The Objective
Celebrating the Holidays to Grow Brand Awareness & Engagement
American Greetings is a global leader in the Celebrations marketplace, creating products including greeting cards, gift wrap, gift bags, party goods, & more. They help their customers celebrate holidays, each other, and all of life’s special moments, in-person and online, guided by their company's purpose to make the world a more thoughtful and caring place every single day.
The brand partnered with Later Influence to find trusted influencers to promote their Celebrate The Holiday Season campaign, using the hashtag #CelebrateTheHolidaySeason. Their goals for the campaign were to drive brand awareness, generate repurposable content for branded channels, and ultimately, increase social proof and customer loyalty.
The Solution
Build & Scale an Influencer Marketing Program
Finding the right influencers & simplifying outreach
Over one year, Later Influence helped American Greetings run several influencer marketing campaigns to promote their brand and retail partners. The brand activated almost 400 influencers for the campaigns in their program.
The campaigns generated over 1.2k unique pieces of content that could be easily repurposed on American Greetings’ own branded social channels.
Using influencers across both micro and mid-tier levels allowed the brand to drive both strong engagement and impressions while maintaining cost efficiencies.
“It’s easy to download content from both current & past campaigns straight from the platform — this has been a game changer. We can easily filter through content, download it all, and it’s ready to go.”
Leah Hydzik
Social Media Marketing Manager at American Greetings
Getting creative with celebrations
To help kick off the Celebrate The Holiday Season campaign, the brand tapped the Later Influence services team to reach out to creators who are avid card & gift givers and have proven success engaging their audiences with their content.
The goal was to generate content that inspires shoppers prior to the peak holiday time frame by providing product and gifting inspiration using American Greetings products.
Authenticity is key
Creators were asked to use creative direction ideas as inspiration but to add their own unique creativity and flair to their posts, resulting in more authentic content that resonated with their followers.
One of the best-performing posts was from creator @honestly.lynn, who showed off a custom card pocket created with American Greetings wrapping paper.
The Results
Exceeding Industry Benchmarks
97
Pieces of Content
8.6M
Impressions
255K
Engagements
8.98%
Average Engagement
$0.53
Average CPM
$0.03
Average CPE
American Greetings’ Celebrate The Holiday Season campaign generated strong performance (with impressions and engagements) that exceeded industry benchmarks, driving 8M+ impressions in this campaign alone— exceeding their goal of 2M total impressions for the fiscal year.
Key results from the campaign include:
- 97 Pieces of Content
- 8.6m Impressions
- 255k Engagements
- 8.98% Average Engagement Rate
- $0.53 Average Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
- $0.03 Average Cost per Engagement (CPE)
Inspired by the success of the influencer program, American Greetings is now looking to launch an ambassador program with Later Influence. Stay tuned for more!
“Later Influence is a really easy, seamless, and cost-efficient way for us to get not only lots of content but good content. It allows us to find and amplify the voices of influencers who already use and love our product.”
Leah Hydzik
Social Media Marketing Manager at American Greetings