The Shelf

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Nite Ize designs and manufactures products to protect your gear, light your way, and creatively solve your everyday problems. Our product line ranges from outdoor gear, mobile accessories, hardware items, pet products, and more. Our products are sold in thousands of retail stores worldwide, including Home Depot, WalMart, REI, Dick's Sporting Goods, Target, Petsmart, and many more. I am the Marketing Manager at Nite Ize.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire The Shelf?

We have run several social influencer campaigns with The Shelf from 2019 and ongoing.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

When we started looking at influencer agencies, The Shelf stood out because of their outstanding customer service and special attention given to their accounts.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

For each campaign we run, we start with a concept for the campaign and have a kickoff call. We identify the target audience, and what products we will be sending the influencers. Then The Shelf team puts together some creative ideas for the project. Then, we review the creative and tell them which option we would like to run with. Then they start looking for influencers to fit the campaign, and we are able to vet them and approve/deny them through The Shelf's dashboard. Then I send the approved influencers, and they upload their content to the dashboard for our approval. Once approved, the posts go live. After the campaign has run, all of the deliverables are added to the dashboard for us to download.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We work with the Brand Partnership Manager, and a few account managers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

While it's hard to correlate influencer marketing directly to sales (especially for a company that does most sales through retail stores), we definitely love getting photo and video assets back from the creators, and are able to use those in our own marketing efforts.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow has been great, and communication with The Shelf team is always effective.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their customer service is great, and the account managers always strive to get the best content for our brand. They are very receptive to feedback, and they do their best to ensure we get what we need.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The gathering of final assets always seems to be a challenge for us.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the internal digital marketing manager for a portfolio of CPG brands within the OTC health and beauty category. Our products are available at most major retailers across the US and online. Only one of our brands has a DTC eComm website.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire The Shelf - Influencer Marketing Agency?

We've tried multiple ways of managing influencer campaigns. We found that finding, recruiting and managing influencer campaigns was a time-intensive process both for us and for our general social agency.

We were looking for an agency that was fluent in the influencer space with experience running influencer campaigns for CPG brands. Many agencies we looked at were focused on DTC eComm, which is great but not possible for most of our brands. We wanted an agency that was comfortable making strategic recommendations across the brands and across influencer tiers (nano, micro, macro, etc.).

We also wanted an agency that was familiar with best practices for boosting influencer content and acquiring rights to repurpose content. And, perhaps our biggest challenge, we needed an agency that could keep all of this organized to ensure all content was sent to us and routed through our internal approval process (3+ approvers) before going live.

SOLUTION

How did you select The Shelf - Influencer Marketing Agency and what were the deciding factors?

Because we had worked with influencers in several different ways (other external agencies, an internal agency, a dedicated headcount), we had a strong sense of what we needed and what was not going to work.

We searched online and looked at a couple agencies other team members had worked with previously. We ultimately decided to work with The Shelf for a few reasons: they're strategic, creative, organized and data-focused. The proposals they presented were unique to each of our brands and showed that they had listened to our briefing.

Each proposal was an awesome combination of that-makes-sense-for-us and I-would-watch-that-content. Their dashboard makes it easy to manage every step of our campaign, from influencer selection to reporting. Data on each post is pulled into the dashboard for easy access.

Whitelisting ads and content rights are standard in all of our campaigns, ensuring we get as much as possible out of our influencer campaigns.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We held an initial briefing/exploratory call to intro them to the brands, target audiences, previous and ongoing campaigns. After this, The Shelf's strategy team got to work. They then presented their proposals, including target personas, content themes and a guaranteed ROI. We refined each campaign down to the core personas and themes we wanted to pursue.

When our first list of influencers was available, we were given access to the The Shelf's dashboard. We made our selections within the dashboard (and added notes within the dashboard as applicable) and the team contracted the influencers. Once contracts were signed, the influencers' addresses were added to the dashboard and our internal team shipped out product and added the tracking numbers to the dashboard.

Once the content had been created, it was added to the dashboard for review. We were able to pull it from the dashboard and route through our internal process. The notes section of the dashboard and easy "approved"/"not approved" status made organization super easy. After content was live, we were able to see performance within the dashboard and track the status of the campaign, even outside of our weekly status calls.

As a special request for our internal reporting, The Shelf also provided monthly updates on the paid/whitelisting side of our campaign.

How many resources from the The Shelf - Influencer Marketing Agency team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We are running multiple campaigns simultaneously, so we worked with at least 6 members of The Shelf's team. Our partnership manager, 3 account managers, an account supervisor, and their director of digital strategy.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

While we haven't wrapped our campaigns yet, these have been the most well-run influencer campaigns we've had. The Shelf's team made it easy to scale our influencer campaigns from half a dozen influencers a year to almost 100-- and that include multiple mega influencers.

We also garnered more impressions and better engagement through the whitelisting side of the campaigns, with whitelisting ads having 7x engagement rate of ads from our brand pages.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

This is one of The Shelf's strengths. The dashboard makes it easy to track the status of our campaign. We also met with the team weekly to discuss any open items, and we have a Slack channel to stay on top of the latest.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We are impressed by the ease of collaboration and unique campaign strategies. The dashboard makes it easy to work together, which makes it easy to run better campaigns that are tailored to each brand's needs.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The Shelf met or exceeded all of our expectations. That said, I'm an okay-what's-next type of person. I think there may be opportunities to improve our whitelisting strategy and garner more data on how these ads impact consumers' perception of our brands.

I also think that there may be opportunities to share data from our brand ads to improve our whitelisting ads and vice-versa.