Are you struggling to keep your brand on top of consumers’ minds?
Perhaps you just need to apply a brand awareness strategy you haven’t tried before: influencer marketing.
In today’s highly competitive and dynamic business landscape, business owners and marketers need to establish brand awareness and achieve a strong brand presence to expand their market share and succeed.
This post will explore influencer marketing and influencer partnerships as a strategy and how they could drive sales.
First Things First: Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is the foundation of success for businesses. Building a robust brand presence goes beyond just showcasing your products or services. It involves creating a lasting impression in the minds of your target consumers. Brand awareness helps shape consumer perceptions, encourage engagement, and promote loyalty. And to achieve brand awareness, businesses need to implement effective strategies.
The things brand awareness can do to help businesses thrive and expand include the following:
1. Brand awareness establishes recognition and recall
As the marketplace is crowded with competitors, consumers are presented with a world of choices. Even so, you can make your brand stand out in the minds of consumers if you have a distinct advantage. Consumers need to instantly recognize and recall your brand when they are making a purchasing decision. Of course, before consumers can think of you when they need the kind of product or service you are offering, they must first be aware that your brand exists.
2. Brand awareness cultivates consumer trust and credibility
Trust is vital in the relationship between a business and its consumers. Brand awareness plays a crucial role in building this trust. Consumers often perceive a recognizable and well-established brand as credible and trustworthy.
When consumers are faced with options, they are more likely to choose a brand that they recognize and trust. This leads to customer loyalty, where consumers repeatedly avail of your products and services and even recommend you to people they know.
3. Brand awareness influences consumer behavior
Brand awareness helps shape consumer behavior. When consumers are familiar with your brand and the quality of your products or services, they are more likely to choose you over your competitors.
This influence extends across the entire consumption process—from the initial awareness of the necessity for a product or service to consideration, purchase, and product satisfaction. Your effective brand awareness strategies will guide consumers through this process, increasing sales and market share.
4. Brand awareness creates market differentiation and positioning
Brand awareness is a powerful tool for differentiation in a market saturated with similar products and services. You need to differentiate yourself from your competitors to establish a unique position in the market.
You attract customers by being something they can distinguish from the rest. Doing this will enable you to command premium pricing and effectively withstand market fluctuations.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Traditional advertising methods are either taking a backseat or sharing the spotlight with digital marketing. In the age of social media, influencer marketing has emerged as an effective tool for driving sales and brand success. Influencer marketing has become such an effective brand awareness strategy that 2023 its market size was estimated at a record $21.1 billion.
Influencer marketing involves brands collaborating with online or social media influencers to promote their products or services. This is akin to the use of celebrity endorsers in television commercials and print ads. Influencers are individuals their peers or followers recognize as experts on a specific topic or area. Their influence over their audience is based on their perceived understanding of a certain subject matter and their ability to guide others toward positive outcomes.
So, what are the benefits of outsourcing influencers? Influencers significantly amplify a brand’s reach by recommending its products or services to their followers on their social media platforms, thus generating interest and, ultimately, trust and loyalty in the brand. Selecting influencers with a large and engaged audience ensures their message effectively reaches their desired demographic.
According to an influencer marketing trends report, influencer trust is growing, especially among Gen Zers and millennials. People in this age group who said they trust social media influencers grew from 51% in 2019 to 61% in 2023.
Because influencers have worked hard to gain the trust of their audience, their recommendations are more persuasive than other forms of advertising. Influencers have also established credibility with their audience, so they won’t just push your product on them but share their experience using it.
Using Influencer Marketing To Increase Brand Awareness
More consumers turning to the internet for information, social connection, and shopping gives influencer marketing various platforms to strengthen your brand. Here’s how you can create a good influencer marketing strategy to increase brand awareness:
1. Determine your goals
Does your goal include building your brand, making sales, or finding conversions? Identifying your goal helps determine the number of influencers you need and how long your campaign with them should last.
But since we’re talking about brand awareness, your main goal would be to reach more target customers. As such, your influencer campaign would extend your brand’s reach to that influencer’s followers.
2. Know your target audience
You need to reach the right kind of people. That is why defining your products or services’ specific audience or market is important. Identify the demographics. Which age group are your products for? Are they for men or women? Are you targeting a specific income bracket?
For this, it would help to have professionals with a business psychology major on your team to help you study the market and identify your target audience and what to expect from it.
3. Pick the right influencer
You need to use the right influencers to reach your target audience. Implementing Influencer relationship management tools can significantly enhance the efficiency of identifying and collaborating with the right influencers, ensuring a more strategic and effective influencer marketing campaign. You can use business software and tools like HootSuite and Collabstr to identify famous social media personalities.
However, other than picking an influencer whose followers make up your target audience, you have to make sure that that influencer shares your brand’s values and your company’s vision. Always practice due diligence: Research and go through the influencer’s content. Using influencer tracking tools can simplify the process of monitoring influencer’s posts.
Ensure they have not posted or published posts, videos, reels, or blogs that go against your stand on social issues, politics, and current events. In the age of cancel culture, consumers put significant weight on a brand’s values and position on the issues that affect and matter to them.
4. Collaborate and create effective content
Consumers prefer to engage or interact with their peers rather than with a business. So, including influencers in your marketing strategy can effectively create meaningful connections with your audience. Work with your influences to plan a campaign that puts out relevant content.
Think about the type of content your influencer is most effective at—a video, a post, a blog, or a photo—and go from there. Consider the social media platform where your influencer has the most followers, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or X.
Provide your influencer with guidelines about what you’re looking for. As a business owner, you are expected to have professionals with marketing degree requirements or qualifications onboard who are experts at mapping out effective campaigns, knowing what makes the market tick, and creating content that works.
Conclusion
Increasing your brand awareness and driving sales is a multifaceted endeavor requiring a comprehensive and strategic approach. By adding influencer marketing to your strategies, you can create a strong brand presence that resonates with your target audience.
Additionally, remember that building brand awareness is not a one-time thing that you tick off your list as you go to the next steps. Instead, it is an ongoing process that continuously elevates your brand in the eyes of your consumers, serving as the gateway to consumer trust and as a catalyst for sustained growth and establishing a foundation for long-term success in the market.
You can always look into influencer marketing to capture new customers and drive more sales, even if you are not a new business.
