Influencer Marketing Strategy Plan: Blueland

Planning the strategy and campaign on influencer marketing for Blueland, a startup company offering a sustainable choice for cleaning and personal care products.

1. Background Information

Company Name: Blueland

Industry: Retail (cleaning and personal care products)

Product Name: Laundry Essentials Kit

2. Why Blueland is considering an Influencer Marketing Campaign

Blueland is having an influencer marketing campaign / program mainly due to two reasons: being a start-up and selling sustainable products. Blueland was founded in 2019, its name could still be new to the market. Therefore, it needs to gain brand awareness, and influencer marketing is one of the ways to achieve that. Blueland provides products such as laundry detergents, dish soap, and hand soap that are sustainable. The products are made of safer ingredients, and designed as a reusable, refillable system. However, the majority of consumers don't put sustainability as priority when they purchase laundry detergents, or they have no idea where they could get eco-friendly detergents. Another key reason to lose people’s interest is that Blueland’s detergent is around twice the price of usual detergent. Blueland could use influencer’s sharing to raise the awareness of sustainability and reach to people’s daily life, and persuade people how spending more is beneficial to them. Blueland has already had an affiliate program encouraging editors, content creators, and bloggers to partner with the brand and share Blueland’s products; it shows Blueland is looking forward to growing with the help of influencer marketing campaigns or programs.

3. Objectives for the Influencer Marketing Strategy

• Overall Strategic Objectives

Gaining brand awareness: Having more people knowing the importance of sustainability and how Blueland has been working on the issue. Consumers will be educated with the knowledge of sustainable laundry detergents through blogs, posts and videos, and consider purchasing from Blueland.

Increasing sales: After seeing an influencer’s content, consumers click though the affiliate link to Blueland’s product page, browse and use the special promo code of the influencer at the checkout.

Encouraging advocacy: Even though not every customer is an influencer, their share could have influence to their followers, too. Blueland could build a community through campaigns on social media, making more and more customers feel good to be part of it, and be willing to share Blueland products with people. For example, a unique hashtag could start from Blueland’s influencers’ posts, and be spread by the followers who have purchased Blueland’s products and decide to share with others.

• Measurement KPIs

Engagement rate: The posts of Blueland’s influencers should reach a certain engagement rate. Ideally, macro influencers’ posts should have an engagement rate of at least 2%, micro would be more than 3%, and nano would be above 5%.

Follower growth: The number of followers of Blueland’s instagram account increases by at least 1% in 2 months; the followers of Blueland’s TikTok account increase by 8% in 2 months.

Number of hashtag posts and views: Create a hashtag for influencers to use in their posts, find ways to encourage social media users to use the hashtag and post about Blueland. The goal will be to reach 10,000 posts of the hashtag on instagram, and reach 1M views for the hashtag’s posts on TikTok in 2 months.

Sales generated: Tracked through affiliate links and promo code, and expect to have 4-5% of conversion rate through influencer’s posts and links.

4. Influencer Strategy

• Influencer Criteria for the Strategy

The ideal influencers should be either willing to share their daily life in their places or care about the environment to be convincing, because they will be talking about Blueland and laundry products. The age could range between 20 to 45, all genders are suitable, and they should be located in the US because it is currently the main market for Blueland. They usually hang out on instagram, TikTok, or both. They publish photos with text underneath and short videos, and it will be a plus if their posts meet the aesthetics of Blueland. They could be college students talking about their lifestyle, fashion, and daily routine; or people who are passionate about protecting nature and are living a sustainable life; they might also be moms or dads who share their family life on social media and would choose the best products for their children.

• How Many of What Type of Influencers to Employ

Planning to employ around 20 influencers, half of them will be external influencers and the other half will be customers. For the platform, they have to be active on Instagram or TikTok. Their main content should be about sustainable life, home, family, or fashion. Even if the influencers did not focus on sustainability, it would be fine, since the brand would like to gain attention from the audience who have not learned much about the topic. There will be more micro influencers than nano and macro influencers, and mega influencers are not the candidates for the plan.

• How to Find the Influencers

First, the platforms to use for finding influencers are Instagram and TikTok. The next step is to search for keywords or hashtags in related topics, including sustainability, home, lifestyle, family, and fashion. The hashtags to search for sustainability are: sustainable living, green lifestyle, sustainability, low waste, and plastic free. Hashtags for home and lifestyle are: home, home decor, cleaning, day in the life, mini vlog, life vlog, selfcare routine, and daily routine. Hashtags for family are: family, familytime, familylife, momlife and dadlife. Hashtags for fashion could be: clothing care, fashion style, laundry tips, minimalist, sustainable fashion, and slow fashion.

The location will be the first thing to filter the search result, make sure to pick the influencers based in the US. Then looking into the influencer’s content, it’s suitable for Blueland when their characteristics and tone are optimistic, cheerful, or peaceful; they should also be good at storytelling or explaining the features of a product. Finally, their photos and videos should have good quality and have clean, organized and comfortable aesthetics, to match the image of Blueland’s website and social media.

