How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your Brand Visibility and Exposure

With an end goal of increasing brand awareness in the US, Milton and Kings collaborated with 45 influencers. This resulted in a direct reach to 980,071 consumers. They even gained 10,000+ followers on social media.

This case study is proof that influencer marketing is here to empower your brand visibility. In fact, it could even drive an 11x higher ROI compared to traditional digital marketing.

An effective influencer marketing strategy is the one that helps the brand build a community of loyal brand evangelists.

Here are five steps you can follow to boost your brand visibility and exposure through influencer marketing:

1. Lay the groundwork
2. Handpick your influencers
3. Decide on your end goal
4. Create value for influencers
5. Partner with influencers for content creation

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at each of these steps.

1. Lay the Groundwork

When done right, influencer marketing can empower your business growth.
The first step to influencer marketing is to identify the right social media platform where your target audience has an active presence. For example:

• Instagram for beauty and fashion brands
  Twitch for the video game industry
  LinkedIn for B2B companies

Get started with one network and then expand to other networks for cross-platform influencer marketing.
Once you find the right network to reach your target audience, you can look for the most influential personalities on those platforms. Then recruit them to build an army of influencers to boost your brand visibility.

2. Handpick Your Influencers

Using influencer marketing tools, you can easily search for influencers based on budget, location, industry, or other parameters. It’s crucial to properly vet prospective influencers with defined metrics or characteristics relevant for your campaign.

Remember that the number of followers is a vanity metric on its own. But the number of followers in ratio to the number of likes, shares, and comments is the engagement rate, which reveals how influential they are with their followers.

Their ability to tell brand stories effectively is another factor to consider. Take a quick look through their posts to check if they have done sponsored content before. See how good they are at weaving in brand mentions with their personal experiences.

Kristal Heradia, who collaborated with Forever21 Plus, is a perfect example of a highly effective micro-influencer. She drove a whopping 25.1% engagement rate with only 13.8k followers at the time of the campaign.

To evangelize your brand and share your story, you can handpick influencers who are relevant to your niche. And to effectively do that, ask the following three questions:

• What is their engagement rate?
• Have they done sponsored content before?
• Does your brand values align with theirs?

If you are satisfied with the answers to the above question, you may have found the right influencers for your next successful marketing campaign.

3. Decide on Your End Goal

For the success of your influencer marketing campaign, everyone involved needs to work toward one common goal. This will ensure better coordination between different teams. The desired objective will also dictate the kind of content you’ll need influencers to create.

Following is a list of brand awareness goals you can choose from:

• Develop brand affinity
• Become a thought leader
• Drive more website traffic
• Earn backlinks to your website
• Increase sales and revenue for your business
• Increase followers on your social media pages

Once you pick your goals, define each of them with very specific details and monitor your campaign over a set of relevant key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you figure out your expectations, you can allocate your budget and resources accordingly.

4. Create Value for Influencers

Building a brand means building relationships with your target audience. And in influencer marketing, the first step to building relationships with that audience starts with an influencer.

Too often, businesses just focus on the outcome of the campaign or what they are getting out of it. But you should also look at what value influencers are getting out of the campaign.

Money isn’t the only value influencers look for in brand partnerships according to a Mediakix survey.

Here are some ways in which you can create value for influencers that goes beyond monetary benefits:

1. Give influencers added exposure through company blogs or social media posts.
2. Try to engage with their audience as much as possible.
3. Give them the freedom to create content that appeals to their audience.
4. Commit to collaborates with valuable influencers for a long-term partnership.
5. Provide them with exclusive experiences like vacation packages, VIP access to events, early access to upcoming products, etc.

If influencer marketing is a part of your long-term strategy, then take care to build long-lasting and meaningful connections with your influencers.

5. Partner with Influencers for Content Creation

Influencers know their audiences and the types of content they engage with. They’ve spent years trying to grow their followings and gain authority in their niches.

If you want to take your brand awareness campaign to the next level, then you need to strategically build content together with influencers.

Following are the different ways you can partner with influencers for content creation:

• A sponsored web series
• Hashtag campaigns to encash user-generated content
• Giveaway campaigns that prompt followers for positive and actionable responses

The above is an example of an influencer giveaway during which the brand successfully connected the aspirational lifestyle of the influencer with their product range. A giveaway campaign like this helps influencers to grow their followings as well.

Takeaway

Influencer marketing has emerged as an effective way to establish brand trust and build awareness about products and services.

To be successful, an influencer campaign demands plenty of groundwork and careful execution. But when done right, it can deliver massive results both in terms of revenue and brand building. The tips given above should help you get started with effective influencer marketing for boosting brand visibility.

If you have any questions about the tips we’ve provided here, please share them in the comments. If you want to learn more about influencer marketing, keep reading our blog.