Brands used to focus on building awareness through traditional advertising—commercials, billboards, print ads, and the like. But as times change, and most of marketing has turned digital, so have brand awareness tactics. And that brings more priority toward brand engagement.
One key way to build brand awareness today is with influencers.
So, how can brands leverage an influencer partnership to benefit their own marketing goals? First, let’s go back to the basics to review the power and purpose of brand awareness and brand engagement. Then we’ll share how an influencer marketing campaign can support your brand’s overall awareness and engagement goals.
What Is Brand Awareness?
At its core, brand awareness is the familiarity your consumer base has with your brand. It includes recognition of your name/logo, or an understanding of your products or services.
Brand awareness isn’t a complex concept, but it can be incredibly difficult to achieve. Though it’s worth the effort. High brand awareness is essential to build trust and credibility with consumers, which leads to increased sales.
Effective marketing campaigns, particularly via social media, are the simplest way to gain brand awareness. The challenge is that brand awareness does have a quantifiable metric to determine success.
What’s Brand Engagement?
Brand engagement is the next level; taking consumers from merely being aware of your brand, to being attached or engaged with it. Engagement means you’re creating emotional and rational connections between your customers and your brand.
Brand engagement goes beyond brand interaction, including actions like following the brand on social media, booking a hotel room, or adding a product to the cart. It occurs at various touchpoints, like on the brand's website or social media channels, at a physical store, through public advertisements, in online reviews, and as referrals or word-of-mouth recommendations from others.
Brand engagement cannot exist without brand awareness, and it’s one of the key factors that determine a successful marketing campaign. For most brands, “engagement” doesn’t just mean product purchase — it can be a like, a comment, or a share on social media that encourages organic messaging between your current and future fan base.
That’s where influencer marketing comes in: It serves as an invaluable bridge between brand awareness and brand engagement.
How to Use Influencer Marketing For Brand Awareness and Engagement
Influencer marketing allows you to reach new audiences and expand the footprint of your marketing efforts. By enlisting an influencer, you’re ensuring your brand awareness is multiplied to all his or her followers. You’re leveraging the trust and credibility that influencers have built with their audience to bring more awareness — and ultimately engagement — to your brand.
In turn, that influencer’s engagement with your brand — say, with a dedicated blog post, product placement, or social media post — adds a new appeal, turning them into a dedicated and trusted brand ambassador. After all, most influencers only talk about brands they really love. With that seal of approval, you have a high likelihood of seeing positive results. Their followers will become your followers and ultimately loyal, engaged customers.
Here’s how to get started.
Build a Plan
You already know you want to recruit influencers to help you reach new audiences and improve your brand awareness.
Now you need to do some basic campaign planning, including:
- Timelines
- Products or services to highlight
- Budget
- Target audience
- Resources
You need to know what you have to work with on this campaign, and who will be doing that work.
Set Goals
Next, set realistic goals. Remember, your objective here is brand awareness and brand engagement, so your specific key performance indicators (KPIs) will likely be related to website traffic, uptick in sales, and/or new social media followers.
Establishing KPI goals before beginning a campaign will also help you identify what sort of influencer you need to achieve these goals.
So, how do you know when your KPIs are leaning toward brand awareness or engagement? We have three simple examples to help you choose.
Social engagement - This one is a bit of a giveaway because engagement is in its verbiage. This type of KPI is about generating a conversation to encourage likes, shares, and comments on your preferred channel(s).
Let’s say you want to increase your Instagram following within one quarter. To meet that goal, your campaign may involve an influencer with a strong Instagram following to amplify your brand’s message. You would probably create a direct call to action to your Instagram page, possibly including:
1) specialized Instagram Stories by one or two influencers to promote your brand’s page
2) several influencers utilizing your hashtag and tagging your page
3) a takeover on the influencer’s page explaining how they utilize your brand in their day-to-day
To monitor, you’d analyze your social media stats before, during, and after a targeted influencer campaign focused on this outcome.
Exposure - This goal is easiest to achieve with a content and social campaign utilizing a set hashtag to promote your brand’s message.
The goal of this approach is to make the hashtag synonymous with your brand, creating a community of like-minded brand ambassadors from all over the Internet. An influencer can easily craft a specialized blog post to promote your brand — one that will feel authentic to their brand’s message — spurring interest in their following.
Then, once it’s promoted on social media with the hashtag, followers can learn to recognize the hashtag as an extension of your page.
To monitor exposure, you’d be looking at impressions, web traffic, etc. to indicate new eyeballs (even if they don’t yet engage with your brand or purchase from you).
Retention - This one is a little trickier than the other two because it involves KPIs that target both brand awareness and brand engagement. In today’s social marketing game, it’s easy to try to hack the algorithms to gain followers quickly. It is not, however, easy to maintain that following.
With the goal of engagement, you’ll want to ensure your page reciprocates the new interaction by liking, commenting, and following new accounts. This encourages extended reach and continued conversation.
Similarly, you may want to utilize a brand hashtag or even link to the influencer’s specialized content to encourage brand awareness. Including affiliate links within content and utilizing them in social marketing can also ensure you meet both a brand awareness and brand engagement goal.
Find the Right Influencer
You can have a rock-solid plan and set all the right goals, but without the perfect influencer to do the marketing, you don’t stand a chance at meeting those objectives. Consider collaborating with influencers of varying audience sizes and niches to reach a broader audience to maximize brand exposure.
Then look at the influencer's engagement rate, audience demographics, psychographics, and behavior to ensure they align with your target audience. And make sure the influencer's content style, tone, and messaging align with your brand's values and aesthetic.
Finding, vetting, and contracting with influencers is difficult, but it makes all the difference in the success of your campaign.
Contact us today to get started with your influencer marketing campaign for brand awareness and engagement.
