Increased brand awareness is something that every company strives to obtain. Brand awareness is a term used to describe the degree customers can recognize a product or service based solely on its name.
When you think of companies with some of the most recognizable brands, for example, McDonald’s and Nike, by simply seeing a quick flash of the McDonald’s arches or the Nike swoosh, you immediately know what they offer.
This level of brand awareness is not an accident. It is the result of decades of advertising and millions of dollars of investments.
The main advantage that companies like McDonald’s and Nike have is that they started their brand awareness campaigns decades ago before the internet was so central to our everyday lives.
Today, if you are a new company starting out, even if you have an amazing product, it may be difficult to stand out above the competition. Consumers have more choices than ever before, and they consume information in different ways. With all of the content out there, it can be more difficult for consumers to cut through the noise to find products they can truly care about.
To help build brand awareness, more companies are utilizing influencers as a marketing strategy to spread the word about their products and services, and it is working.
If you are a newer company out there, there are several ways that you can utilize influencer marketing to help spread the word about your company. Let us discuss some of the most effective ways businesses leverage influencer marketing to build brand awareness.
Content creation is at the core of brand awareness
Before starting an influencer marketing campaign, your company should have a solid and well-designed website as the foundation of your brand and the products and services you offer. All of the content that you create, as well as any of the content that influencers produce promoting your brand, should eventually lead back to your site, where leads can convert to sales.
The site is also the holy grail of information when it comes to your brand. It will have all of the product specifications, prices, and minor details that people need, as well as offer ways for potential customers to contact you if they are looking for further information.
Additionally, your well-designed website should have a social media hub plugin to help you organize your different social media accounts. A social media hub on your website can allow visitors to view, share, and interact with the social media content you create across all platforms. It can inspire customer engagement, increase your time-on-page metrics, and provide you with one location to manage and publish your social media content.
Much of the content that your influencers make on their social media accounts and platforms can be repurposed and formatted to be reposted on your brand’s social media accounts.
Once you have your solid foundation in the form of a well-designed website and a social media hub to organize and manage your social media content, you can focus on working with influencers to have them produce content on your behalf. Influencers will already have a large audience of followers who consume the content they create and have established trust with the influencer.
Hiring influencers to help boost your brand
Influencers can add more authenticity, relevance, and emotional appeal to the promotion of a brand, product, or service than any other type of traditional advertising method. Because of this, if you are working with an influencer who is creating content on your behalf, you will want to ensure that they are fairly compensated for their efforts.
Influencers may have the power to make your brand but also to break it, so make sure you negotiate payment terms in good faith. Have the influencer document every post they make for your brand using a Google Docs invoicing template, so you have a clear overview of their work. You’ll also need a formal contract detailing the scope of work, deliverables, how you plan to measure the results, and the end date for the project.
Once you have negotiated payment terms and an idea of what products you would like the influencer to promote, you can move on to content creation. You can let your influencer have 100% autonomy on the type of content they create, or you can retain some control over your marketing content and collaborate with them.
If you decide to collaborate, here are some ways that brands and influencers have worked together to create engaging content.
Types of content that brands and influencers can make in collaboration
There are five main types of influencer content that have a proven track record of being successful: unboxing videos, tutorials or how-to videos, social media takeovers, contests/giveaways, and brand-sponsored events.
Before collaborating with an influencer to create any of these types of content, you will want to ensure your website can handle the potential influx in traffic. You’ll also want to check that your team knows how to use customer and lead management tools to compile visitor data for future marketing efforts and convert curious visitors into paying customers.
Let’s look at the most common and successful influencer content types in more detail.
Unboxing videos
Unboxing videos created on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram Live can be extremely effective at promoting a new product that is about to come out or has just been released. By sending one of your new products to an influencer, they can create a video of them opening the box the product is shipped in, explaining the contents, and documenting their natural reaction to seeing the product for the first time.
Unboxing videos are extremely effective because they can give a potential customer a first-hand look at the size of a product, how it may fit in their hands, how it feels, what features it has, and ultimately if it is worth all the hype.
Tutorials/how-to videos
Tutorial and how-to videos are some of the easiest videos to make that can have the largest impact. Most potential customers prefer to learn how to use a product by watching one of their favorite online personalities using it rather than reading an instructional pamphlet.
Social media takeovers
Social media takeovers are when an influencer takes over the posting privileges of a brand’s social media account to create content for a set time. The main benefit of doing a social media takeover with an extremely popular social media influencer is cross-pollination.
Cross-pollination in social media marketing occurs when followers of an influencer are directed to your social media accounts to view the content created by their favorite online personality. During cross-pollination, you should be able to acquire a good amount of new followers on your own social media accounts.
Contests/giveaways
Everybody loves a contest or a giveaway. A contest held by a popular influencer promoting your brand is an extremely effective marketing technique. Typically, users are required to sign up for a mailing list, share posts, or leave a comment to enter the contest. This is an extremely effective way to gather email addresses and contact information for future marketing efforts. Also, don’t be cheap. Make the prizes exciting to ensure engagement.
Brand-sponsored events
Brand-sponsored events like an influencer meet-and-greet or an online Q and A on Facebook or Instagram live are great ways to engage influencer followers and associate your brand with the influencer.
If you do a face-to-face meet-and-greet event, you can provide swag bags to attendees. If you do an online Q and A session, you can offer special promo codes and discounts for people who are in attendance. Sometimes special promo codes like these can create an element of exclusivity that people love.
Wrapping up
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to boost brand awareness and an important factor in gathering leads and increasing sales and revenue. If you want to be a part of the content creation process, you can collaborate with your influencers and help them make unboxing and tutorial/how-to videos. Social media takeovers, contests and giveaways, and brand-sponsored events are other great ways to generate buzz around your brand. Just remember that a successful influencer marketing campaign starts with a well-designed and well-functioning website and an active social media presence.
