Brand awareness vs performance is a battle as old as the marketing profession itself. And while performance has been in the driver’s seat for the last decade or so across all marketing disciplines, we’ve seen an exodus back to brand building.

I wanted to know how influencer marketers adjusted their campaigns to focus on brand awareness (contrasted to their performance campaigns).  I asked:

• How briefs, deliverables, and CTAs change for brand awareness
• Which collaborations worked the best for brand campaigns
• How they went about tracking and measuring brand awareness
• How they split their budgets between brand and performance

Here’s how influencer marketers do brand awareness:

How do influencer marketers define brand awareness initiatives?

For brevity, brand awareness is the idea of using influencer content to reach as many relevant people for your brand in the hopes that your brand and products will be interesting or tempting to them.

In influencer marketing, brand awareness focuses primarily on storytelling: what is the message you want customers to take away from your brand and its content? It’s a lot more content-focused than sales-focused. You’re using brand awareness to build trust with an audience so you’re top of mind when a customer decides to purchase.

For Alex Sabucido, it’s about connecting with your target audience.

Alexander Sabucido

Influencer Marketing Specialist

Brand initiatives are more into creating connections with your audience/community through influencer partnerships, building trust and shaping perceptions.

Gabija Jankauskė agrees:

Gabija Jankauskė

Influencer manager, Son de Flor

A brand initiative is emotion – a brand story, creating a bond with customers. And performance is just numbers, sales, conversions, and etc.

If the overall goals of a brand awareness campaign change for marketers, do the little moving parts of the campaign change as well?

Brand awareness vs. performance: What should I change in my campaign?

Then, I wanted to know whether the different elements of an influencer marketing campaign changed if the goal was centered around brand awareness. I broke down the questions element-by-element and dove deep with marketers to find out the why behind changing them (or not).

Here’s the Tl;Dr:

• Adjust your KPIs – you’re not looking for hard sales. Prioritize things like reach, engagement, etc.
• Center your briefs more around emotions and storytelling – give your influencer the creative freedom to convey the emotions you’re looking for.
• Consider which kinds of deliverables reach the most eyes – you’ll want to choose formats effective for engaging their audience (Reels, Stories, TikTok videos, etc).
• CTAs should be softer – consider brand awareness like the top of your funnel. Opt for CTAs that focus on “learn more” or “follow us” to pull as many people into your orbit as possible.

Briefs:

Results:

• Yes: 82.9%
• No: 17.1%

For most marketers, the brief changes between performance and brand awareness campaigns. I wondered exactly how they changed, and if you needed to include more detail, less, or just different details.

For Miroslava Petkova, there were, overall, fewer details – preferring to give as much freedom to influencers as possible.

Miroslava Petkova

Regional Influencer Marketing Manager, COCOSOLIS

We don't include as much specific details and instructions, we let the influencer do their thing.

Michael Todner agrees, focusing instead on the core message:

Michael Todner

Influencer Marketing, Gear4music

It depends, but typically, we cut down on details. We focus on our offering as a whole, who we are as a business and how we can help a customer to solve an issue.

For Fernanda Marques, it was about communicating brand values.

Fernanda Marques

Influencer Marketing Coordinator

The creative brief focuses on conveying the brand’s identity, values, and story. The messaging is often more emotionally driven, aiming to create a memorable experience that resonates with the audience, with an emphasis on quality visuals and storytelling to build a strong connection.

Other marketers emphasized leaving an influencer creative freedom for brand awareness – equipping their creator with only a few key messages to work from. This was the case for Zuzana Jirickova, who focused more on storytelling, and said she still gives details, it’s just that those details change between brand awareness and performance campaigns.

Zuzana Jirickova

Influencer Relations Manager, Notino

Brand awareness is more about storytelling and emotions – we're more focused on tone of the voice and aesthetics. For performance based briefs, we include a clear CTA and instructions with a detailed description.

Lee Drysdale reinforces this creative freedom, saying that it’s a staple for him, regardless of the kind of campaign he’s running.

Lee Drysdale

Affiliate and Partnerships Executive, Argento

I am a really big believer in creative freedom on both briefs, when working on these campaigns I have usually sourced an influencer after a lot of time looking into their content - meaning I usually give full creative freedom over because their content is bomb.

Lee has confidence in his vetting process, and knows that choosing the right influencer means he can be more hands-off in general. For performance briefs, he prefers to offer a little more guidance, but ultimately leaves a lot of space for an influencer to get creative.

Lee Drysdale

Affiliate and Partnerships Executive, Argento

I create a super loose brief that influencers can still work into their content style. In my last performance campaign, we put a spin on the 333 challenge trending on TikTok. Having influencers that are well-known for posting about the brand posting a similar style of content during the week worked wonders for metrics.

He also mentioned that this style of content really helped audiences want to get involved.

Connecting deeply with your audience is the point behind brand awareness. It’s always a good idea to light the way for your influencer, but leave them the creative freedom to interpret your brand message in a way that will resonate with their audience.

Deliverables:

For deliverables, I wanted to see if the kind of content that brands expected of creators changed in the event the goal was brand awareness.

The majority of marketers said that it did change (albeit fewer than said they changed their influencer briefs).

Results:

• Yes: 71.4%
• No:  28.6%

As brand awareness focuses on reach, it makes sense to prioritize channels where CPMs are cheaper, like Instagram and Tiktok. While platforms like TikTok and Instagram are great for driving views, it’s harder to drive link clicks (and track them) as you can’t link directly in the post.

Stories tend to be among the top priorities for performance campaigns – as you can actually add a link to a product or store. TikTok shop also offers a direct line to purchase, and so works well for those performance campaigns as well.

