Interstate Batteries
Interstate Batteries is a leading automotive-aftermarket company headquartered in Dallas, Texas supplying batteries to over 150,000 dealers across the US. It has a vast 200+ distributor network and over 150 Interstate All Battery Center retail locations. When their marketing team was faced with the challenge of lower brand awareness among younger audiences, Kelly Cunningham, Brand Content and Social Media Manager, had a unique opportunity to help the brand evaluate its marketing strategy and re-engage with younger audiences.
Kelly decided to explore new avenues to reach this demographic and landed on influencer marketing through Aspire’s Agency Services team. Because this was a marketing tactic the company had never tried before, Kelly had to get buy-in from the leadership team first. After proving the promise of influencer marketing and Aspire, Kelly teamed up with Aspire’s Agency Services team to experiment with this new marketing channel.
Prior to Aspire, the team was running traditional paid ads campaigns on social media that didn’t involve influencers. When Kelly analyzed these past programs, while these campaigns performed well overall, the creative didn’t resonate as strongly with a younger demographic.
Kelly chose to work with Aspire’s Agency Services team because of their expertise in boosting brand awareness and out of the box marketing strategies. This proved highly beneficial for Kelly, allowing her to focus on approving talent, creating creative briefs, reviewing concepts, and approving content, while leaving the contracting, logistics, and creative communication to the agency service team. This approach saved time and enabled Kelly to focus on strategic planning rather than the day-to-day execution of the campaign.
Finding the right creators for the battery industry
Unlike beauty or health, finding influencers that made sense for Interstate Batteries took some creativity. The key to the team’s success was rooted in strong partnerships with the influencers in their campaign. The Agency Services team sourced, contracted, and briefed creators from vastly different categories, from van lifers to recreational fishermen. The team gave influencers the flexibility to create content that played to their strengths, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. This approach allowed for a high level of customization and ultimately led to a high-performance campaign.
Boosting IGC for increased ad performance
After compiling all the campaign content, the team repurposed it as ads through Aspire using the Ads Manager integration. The team obtained permission to repurpose and boost the content through Branded Content Ads, and measure the ad's performance with ease. This enabled them to identify the most effective platform and creators, adjust their campaigns accordingly, and improve engagement. Through this process, they discovered that DIY creators and family vloggers on TikTok were the most successful and the team partnered with more creators in those niches in future iterations.
Interstate Batteries’ campaigns were highly successful, exceeding expectations in terms of impressions, clicks, engagement rate, and overall engagement. The campaign generated 5.3 million organic impressions with a 5.6% engagement rate and 300,000 engagements across all content. The team utilized BCA and paid TikTok ads, with the latter surpassing industry benchmarks by 182% in engagement rate.
All this engagement with branded content translated to increased traffic to the Interstate Batteries website. Using Aspire’s sales tracking links, the team saw that over 30K people used influencer links to find an Interstate Batteries retailer near them.
By proving the success of influencer marketing to her leadership team, Kelly was able to secure a higher budget for future campaigns to scale their influencer marketing program and increase the volume of assets produced.
Learn more about partnering with Aspire’s Agency Services Team here.
