Do you need a few social media marketing examples to inspire your next big campaign?
A proper social media campaign has a defined goal and strategic content designed to help your brand reach that goal.
That’s why in this post, we’ve rounded up a handful of social media marketing examples that cover different campaign types.
Some of these examples are from big-name brands while others are from prolific bloggers.
Nevertheless, they’ll help you come up with a few ideas for your next campaign.
Let’s get into it.
The best social media marketing examples
Social media marketing examples featured on this list:
- User-generated content – Photos, videos and text-based posts created by your followers that feature your products or mention your brand.
- Advocacy – Influencers you sponsor in an elaborate social media campaign that increases brand awareness and dramatically improves sales.
- Product collaboration – A collaboration between your company and another (or an influencer) that produces a product featuring essences of both brands.
- Conversions – A campaign designed to increase conversions in the form of clicks, sign-ups, sales, etc.
- Brand awareness – A simple social media marketing campaign that increases brand awareness.
1. Apple: Encouraging user-generated content
- Influencer class: Brand (Tech)
- Campaign type: User-Generated Content
- Campaign: Encouraging users to post photos taken with an iPhone on Instagram and using the hashtag #shotoniphone.
- Total engagements from campaign: 27.4 million Posts
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram
The Shot On iPhone campaign is one of the most successful (and longest running) social media marketing campaigns in existence.
The hashtag it’s associated with, #shotinphone, has generated over 27.4 million posts on Instagram alone since Apple launched the campaign in 2014.
The campaign is simple: social media users are asked to take photos with their iPhone and add them to social media posts using the hashtag #shotoniphone.
These types of posts are called “user-generated content” in the marketing industry. The term describes branded content that’s created by users but benefits the brands they’re associated with.
Apple has also used the Shot On iPhone campaign to run contests and launch bigger marketing campaigns, such as the marketing campaign they launched with Selena Gomez by shooting her music video for “Lose You to Love Me” on an iPhone.
Video ads released for the song featured the tagline “Shot On iPhone.”
Key takeaways
Apple is one of the most profitable tech companies around the world, so it only makes sense for a campaign of theirs to generate millions and millions of posts and become one of the best social media marketing examples out there.
Even so, you can replicate this social media marketing campaign and still see decent results from your own target audience.
Ask your followers to share some aspect of your business in one way or another.
For example, food blogger Pinch of Yum asks their readers to share images of the recipes they cook by using the hashtag #pinchofyum on Instagram.
If you really want to boost your engagements from this type of campaign, consider using a tool like SweepWidget.
It allows you to run social media contests that ensure contestants submit an Instagram photo as an entry, among other entry methods.
You can also schedule your own posts with Sendible, a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create a library of hashtag groups to quickly add hashtags to new posts.
You can use this feature to create a group filled with branded hashtags.
The biggest takeaways from this campaign are the ways in which it helps your brand.
For one, it ensures your brand has a continuous presence across multiple social media marketing platforms without you having to post anything. Your followers will do it for you!
Secondly, it gives you more content to work with. You can easily repost your followers’ posts to your own social media accounts.
Just be sure to tag them so they receive engagements as well.
2. Function of Beauty: Advocacy from YouTubers
- Influencer class: Brand (Beauty)
- Campaign type: Advocacy
- Campaign: Giving multiple YouTubers and influencers free products, affiliate links and special promo codes in exchange for appearing in their content.
- Total engagements from campaign: Unknown but in the hundreds of thousands of video views and post likes.
- Primary platform for campaign: YouTube
Function of Beauty is a beauty product with a twist.
When they first launched their line of shampoos and conditioners, they distinguished themselves from similar brands by offering personalized hair care formulas.
All you had to do was take a simple quiz that asked a few questions about your hair type, favorite color and scent preferences, and the brand would craft (and still does craft) personalized bottles of shampoo and conditioner suited to your hair type.
This is what attracted many influencers, namely YouTubers, to the brand when Function of Beauty approached them to collaborate in 2019 and beyond.
Soon, interest in the brand started to skyrocket.
Function of Beauty offered to collaborate and send free products to the influencers who would go on to push the brand’s name to the forefront of the industry.
Some influencers were given plain affiliate links while others received their own branded discount codes and affiliate links to offer their audiences.
Most influencers reviewed the brand’s products by using them in place of their usual hair care products.
Others used the products for special content types, such as trying out new hair care routines. Some would even show themselves taking the hair care quiz in their respective videos.
Key takeaways
Function of Beauty’s campaign was effective for two reasons.
While they offered the same product as their competitors, they offered it in a different way.
Instead of just telling their subscribers to “click this link” and “use my promo code at checkout,” YouTubers invited their audiences to take the brand’s hair care quiz alongside them to generate their own formulas.
This made the buying process incredibly interactive. The personalization aspect of the product was just the cherry on the top.
You can create quizzes of your own with a tool like Interact.
This tool has the same question-and-answer functionalities you’re used to seeing in quizzes, but it has a number of additional features that make it a powerful tool for marketers.
With email opt-in fields and integrations with email marketing tools, including segmentation options, you can use this tool at the capture stage of a larger lead generation campaign.
You can even require leads to subscribe in order to see their results.
The second reason this campaign is one of the best social media marketing examples is because Function of Beauty didn’t rely on their own following to get the word out about their brand.
They utilized the audiences of numerous YouTubers instead, YouTubers who introduced the brand’s name to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The next time you want to launch a social media campaign for your product, choose a specific social media platform to target, find an influencer(s) on that platform who’s in your niche and has a sizeable following (it just needs to be larger than yours), and consider leveraging the power of that following instead of relying on yours alone.
3. Lauren Conrad: Product collaboration
- Influencer class: Lifestyle Instagram Blogger
- Campaign type: Product Collaboration
- Campaign: Lauren’s company The Little Market collaborated with Saje Natural Wellness to offer a limited-edition aromatherapy diffuser.
- Total engagements from campaign: 949,000+ Video Views
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram (934,571 video views came from Lauren’s account alone)
Lauren Conrad is a lifestyle blogger on Instagram who got her start in the influencer industry when she appeared on the 2000’s MTV reality shows Laguna Beach and The Hills.
Today, Lauren owns a homeware shop called The Little Market, which sells artisan-made home goods and gifts.
In mid 2021, The Little Market teamed up with Saje Natural Wellness to produce a limited-edition aromatherapy diffuser designed by Lauren and her co-founder Hannah Skvarla.
The campaign for the product launched as a promotional video posted to all four parties’ Instagram accounts on June 4, 2021.
It had varying results, which were dependent on each party’s follower account.
Lauren had millions of followers at the time, so her post received over 900,000 views and 13,000 likes while everyone else’s received a few thousand views and a few hundred likes each.
Key takeaways
This is one of the best social media marketing examples because it demonstrates a couple crucial realities many marketers forget about when it comes to social media marketing.
The first is the way in which social media users would rather interact with individuals on social media than brands.
This is why it’s easy for Lauren and many other lifestyle Instagram bloggers to grow their followings and receive thousands upon thousands of likes per post