• Sample Influencers (5)

@motek_ (269.5K followers on TikTok)

Motek shares her day to day life, work from home vlog, and her routine on cleaning, organizing her place and personal care, which create a lot of scenarios to place and use Blueland products. She also films her life with fun and neat characteristics.

@arabella.stokes (89.5K followers on Instagram)

Arabella posts about cozy lifestyle and recommends daily life products, her strength is having modern, simple and comfortable aesthetics for every post.

@emmajanegeisler (13.4K followers on TikTok)

Emma Jane is an influencer who loves to go to nature and take care of the environment. She also posts about her hiking outfits and they require good care, therefore she is a great candidate to talk about sustainable laundry products.

@itskarenjkoch (7841 followers on Instagram)

Karen Koch is a mom who shares her lifestyle and motherhood with three kids. Her posts have a warm and happy feeling, she takes good care of her own aesthetics for the photos, and her captions are detailed and sincere.

@helloitsmaurissa (3170 followers on Instagram)

Maurissa posts about her family life with her husband and kids. Her posts are also good-looking visuals often with natural elements or background. The image of loving to take her family to nature seems like a good fit for Blueland.

5. Influencer Engagement

• What Type of Campaign to Engage Influencers For

There will be one campaign with two phases, and lasts 2 months. The first one is to raise brand awareness and have the audience learn more about blueland’s products. The second one will encourage social media users to join the Blueland community and become advocates. During the two phases, affiliate links and promo codes will also be provided to increase sales.

Phase 1 will be hosting a giveaway of Blueland products. The influencers will have a post introducing Blueland and its main products, and ask their audience to like, comment on what Blueland products they want to try the most, and follow both the influencer and Blueland’s accounts. The influencers will then randomly pick 5 followers from the comments and Blueland will send the products to the followers.

Phase 2 will be good visuals with a hashtag. The influencers will share a post based on their main topics, take special care on the aesthetics, and make sure to hashtag #carewithblueland in the caption. Influencers on sustainable life, lifestyle and home could place their Bluland products with their home decor or good-looking spaces. Family influencers could take photos of their children or children’s things with Blueland products. Fashion influencers can get more creative, styling themselves while showing Blueland products with them. Besides the hashtag, the caption should also encourage their audience to share their Blueland life using visuals with the hashtag. Blueland will repost influencers’ content as well as the UGCs in its account.

• Sample Email Pitch to Influencers

Hello Motek,

My name is Bella Liu and I work for Blueland, which is a brand offering a more sustainable choice on cleaning and self care products. I’ve been following your lifestyle content on TikTok for a while and I love it! On behalf of Blueland’s marketing team, I would like to share an opportunity of joining our new influencer marketing campaign, which will be happening in December, and it will be about holding one giveaway and a hashtag post. This will be a paid collaboration and you will be offered free products from Blueland. Based on your fun home-related content and organized characteristics, I think you will be ideal to share about Blueland. If you’re interested, just reply to this email and I look forward to discussing the next step with you!

Sincerely,

Bella Liu

Blueland

6. Projected Outcomes

• Estimated Results in Terms of Sales / Expenses / Other Outcomes

Number of posts: With 20 influencers each creating 2 posts, 40 posts will be generated.

Reach: Assuming the 20 influencers have around 3.5M followers combined for posting twice, and have the average reach rate of 30%, it is estimated that the campaign will reach more than 1,050,000 people.

Following: Assuming the average engagement of the posts reaches 4% to have about 42,000 people engaging, and if 50% of the engaging people follow Blueland’s accounts(mostly from the giveaway posts), Blueland could gain a total of 21,000+ followers in 2 months.

Sales: Suppose all 42,000 people who engaged also visit Blueland’s office, and the conversion rate reaches 4%, meaning receiving 1,680 orders. Assuming the average price of each order is $45, then the 1,680 orders will generate $75,600 of sales for this 2-month campaign.

Expenses: Assuming the cost per 10,000 followers is $100, a total of 3.5M followers from 20 influencers’ 40 posts will cost $35,000. The expenses also include product giveaways for influencers and the followers, and other possible costs.

• What are the Biggest Risks That Could Impact Your Strategy - what could go wrong?

The biggest risks include the uncertainty of influencers’ images and conversion rate. First, if the influencer happened to have a public history of seriously wasting resources, damaging the environment, or overconsumption, the campaign might not be trusted by the audience because the image of the influencer and the brand is contradictory. Second, in order to reach more audiences, the cost of the campaign will be high. It is crucial for the campaign to reach a certain conversion rate to create satisfactory sales and profit; if not, the campaign might not be profitable or generate too little profit. Therefore much effort should be put into raising the conversion rate.