How to Increase Brand Awareness Through Influencer Marketing

Creating and growing brand awareness is the first step of the sales funnel. Without it, you can’t expect to get new leads and conversions. That’s why it’s one of the most critical steps as well.

There are numerous ways in which digital marketing can grow your brand awareness, but none can come close to influencer marketing.

This is perhaps the reason why 65% of marketers judge the success of an influencer marketing campaign by measuring the brand awareness generated through it.

Additionally, nearly 84% of marketers surveyed believe that influencer marketing is effective. It’s due to such benefits that its popularity has grown, and 93% of marketers say that they use it.

But while it has become popular, influencer marketing has faced some serious backlash too.

Why?

Events such as the Fyre Festival and the Diclegis influencer marketing campaign have led to people questioning its authenticity. However, it continues to grow and is expected to grow at 32.4% CAGR for the next four years.

But that’s not to say that it hasn’t changed. Brands have started moving towards nano- and micro-influencers due to their lower fees and higher engagement rates.

Additionally, these influencers are more relatable for their followers as well, and this makes them great for collaboration.

So, how can you grow your brand awareness through influencer marketing? Let’s find out.

Pro Tip: Analyze an influencer’s audience thoroughly to understand if it matches that of your target audience else the partnership may not be beneficial.

How Can You Increase Brand Awareness Through Influencer Marketing?

Here’s how you can use influencer marketing to increase your brand awareness on social media.

1. Find and Partner with Influencers

To give your brand awareness a boost, you need to find the right influencers and reach out to them for partnership.

While there are a variety of social media influencers you can collaborate with, macro-influencers can charge huge fees for a collaboration. That’s why many small brands and startups rely on micro- and nano-influencers.

What’s more?

These influencers have smaller audiences, and that gives them enough time to engage with their followers on a personal level. This leads to an increased engagement rate.

Additionally, their followers can relate to them better as they don’t have extravagant lives. And relatability is two times more important than popularity as a quality that gets people to follow influencers.

Lastly, due to their smaller following, the audience of micro- and nano-influencers will be highly specific too.

However, it’s essential to find the right micro- and nano-influencers for your influencer marketing campaign. This is because there are many influencers out there who have fake followers.

To find genuine influencers, you can use Fourstarzz Media. Using our tool, you can look for influencers based on their reach, engagement rates, niche, audience interests, and more.

You can also leverage our advanced search feature to find influencers using hashtags, influencer handles, and more.

Arbor Day Coffee, for instance, wanted to grow their brand awareness. For this, they partnered with ten social media influencers and sent them a welcome package with various types of coffee.

The influencers posted about these packages on social media platforms and added coupon codes to incentivize their followers to purchase them as well. The campaign reached over 1.39 million people.

2. Leverage Contests or Giveaways

Yet another way to increase your brand awareness and reach new audiences is by hosting a contest or giveaway with social media influencers.

You can ask influencers to feature your product or brand in the awareness campaign by sending out samples to them. Through these posts, they can talk about the contest or the giveaway. These posts tend to get lots of engagement as everyone wants to try their luck.

But, what’s the catch?

To ensure that your influencer marketing campaign gets enough traction, the prize must be valuable enough to the influencer’s social media followers. Only then will they be interested in registering for it.

Through this type of social media marketing campaign, you can ask them to follow your social media account to register or send them to your website and get them to fill out a form. This can help you generate leads and build your social media following.

For instance, Jed North partnered with influencers like McKenna Wood to increase brand awareness among their target audience by means of a contest. This post from McKenna got over 550 likes and 250 comments.

Pro Tip: Whenever you launch a contest, stick to the announced dates. Increasing the contest duration might put off social media followers.

3. Launch a Brand Ambassador Program

One way of taking your influencer marketing strategy to the next level for driving brand awareness is by launching a brand ambassador program.

While influencer marketing campaigns can build your brand awareness in the short term, a brand ambassador program does it for the longer-term.

How?

It helps you reach people through word-of-mouth marketing, and when influencers recommend your brand, people will believe them. In fact, about 91% of people believe online recommendations.

Brand ambassadors promote your brand for a longer duration than a one-off campaign. How? They post content about your product or services and building brand awareness.

Additionally, for every sale that they bring in, you can pay them a commission too. This can motivate them to drive sales as well and help you reach your marketing goals.

So, how can you find them?

To find brand ambassadors, you can leverage our platform, Fourstarzz Media. All you need to do is search for influencers by filtering your niche, social media channel, influencer country, and other advanced options.

Alternatively, you can put up a web form that interested influencers can fill out to partner with you.

For example, Izzy & Liv has a brand ambassador program where they partner with micro-influencers like Glamazini to grow their brand awareness. She posted a video of the products she’s received from them, and it got over 1.7K views.

4. Social Media Takeovers

Social media takeovers can be a great addition to your influencer marketing strategy. During this type of campaign, the influencer takes over one of your social media accounts for a specific duration and creates content for your audience.

So, what does it do?

When influencers take over your account and create content, it’ll attract not only your social media followers but also theirs. This can help you increase brand awareness by reaching new audiences. They can also drive traffic to your website by adding links to their posts.

However, just like all other influencer marketing campaigns, it’s essential to create an agreement for the influencer takeover. This agreement should mention the duration of the takeover and other terms of the partnership. This can help make the deliverables from both the parties clear as well.

For instance, Be Well Indy partnered with an influencer, ms_kelly__, to build their brand awareness through a social media takeover.

Note how she just took over their Instagram Stories and not the complete account. Such partnerships would differ from case to case.

Ready to Increase Brand Awareness?

To build your brand, you need to grow your brand awareness. This can help attract people towards your brand and build brand trust as well. You can boost brand awareness through influencer marketing by leveraging the power influencers have over their followers.

You can pair your influencer campaigns with contests or giveaways to grow your reach. To increase brand awareness in the long-term, you can launch a brand ambassador program. Lastly, you can partner with influencers for a social media takeover and reach new audiences with ease.

Do you have any questions about using influencer marketing to build brand awareness? Let us know in the comments.

To find influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns, subscribe to Fourstarzz Media for $59/month. Cancel anytime.

This post originally published at Fourstarzz Media's blog.