How Shutterfly Achieved their Highest Performing Content Yet Through Ambassadors

Basics:

Shutterfly is a leader in personalized products and services that help their customers make the most of life’s memorable moments. Through a wide array of products, Shutterfly helps people around the world celebrate the many ways to stay connected to those who matter most. In partnership with Fohr, Shutterfly worked with content creators to inspire and spark ideas to create a gift using their services, either as a treat for themselves or for a loved one. 

When Shutterfly first approached Fohr in March of 2021, they had little history of utilizing influencer marketing. They came to the Fohr team with a few questions needing answers. What types of creators make the most sense for the Shutterfly brand? What types of products were their customers gravitating towards? What types of content work the best, and on which platform?  

Starting off the partnership, the Fohr team had an underlying question that thread through each campaign: What’s going on in people’s heads and hearts right now, and how can we weave Shutterfly into that? The main goal was to create content that’s inspiring and engaging while telling a story of how these things come to life, and why.

The biggest challenge? Knowing that life moves way too fast. People capture thousands of memories and images but seldom reach the finish line to make these moments last with a personalized keepsake or thoughtful gift. Enter Shutterfly, a brand that makes life’s best moments last forever. 

Challenges: 

Shutterfly’s biggest challenge was bringing their products to life through personal narratives. That’s where key partnerships came into play. Fohr facilitated partnerships with a small number of impactful creators — who already demonstrated real love for life’s special moments. Each influencer was tasked with crafting a personalized product reflecting a key life moment dear to them. Shutterfly also wanted to tap into a newer, younger customer base. They approached Fohr wanting to introduce Shutterfly to a new audience who had not previously considered personalized gifts before — and present them with a wide collection of Shutterfly products perfect for gifting occasions. 

Tasked, the Fohr team rallied around a central question: how could Shutterfly inspire customers to keep your brand top of mind through the whirlwind of life’s biggest moments? To start, you can show them the creative possibilities and use emotion as your driving force. 

Fohr aimed to find influencers that were going through certain life shifts organically — redecorating their home, wedding planning, celebrating Pride, graduation ceremonies, anniversaries, and more — so their content and finished products were creative, personal, engaging, and real. Emotion would be the driving force in each of the campaigns.

Results: 

The Fohr team’s collaborative campaigns brought to life real stories from real people. The team leaned into relatable truths and authentic storytelling, all with Shutterfly products acting as the vehicle for the influencers’ self-expression.

Using Fohr’s proprietary discovery tools, they found creators to help entertain, inspire and educate audiences on Shutterfly’s continued brand evolution: they made small moments monumental. The Fohr team also tested a variety of different campaign types across platforms to determine key audiences through Instagram in-feed posts, Stories, Reels, IGTV, as well as TikTok videos. 

One standout post by photographer Joe Greer took the audience from ideation to the final product. Joe’s post about creating a photo book for his partner reached 136,000 views with over 100% viewership rate, 11,000 likes, and had 8.1% effectiveness. Shutterfly reposted Greer’s content on their own feed, and it quickly became the brand’s best-performing post.

To help Shutterfly promote their variety of prints and wall art products, the Fohr team recruited influencers to showcase how they personalized their space with custom WonderWalls, reinvigorating love for their home. This campaign achieved 5.5M impressions and 4,473 link clicks.

The team found influencers that could weave stories from life milestones, such as wedding planning. One couple, Uly & Ernesto, shared their wedding planning on TikTok promoting Shutterfly’s products, achieving 121,000 views, 21,800 likes, 244 comments, 266 shares, and overall 18% effectiveness.

To inspire graduation gifts, the Fohr team identified a small group of Gen Z partners that were graduating or had friends graduating, highlighting why a personalized photo book is a perfect gift to commemorate high school or college memories. This campaign garnered 6.5M impressions and had an average of 8.5% engagement on TikTok.

To celebrate Pride Month, the Fohr team partnered with 15 LGBTQ+ creators to illustrate Pride and utilize a suite of Shutterfly products as the vehicle of their story; from tote bags and photobooks to gallery walls and puzzles, all to celebrate their love for themselves and their partners. This campaign reached 3.9M impressions and 20.78% average in-feed viewership.

In the short span of just 9 months, the campaigns reached 15.7M total impressions, 2.95M total views, average Instagram in-feed views of 19.41%, and 3,998 total link clicks. As an extension of our partnership with Shutterfly, Grace Murray, Vice President or Strategy at Fohr, was invited to speak at the 2021 Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Conference with Josh Carter, Director of PR, Social Media and Influencer Partnerships at Shutterfly. The presentation focused on ambassador marketing and humanizing product stories. Shutterfly continues to partner with Fohr for strategic insight and optimization tactics for its influencer marketing campaigns.