How Influencer Marketing Helped Increase Applications To The British Army By 71%

Here at Influencer, we always strive to be the best of the best. To do so, we create the most awesome, innovative and finger-stopping campaigns out there. One campaign we think stands out above the rest is our collaboration with Karmarama and Capita for the British Army, ‘Your Army Needs You’.

The objective of this campaign was simple: to recruit more young people into the British Army. To succeed in achieving this objective, we had to challenge society’s preconceptions of young people today, showing that where society saw stereotypes, the Army sees potential and puts it to good use by promoting work that matters. To truly understand the perspective of Gen Z and millennial audiences and tackle youth preconceptions, we knew we had to open up the dialogue between the Army and the stereotyped young of today. As Instagram is a platform that is hugely used by the Army’s target demographic, today's youth, we believed collaborating with social media creators, whose followings aligned with the brand’s message, would be the perfect way to deliver the campaign.

To do so accordingly, we used a small group of highly creative creators to produce 16 pieces of incredible content that delivered impactful messages and challenged the stereotype of millennials, in order to persuade a creatively-minded audience that a career in the British Army was a viable option. All 16 creators used photography, art or moving images across both Instagram grid posts and Stories, to reflect their personal response to one of the stereotyped statements targeted at their generation. As a result, the content created was truly original and spoke to the brand’s target audience.

The integrated campaign drove record-breaking results; in the first week alone, there were 497 pieces of media coverage worldwide with a reach of 4.8 billion in earned media. Not only this, by the end of January 2019, within only a month of launching the campaign, applications were up 71% vs. January 2018. In February 2020 with just 7 weeks left of the recruiting year, 99% of roles had been filled. As a result of these fantastic statistics, ‘Your Army Needs You’ was recognised as The Best Brand/Influencer Collaboration Award at DigiDay’s Marketing and Advertising Awards 2019.

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