How WGG Agency built an influencer marketing campaign for a children’s toy retailer in Dubai and Abu Dhabi

ABOUT THE BRAND

Toy Station is a children’s toy store operating in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of the project, the brand faced low awareness among its target audience. Another key challenge was the need to increase engagement and sales through social media. The project therefore required influencer activity that could address awareness while also supporting engagement and sales through social media.

Toy Station had low brand awareness among its target audience and needed to increase engagement and sales through social media.

We developed an influencer strategy, defined relevant creator profiles and content formats, built a database of 150+ influencers, and activated collaborations across Instagram Stories, Reels and TikTok.

Before launching influencer collaborations, WGG Agency structured the campaign around the brand’s initial challenges, relevant creator profiles and content formats.
1. Define the challenge: Toy Station needed to increase brand awareness, social media engagement and sales.
2. Define influencer profiles: We identified two core creator groups: family lifestyle influencers aged 20–45 and children bloggers aged 5–15.
3. Define relevant content topics: For family lifestyle creators, the focus included family fun, gift ideas and shopping reviews. For children bloggers, suitable formats included unboxing, toy challenges, gaming vlogs and visits to entertainment centers and stores.
4. Define collaboration formats: We prepared three core content approaches: home unboxing, store review and lifestyle fit.
5. Build the influencer pool: We created a database of 150+ relevant influencers and started outreach through social media with collaboration proposals.

To build a relevant creator pool, we defined two influencer portraits.
The first group was family lifestyle creators aged 20–45. Suitable topics included family fun, gift ideas and shopping reviews. The second group was children bloggers aged 5–15, with suitable formats such as unboxing, toy challenges, gaming vlogs and visits to entertainment centers and stores.
We also defined inappropriate topics for each group so collaborations remained aligned with the brand. The creator selection was structured around the content each group already produced, so family lifestyle profiles focused on family fun, gift ideas and shopping reviews, while children bloggers were matched with unboxing, toy challenges, gaming vlogs and visits to entertainment centers and stores.

Instead of using one repeated collaboration format, we developed several ways for influencers to integrate Toy Station into their content. Useful article about content marketing. The formats included home unboxing, store review and lifestyle fit. This allowed the brand to appear in different creator scenarios while keeping the content relevant to each influencer’s audience. These three approaches gave creators different ways to present the brand: products could be introduced at home, the physical store could become part of the content, or Toy Station could be integrated into a broader lifestyle scenario.

We built a database of more than 150 relevant influencers and reached out to them through social media with collaboration proposals. This gave the campaign a structured creator pool and allowed us to select influencers whose content and audiences matched Toy Station. Outreach was conducted through social media with collaboration proposals, turning the database into an active pool for selecting creators relevant to the campaign.

As a result of the outreach, Toy Station collaborated with more than 40 influencers.
The creators published more than 50 pieces of unique content, giving the brand a broad volume of influencer-generated materials across social media. The scale of the outreach translated into both creator volume and content volume: more than 40 influencers participated and together produced over 50 unique pieces of content. This meant the campaign was not dependent on a single creator or a single execution; Toy Station appeared through multiple influencer collaborations and content pieces across the campaign.

Influencers used Instagram Stories to show Toy Station products, store visits and real-life interactions with toys. The format helped integrate the brand naturally into everyday family, shopping and product-discovery content. Stories were used for product showcases, store visits and real-life interactions with toys. Within the wider strategy, this gave creators a format for showing Toy Station in immediate, everyday contexts rather than limiting the campaign to standalone promotional posts.

The campaign also included Instagram Reels created by influencers. Short-form videos featured Toy Station products and in-store experiences, extending the campaign through a dynamic format suited to social media discovery. Reels added another short-form layer to the campaign alongside Stories, giving influencers space to build product-focused and in-store video executions while keeping Toy Station within the creator-led content strategy.

Influencer content was also distributed on TikTok. Creators produced videos around store visits, products, hauls and toy-related experiences, allowing Toy Station to reach audiences through another short-form video platform. The TikTok executions carried the influencer strategy beyond Instagram while retaining the same core campaign themes: products, shopping experiences and creator interaction with the brand. This gave the campaign an additional distribution format without changing the underlying creator-led approach.

Despite the difference in views and likes, both publications recorded the same 1% engagement rate. The examples support the broader campaign approach of using influencer-created content to expose Toy Station to creator audiences on Instagram.

Together, the examples show how TikTok contributed both reach and audience interaction within the campaign. They also complement the Instagram activity by extending Toy Station’s influencer content to another short-form video platform built around store visits, products, hauls and toy-related experiences.

The influencer budget was allocated across two collaboration models. The campaign included 7 paid collaborations based on an influencer fee plus store credit, and 42 barter collaborations based on store credit for each influencer. Rather than relying on only one partnership model, the campaign used both fee-based and barter arrangements. This structure supported a broader mix of collaborations within the influencer program while keeping store credit as part of both models described in the case.

The monthly results show that campaign activity continued across the full three-month period rather than being concentrated in a single month. April delivered the highest number of views and engagements and also the highest monthly engagement rate shown in the case.

The campaign was built around influencer profiles that matched Toy Station’s target audience. By separating family lifestyle creators and children bloggers, defining suitable content topics, and using different formats such as home unboxing, store reviews and lifestyle content, the brand could appear naturally in creators’ feeds.
A database of 150+ relevant influencers made outreach systematic, while the combination of paid and barter collaborations allowed Toy Station to work with 40+ influencers and generate more than 50 pieces of unique content. The use of Instagram Stories, Reels and TikTok expanded the campaign across multiple short-form formats.
Over three months, the campaign generated 1,227,190 views and 13,325 engagements with an overall engagement rate of 2.92%.

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