Mizzen+Main, a men’s apparel brand, and Wpromote a leading performance marketing agency, have been amazing partners for Lumanu as we all work together to push the envelope on influencer marketing as a true acquisition channel. Today, we’re happy to announce that our work has been prominently featured on an official Facebook Case Study!
In a Facebook-verified Test versus Control experiment over 2 months, Lumanu demonstrated that leveraging influencer dark posts and audiences (enabled at scale via Lumanu’s automated influencer whitelisting platform) generated amazing results versus traditional brand ads:
- 2.3x increase in purchases
- 73% decrease in cost-per-purchase
- 128% improvement in RoAS
Best of all: the above results were driven entirely through prospecting campaigns! Due to Lumanu’s native integrations with Facebook Ads Manager, Wpromote was able to easily exclude previous Mizzen+Main Add-to-Carts, customers, and website visitors to ensure all conversions were net new customers.
The official Facebook case study can be found here.
"The results from using influencer media on Facebook and partnering with Lumanu exceeded our expectations. Prior to the testing with Lumanu, the return on influencer campaigns had been difficult to measure and scale. With Lumanu, we are able to scale our influencer initiative and optimize our spend based on full-funnel metrics"
-Chris Phillips, CEO Mizzen+Main
We’ve taken the liberty to publish an expanded view of the results from the Facebook Case Study, as well as include our “Keys to Success” for readers who wish to recreate this experiment for themselves.
Read on for the good stuff!
Results delivered with influencer dark posts
Treating influencer marketing as a paid social media tactic generates greater return along the entire customer purchase journey. It’s no surprise either from the user’s standpoint: seeing a high frequency of diverse ads from a diverse set of users in your news feed just feels better, and now we have the data to prove it!
Note: This experiment had about equal ad spend through both the control group (Brand ads) and the test group (Influencer ads). Facebook required that each group had over six figures in ad spend. The influencer ads had ~3% LESS total ad spend compared to the brand ads control group.
Example Creatives
Keys to Success for Instagram and Facebook Dark Posts
Prior to Lumanu, Mizzen+Main had a robust influencer program for branding and social campaigns. However, that robust program fell short when it came to generating true performance marketing results. Lumanu and Wpromote saw an opportunity to leverage the influencer marketing efforts within the context of Mizzen+Main’s paid social media marketing strategy to combat ad fatigue, add more variety, and ultimately boost results. This was achieved by creating Instagram and Facebook dark posts and leveraging influencer and brand audiences for the targeted ads. How to setup and deliver results with instagram ads via dark posts.
For the e-commerce Facebook marketing experts out there, here’s our short checklist of “Keys to Success” to ensure your influencer program is generating true ad performance results:
On identifying and activating influencers:
- Work with a variety of influencers across all follower counts
- Leverage a gifting program to generate a cohort of ambassadors who are willing to post for you on an ongoing basis
- Ensure whitelisting usage rights are a part of all your influencer paid collaborations, gifting collaborations, as well as affiliate and ambassador relationships
- Along with the organic content that is getting posted by your influencers, ask for additional content across multiple formats -- feed posts, story posts, horizontal videos, etc . . . so you can use them to create several different ad variants to support a/b testing
- Don’t solely rely on a limited network of influencers via marketplaces (or else you will be paying a premium on every influencer)
- Focus on working with professional influencers who make great content, not just on influencers with large follower counts or high engagement rates
- If you want to work with an influencer agency, ask for examples of content that performed in Direct Response campaigns or for e-commerce brands. There are several influencer agencies that specialize in identifying and training influencers to make great DR content
- For best results and to minimize you ramp up time, aim to have at least 5 influencers and 5-10 initial creatives as you start your influencer whitelisting test
On media buying via influencer dark posts:
- Edit influencer creatives and copy to create ads that are designed for direct-response. For example: ensure your brand is mentioned in the first 5 words, make sure there’s a clear CTA or urgency, add text overlay, add subtle animation. The Lumanu Dark Posting Ebook dives into content strategies in detail.
- Stitch together multiple creatives from an influencer to generate slideshows, carousels, and video ads to diversify your content
- Stitch together multiple creatives from multiple influencers to create montages for even more social proof
- Leverage multiple influencer content and identities in one Facebook Ad Set to minimize audience saturation and increase creative optimizations by Facebook
- Create custom and lookalike audiences from influencer Business Instagram Profile engagements, Facebook Page engagements, and Video views. Leverage different audiences across all social media marketing campaigns
- Experiment with split testing to figure out ad creative elements that drive results (e.g. test various call-to-action buttons)
- Segment and combine influencer audiences from similar influencers together into one ad set to combat ad fatigue and increase the targeting pool for Facebook to lower CPM and CPA
Lumanu enabled Wpromote to create a profitable new prospecting channel for Mizzen+Main. By incorporating influencer dark posts (also known as unpublished posts as they do not show up as organic posts on the influencers page) Mizzen+Main to drastically increase sales to new customers while reducing cost to acquire these customers.
.png)
.webp)
