Published by Indira McVilly
Published Date 08.08.2023 
When Crocs Europe asked Hey Honey to grow their social media presence, they had one objective: Growing their community on Instagram. But, it wasn’t that simple. Sure, Crocs wanted to grow their follower count—which brand doesn’t—but more importantly, they wanted to tap into newer audiences that would engage with the brand on social organically.
We gave ourselves an ambitious goal—30,000 followers. In a month(!!!). Normally, objectives like these within a short timeframe are virtually impossible to achieve without big global campaigns to support, but we knew the Crocs Europe audience well because we’d built it up over the last few years of working with them. We knew what content they liked, how they interacted with our comments, and what they shared with their friends. We also knew there were A LOT of them out there we hadn’t reached yet.
With a lofty goal in mind and a looming deadline we got to work. We knew we wanted to do something fun and interactive like a giveaway and we knew we wanted to tap tastemakers and influencers we hadn’t previously worked with. We put together a big list which over time shifted, evolved, grew, and shrank. Ultimately, we settled on six accounts (5 of which were in our first pool—always go with your instinct) ranging from a reality TV star to a London Gen Z It Girl to meme accounts.
When we first talked about working with meme accounts, the responses around the table were a bit of a mixed bag. We, of course, loved meme accounts, but some of us couldn’t quite figure out how we’d make them work for Crocs without diluting the brand. But it was simple, our audience loved humour and we knew if we found the right ones (in the end, we did), we’d have a winner on our hands.
Working directly with the talent to create content in their own style that they feel would resonate better with their audiences. We opted for grid posts in order to optimise reach by also sharing the post via Stories and their own Stories. In the end we worked with Love Island alum Faye Winter, fashion-focused Gen Zer Lara Adkins (whose sister is Niamh Adkins has 1.1m followers and reposted her giveaway post), Belgian influencer David Rodriguez (1m+ followers), and UK meme pages Love of Huns and The Archbishop of Banterbury.
By allowing the pages to create content themselves (with only direction on the giveaway mechanisms), we were able to ensure that all posts would be evergreen and fit into their feeds organically which would guarantee us a better chance of success.
In the end, we increased the Crocs Europe Instagram followers by more than 30,000 (exceeding 100,000 in total, which was our original goal). Whatsmore, those followers stayed. Though it’s quite common to drop followers after giveaways, we knew that the influencers and communities we had targeted would like our content too and want to stay in our community.
