annual sales.  

Pro tip

When sending out influencer gifts, there's often no guarantee (unless you signed a contract) of who will post, and who won't. Even if some creators reply to tell you, it's still a pain to track. The easiest thing to do is set up a campaign using an influencer monitoring tool in Modash with your target influencers & hashtags. Then, if/when any creators post about you, the tool will automatically save the post, collect the content, and report on reach/engagement. Magic!

13. Calvin Klein

Campaign type: Celebrity collaboration, user-generated content

Platform: Commercial and Instagram

Calvin Klein has been one of the pioneers of influencer marketing. For the #MyCalvins campaign in 2014, the brand collaborated with Justin Bieber. The pop star, ranked by Twitter as the most tweeted about musical artist of 2014 with 150+ million followers on Instagram, was a huge catch for the brand.

The campaign #MyCalvins was launched through a YouTube video; since then, it has garnered over 10 million views. The video description encouraged the audience to share their journey of self-expression by displaying their own fit with the hashtag #MyCalvins. Since its launch, the #MyCalvins campaign has had a host of celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Shawn Mendes, and A$AP Rocky.

Jerrod La Rue shared this sponsored post — a beautiful exploration of incorporating art in a brand’s product.

After the campaign, the brand also released a micro website where the best user-generated content is recognized and showcased.

Campaign statistics

In the year after the campaign, #MyCalvins increased the company's Facebook followers by 2.2 million followers, Instagram by 1.8 million, and Twitter by 1 million. With 920,000+ posts on Instagram with #MyCalvins, the brand continues to generate word-of-mouth through these authentic posts.

Key takeaway

✅Don't just rely on celebrity and influencer collaborations to make your campaign successful. Come up with creative ways to engage your audience so they can also participate in the campaign.  

14. Brawl Stars

Campaign Type: Influencer collaboration

Platform: YouTube

Supercell, a mobile games developer, doubled down on influencer marketing for the launch of their game Brawl Stars.

For the campaign, they collaborated with 10 YouTube mobile influencers and gamers. The goal of the campaign was to increase registrations before the game launch.

Brawl Stars posted one image on social media to increase curiosity without any explanation or caption. Suddenly, everyone started talking about it — prompting social posts, memes, conspiracy theory videos, online petitions, and a trending hashtag #DontKillBrawlStars.

 With a YouTube video with 4M+ views, it was announced that Brawl Stars is going global. The campaign involved hosting a series of pre-launch gameplay live streaming videos on YouTube. Instead of collaborating with popular gaming influencers with millions of subscribers, they focused on micro-influencers who were already playing Supercell's other games.

100+ content creators were invited to the official launch of the game. They amplified the event, earning thousands of shares and engagement for Brawl Stars.

Campaign statistics

The campaign helped drive 5 million pre-registration sign-ups in eight hours, growing the game's social channels exponentially — from 188% on Instagram to 194% on YouTube. Ultimately Brawl Stars became the number one iPhone app in thirty-two countries earning over $10m in its first week.

Key takeaway

✅ Instead of collaborating with only one or two influencers, partner with a variety of relevant influencers at the same time. It will help land your product in front of more people and get your audience to notice the hype around it. Before collaborating with an influencer, analyze their profile, followers' demographics, and engagement rate through Modash's influencer analytics platform.

15. Balvenie

Campaign type: Celebrity collaboration, product placement

Platform: YouTube

The Balvenie, a whiskey brand, collaborated with Questlove for the "Quest for Craft" YouTube series. The campaign's priority was to drive awareness for the Single Malt Scotch Whiskey as the most handcrafted whiskey. 

The campaign targets aspiring makers and creators who want to focus on personal and cultural development. With Questlove's creativity, the "Quest for Craft" digital series explores the human attributes of those on the never-ending journey of taking something from great to exceptional.  

The series is in its second season now and continues collaborating with people like Fran Lebowitz, Kenan Thomspon, and Patti Smith, among others. 

Campaign statistics 

Despite supply challenges, 2022 sales were +5% compared to last year. The series reached over 43M unique consumers, has amassed 27M+ views on YouTube, and added over 2.1K new subscribers to the channel, the latter speaking highly of the campaign's success in bringing new consumers into the brand.

Key takeaways

The Balvenie vision is to be the leading discerning luxury single malt. With this campaign, the company wanted to present itself as the ultimate craftsman in everything they do.

The digital series Quest for Craft highlights humans' need for new perspectives and really hits it home for the audience looking to explore the blend of creativity, passion, and perfection.

16. Care/of

Campaign type: affiliate marketing.

Platforms: Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

‍Care/of is a vitamins supplements company that sells personalized vitamins based on your needs (after you take a quiz). They’re present widely across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube among a variety of influencers — whether they’re mom influencers, lifestyle creators, or a cultural/internet commentary YouTuber like Tiffany Ferg.

The best part about Care/of’s influencer campaigns is it doesn’t restrict itself to health-conscious influencers. With the net wide, many #careofpartners are mothers, female content creators, and wellness creators. The individual code also makes influencer marketing ROI easy to track and the code giving a whopping 50% off is a generous offer that’ll help consumers give Care/of a try.

The creator videos have a lot of variety too — some talk about the product and its benefits directly, while others show how they embed Care/of supplements in their day. 

‍Campaign statistics: The hashtag #careofpartner has thousands of videos from influencers across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Many of these creator collabs garner a million views (one has over 24 million views and counting!).

‍Key takeaways: If your product doesn’t require industry authority, consider experimenting with various types of influencers (in terms of niche and size) to see which kind of creators get you the best ROI. And if your profit margins allow for it, consider giving a hefty discount via influencer discount codes to get more and more people to use them.

Mix-and-match to make your own

While each company’s influencer marketing practices are different, I hope these campaign examples have ignited some ideas on what you can incorporate into your own influencer marketing campaigns.

Any successful creator campaign needs a home — to find influencers, track outreach, and measure performance. Build yours in Modash — it’s an all-in-one influencer marketing tool that’ll help you discover influencers, analyze their profiles, reach out to them, and track their progress. Sign up for free today and see for yourself. The first 14 days are on us!