Peer-to-peer recommendations and word of mouth are the most powerful marketing and advertising tools. The effectiveness is even greater when the advocate has already established their credibility in the concerned field – these people are influencers (whether they know it or not).
Influencers can be of any type: analysts, industry experts, critics, celebrities, high quality content developers, and bloggers.
Whatever their niche, marketers value influencers for their ability to affect the behavior and actions of people in their networks and communities. Because their community looks on them with goodwill and trust, influencers can help you increase brand awareness.
Here’s how you can work with influencers to increase brand awareness.
Why Brand Awareness Matters and How Influencers Can Help
Brand awareness is the only way for consumers to know who you are and what you do. It’s important to note that successful brand awareness is more than just name recognition. You also need to make the sale.
You know this: consumers do not trust sales pitches as much as they trust recommendations from industry leaders, colleagues, and peers. The right influencer can add credibility to your offerings, helping your business establish or improve your position in the marketplace.
How Influencers Increase Your Reach
Influencers can spin more traffic to your business than almost any other marketing tool, and we have the numbers to back it up.
According to a Nielsen survey, when it comes to brand awareness, expert content from well established influencers is 88% more valuable than branded content and 83% more effective than traditional product reviews. Social media platforms, bloggers, and vloggers have a higher reach to your target audience than any almost any other digital marketing medium.
Source: TechnoratiMedia
Listed below are a few content marketing methods that use the power of influencers to create connections, particularly with niche consumers.
Get Your Influencers to Endorse your Product
Brand awareness is so important for your business because even when someone doesn’t buy your product, they know what you offer and where your product is placed in the market. For example; you might not be an Apple consumer but everyone knows about Apple products and its market placement.
For new businesses, it is very difficult to reach their audience amongst the existing competition. The right influencers will mobilize consumers that already follow them and trust their opinion. Among various tactics, the following prove to be highly effective when it comes to effective content marketing.
Sponsored Posts by Your Influencers
When working with influencers, remember to keep the influencer’s body of work relevant with your business. For example, Taylor Swift is among the most influential celebrities with an unparalleled audience reach internationally, but her tweet regarding an investment plan will not be relevant and will fail to attract the target audience.
Once you have identified a key Influencer who has a strong following in the respective subject, someone with the reach and credibility to attract your target audience; get their work sponsored by your brand.
See our post on Sponsored Content for more details on how to work with influencers and master native advertising.
Influencer-Developed Product Reviews and Features
The key to getting your product reviewed by a blogger or critic is building good relations. If the Influencer is not passionate about your product, they will find it difficult to incorporate a good word about your business in their content.
Although building sustainable relationships is not easy, there are a few effective ways you can get started.
Source: The Over Exposed
An excellent way to start building relations is to first list out the names of the influencers you want to befriend. You can use one of the sites listed above like Mode Media and Blogher to find people that interest you. Once you are ready with the list, look through LinkedIn, BranchOut, PartnerUp and Meetup or any such professional networking sites to find any common connections with these people.
The way you approach a blogger or an Influencer determines their reaction towards your proposal. Try to interact with them on social media first by sharing common interests without imposing your intentions. Try to help them in any way possible as they are more likely to return a favor in the future when you need one.
The best way to get them interested in your venture is to give out samples. Let them use your product and judge the quality and usability. Once they have used your product or availed your services, they can write about it from firsthand experience. And if the writer likes the experience, you will not have to pursue him/her to write good about your product.
When you give out products for review to an influencer, consider handing out a few extra samples. This way, they will distribute the sample to their colleagues, peers, or followers who can be potential consumers or Influencers for you in the future. Many influencers have experience running contests on their sites, and your ‘extra’ product could be used as a prize.
Social Media Coupon Campaigns Drive Immediate Customer Acquisition
Leverage social platforms and trending hashtag relevant to your offerings and give out discount coupons for your marketing campaign.
The goal of a social media coupon campaign is to create brand awareness as well as boost sales in the process. Coupons tagged with Influencer blogs and video posts will encourage viewers to purchase immediately, increasing the chances of converting brand awareness to brand loyalty.
There are a variety of tactics that can be adopted to drive consumer acquisition like pre-launch offers, holiday/seasonal offers or exclusive offers for influencer followers. With the help of social media management platforms like Rignite, you can quantify the social media ROI for coupon redemption.
Using Trending Hashtags to Drive Brand Awareness
Hashtags are seen everywhere, from Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler, Pinterest, to print media, Television etc. The power of trending content over the web is tremendous in its ability to convert social media users to content generators, and hashtags help link these stories together.
Users like, share and distribute content that they like and companies that are able to insert their brand in these conversations genuinely are rewarded greatly.
Conversely, with a little help from your influencers, you can start your own conversation, as below with Expedia’s #ExpediaPic tweet.
Source: Maximize Social Business
As always, keep a track of what your competition is up to. Take stock of which bloggers and influencers are working with them which media platforms are being used to advertise and review their products.
Doing this will help you benchmark your success. You can use this knowledge to strategize better and grab opportunities that you were unaware of initially.
Keep an Eye on Your Competition
As always, keep a track of what your competition is up to. Take stock of which bloggers and influencers are working with them which media platforms are being used to advertise and review their products.
Doing this will help you benchmark your success. You can use this knowledge to strategize better and grab opportunities that you were unaware of initially.
Are You Ready to Start Leveraging Influencers?
As you can see, there are several ways in which you can make the most of influencers to boost your brand awareness. Whether it’s to their existing audience base or to a completely new audience, influencers can help you build trust among your target market. The increase in brand awareness can further leverage your other marketing efforts and help you achieve your long-term organizational goals.
Have any questions about how to get started? Let us know in the comments below.