What’s your project about?

Most of brand recommendations happen offline, thus managers seek ways to become part of these sales-driving face-to-face conversations. One tool to achieve that are seeded marketing campaigns (SMCs) with offline-focused nano-influencers. Our research looks into how to set up seeded marketing campaigns effectively and efficiently.

What’s the research problem?

The key challenge with seeded marketing campaigns is that nano-influencers, not managers, control communication content and delivery. Managers have to rely on their indirect influence through the SMC setup (e.g., campaign size, seed selection, or provided behavioral stimuli) to activate nano-influencers, unlike online-focused campaigns with macro-influencers and high direct managerial control.

Which solution does your paper bring to the problem?

By leveraging a unique dataset of 148 seeded marketing campaigns of various sizes and setups, comprising the activity of nearly 700,000 nano-influencers advocating a diverse range of brands offline, we are able to provide managers with needed reliable, campaign-level SMC setup performance estimates.

How did you study this?

Our cross-campaign data enables a comparison of various SMC setups to find out which of managers' available setup decisions aid in planning effective (high campaign-induced seed activity levels and sales) and efficient (high campaign ROI) seeded marketing campaigns.

What did you find?

Our findings suggest that managers indeed can optimize SMC performance through their setup decisions. Following our model recommendations, managers can improve their current SMC performance outcomes by +97% in seed activity, +162% in sales, and +100% in ROI.

What can practitioners learn from these results?

Marketers can directly apply our comprehensive set of SMC setup estimates for goal-specific and cost-conscious campaign planning, while knowing about potential trade-off effects different setup decisions may pose for all relevant campaign outcomes.