The Objective
Allow-listing holiday influencer content
MacKenzie-Childs is a home decor retailer and ceramics manufacturer, offering handmade ceramics and other hand-painted, thoughtfully designed home furnishings.
The 2022 holiday season was approaching when MacKenzie-Childs broached the idea of incorporating paid media into its influencer marketing campaign. The brand knew it wanted to blend strong, holiday-focused content with an allow-listing approach for the very first time.
They also needed to fulfill specific campaign goals. Organic and paid media were needed to support new customer acquisition; the team wanted to make sure organic content was driving website traffic. Paid media goals revolved around driving a low cost per acquisition (CPA) while maintaining a positive return on ad spend (ROAS).
The Solution
Using Later for expert support
Allow-listing, also known as priority listing or advertising access, is a process where brands obtain permission from creators to create and run paid ads on behalf of the creator. This method is usually run via Facebook Ads Manager.
Due to time constraints, the team at MacKenzie-Childs knew that partnering with an experienced influencer marketing platform that could provide turnkey campaign options would be best. Enter: Later. With a wealth of knowledge around allow-listing and paid media, campaign troubleshooting, setup, and management, our team of experts seemed like the perfect fit.
A test & learn approach
Because MacKenzie-Childs hadn’t experimented with an allow-listing strategy in the past, this campaign focused on a test-and-learn approach. The team hoped to understand if and how allow-listing via paid media was a viable tactic for future campaigns. Due to the busy and saturated nature of the holiday season, the team believed that this was the perfect time to test this new method while simultaneously targeting new customers for optimal results.
This influencer marketing program activated micro-influencers and macro-influencers, offering products along with cash payments, as well as involved a gifted-only campaign to promote holiday offerings.
Selecting the right audience
The campaign targeted a subset of adult women in the United States who shopped for comfortable, quality, artistic home decor more than 20 times per year. Ideally, they would be willing to invest in home decor and possess a stylized, colorful, maximalist style. With these constraints in mind, the customer persona also revolved around a moderate to high earner, with an annual income of $150K or more.
To motivate this target audience, MacKenzie-Childs instructed creators to focus on the artistry, individuality, and magic of its seasonal products — specifically on how influencers incorporated products in their homes while decorating and entertaining. To encourage new customer acquisition — a major part of the campaign goals — the brand also provided creators with 20% off promo codes to include in their content, alongside tagging the brand and having #sponsored and #MCHoliday hashtags.
Making magic with Later’s Services team
With Later’s Services team leading the charge, MacKenzie-Childs used its holiday 2022 campaign to test a new strategy and reach a highly sought-after audience, all while driving traffic to its branded website.
Powered by content creators, this content-driven campaign allowed MacKenzie-Childs to then repurpose quality influencer-generated content (IGC) on its brand-owned channels — including its website, email campaigns, organic brand-owned social channels, and a robust paid media campaign.
Not only did Later empower influencer partners to deliver high-quality, organized content at scale, but it also evaluated incoming content and allow-listed appropriate candidates based on performance and vertical expertise. MacKenzie-Childs valued this relationship due to Later’s full suite of services, especially when it came to maintaining strong creator partnerships, and the campaign operated with little oversight.
The Results
Over 11 million impressions generated
566.3k
Total Impressions
8.3m
Content Reach
20.6k
Total Engagements
528
Links Clicks
MacKenzie-Childs’ holiday 2022 campaign activated 36 total influencer partners who created 146 cumulative pieces of content, including 102 Instagram Stories, 25 Instagram in-feed Reels, 8 Instagram carousels, three TikTok videos, and two Facebook posts. This vast amount of creator content yielded 566.3K total impressions, 8.3M reach overall, 20.6K total engagements, and 528 link clicks.
MacKenzie-Childs was pleased to find that content that had been allow-listed for paid media performed stronger than both holiday brand ads and organic creator content that had been repurposed on brand-owned social media channels. Since the allow-listing via paid media approach was highly successful, the brand planned to incorporate it as a strategic, evergreen incorporation to their future campaigns.