Case Study: How Dyson Used Pet Influencers to Grow Awareness for their Vacuums
In this case study, we go over how pet influencers have proven to be quite the force throughout social media.
Most of our influencer marketing case studies on this list highlight human influencers, but as any Instagram user is aware, influencers also come in a variety of forms, including animals! From what we’ve seen with our own clients, pet influencers can prove to be quite the force to be reckoned with.
Pet owners provide a wonderful target market for companies like Dyson. Dyson has been putting in extra effort to broaden its reach in the pet industry since adding products to its inventory that are expressly designed to address pet cleanup.
To raise brand recognition, Dyson launched an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram. While everyone was aware of Dyson’s prowess as a household vacuum cleaner and hair straightener brand, pet owners were surprisingly unaware that Dyson could provide them a viable solution too.
The Approach
On Instagram, Dyson collaborated with five pet influencers, mostly focusing on dog owners. Pet owners were given creative freedom over the posts themselves and a fairly loose creative brief from the brand to influencers. Simply said, the articles had to be funny and demonstrate how pet owners cleaned up after their furry friends.
The ad was successful because Dyson was willing to offer influencers creative control.
Additionally, it chose influencers based on their audience rather than how many followers they had. Despite having the smallest following of any influencer in the campaign—just 2,500 people—one Dyson had the highest engagement rate.
The Outcomes
Giving influencers such a large amount of power was quite bold of Dyson, but it paid off in spades. In terms of influencer marketing results, Dyson observed 1 million views, 115,000 likes, and a 10% engagement rate across their campaign.
How You Can Replicate Their Strategy
The few keys here differ from some of the other campaigns we’ve highlighted in our case studies.
Instead of using a myriad of micro-influencers, Dyson opted to use well known pet accounts, some charging several thousands of dollars per post. Since they aimed to run an awareness campaign rather than sales, reaching a large audience base was key.
Unlike some of the other campaigns we’ve covered, Dyson gave a huge amount of creative freedom to their influencers. Normally, we recommend guiding influencers in terms of the type of content they create to improve their chances of going viral, since you can see their best performing posts on any of our influencer data reports. In Dyson’s case, however, they were using large influencers who were already very experienced. As a result, their main requirement was just to use their branded hashtag, while leaving the rest up to them. Our new CRM feature allows you to describe your campaign in as much detail as you’d like, while listing all requirements and compensation terms transparently.
If your goal is to raise awareness, consider copying Dyson’s model and using a handful of large influencers who have the experience and range to appeal to a broad audience while dominating your target’s Instagram page. Bonus points if you find overlapping audiences among your influencers to treat as retargeting!