YouTube is great for both performance and brand awareness campaigns – but the high cost (that accompanies high-value) often drives marketers to prioritize this channel on more direct sales campaigns.

So to get the most bang for your buck, Instagram Reels and TikTok videos are likely going to be your best bet for brand awareness campaigns.

For some marketers, like Michael, the deliverable was tailored to the specific goal of the campaign.

Michael Todner

Influencer Marketing, Gear4music

It's down to what we want to achieve from the awareness. Are we looking to promote a product, are we looking to alter the perception of the product? Are we looking to bring awareness to our business generally? We'll tailor deliverables to fit these needs, changing the messaging, platform, type of influencer we work with, and etc.

For Tamara, she found that certain deliverables worked better between brand awareness and performance campaigns.

Tamara Torrecillas

Digital and Influencer Marketing Manager, Dialect Fragrances

For performance, we opt for YouTube videos and stories, also TikTok videos with affiliates (organic feel and reviews). For brand awareness, it’s more about Reels and TikTok videos (aesthetic, creative, seamless integration, and etc.).

CTAs:

According to the marketers we polled, CTAs were changed at the same rate as deliverables for brand awareness campaigns.

Results:

• Yes: 71.4%
• No: 28.6%

Many marketers said that the CTAs they used for brand awareness campaigns centered around softer actions. “Buy now” and “Get X% off” were swapped for CTAs like “Learn more” and “Follow us.”

Whether you decide a CTA is necessary or not, a “buy now” CTA probably isn’t going to cut it for a brand awareness campaign. After all,  you’re still building that trust – asking for the sale immediately isn’t going to earn you any brownie points with customers that don’t know you at all.

Instead, focus on adding value first and foremost through your influencer’s content. You’ll be able to earn a lot more trust this way.

According to Miroslava, instead of pushing customers towards a sale, she aims to get customers aware the product exists.

Miroslava Petkova

Regional Influencer Marketing Manager, COCOSOLIS

It's not pushing the audience into selling the product, it's more about sparking an interest or keeping the product on top of mind.

Tamara prefers to get an influencer’s community engaged in the brand actively.

Tamara Torrecillas

Digital and Influencer Marketing Manager, Dialect Fragrances

When doing brand initiatives, we want people to engage (answer a question, take part in a giveaway, join a challenge, follow us, repost, and etc.) For sales, we need influencers to invite people to go to our website and buy, and we usually do this with a promo code.

For Cheyanne Pettyjohn, the CTA becomes a lot more direct for performance campaigns.

Cheyanne Pettyjohn

Director of Influencer Marketing, Rookie Wellness

When we are building brand awareness, we ask creators to speak to the brand as a whole. We also want them to go over our mission and who we are, so people can recognize us from their content. The CTAs shift from "go to this website to learn more" to "use my code to get 20% off this product" for performance campaigns.

For other marketers, CTAs might not even really matter. Zia Ur Rehman says that CTAs aren’t nearly as important in brand awareness campaigns.

Zia Ur Rehman

Influencer Marketing Manager, Vitauthority

In a brand awareness campaign, I’m not worried about CTA as long as they have demonstrated the product well and getting reasonable engagement on their content.

Kat LaFata agrees:

Kat LaFata

Founder, NY&Bagels

Brand awareness CTAs are sometimes not even needed, whereas performance or sales campaigns always should have a specific CTA (like/follow/buy).

What kind of collaborations work best for brand awareness?

Results:

• Gifting/Seeding: 65.7%
• Long-term paid collaborations/ Ambassador programs: 54.3%
• Short-term paid collaborations (and one-off campaigns): 45.7%
• Other: 5.7%

While most of the options were popular for brand awareness campaigns, marketers most often chose gifting and seeding campaigns as their prioritized initiatives.

I suspected that gifting might be a popular response for this question – since in our influencer gifting survey returned brand awareness as one of its top goals. So I decided to dig a little deeper to see if the kinds of products marketers gifted changed between brand awareness and performance.

Results:

• I gift the same kinds of products: 52%
• I gift best-sellers: 34.8%
• I gift our most unique products: 8.7%
• Other: 4.3%

It turns out that half of marketers don’t adjust the products that they gift if their campaign’s goal is centered around brand awareness. Another nearly 35% of marketers said they gift best-sellers, while 8.7% said they opt for more unique products.

A gifting brand awareness campaign is a great way to get eyes on a new product – or even something that’s coming soon. There’s no better teaser than to gift an influencer with an exclusive product that’s not even out yet to generate a little buzz in their community.

Which kinds of content work best for brand awareness?

I then wondered if there were any particular content formats that were especially well-adapted to brand awareness campaigns. For many marketers, focusing on education was the way to go.

Results:

• Demonstrations/Tutorials: 65.7%
• Get Ready With Me: 62.9%
• Hauls: 51.4%
• Skits: 37.1%
• Other: 20%

Other marketers mentioned personal stories, giveaways, and event content as great brand awareness content.

Clearly, anything educational is going to be a hit for a brand awareness campaign – the idea is to inform your potential customer that your product exists, right? Using a combined approach across different creators and content types will help you really pack a punch with your campaigns.

Which social platforms work best for brand awareness?

Results:

• Instagram: 80%
• TikTok: 68.6%
• YouTube: 40%
• Other: 5.7%

For marketers, Instagram and TikTok were the top two selected social platforms for brand awareness. This makes perfect sense – as we know from how deliverables change that the overall barrier of entry is a lot lower for simple Instagram Reels and TikTok videos (contrasted against YouTube, which is a performance powerhouse, but is a lot more expensive in general).

How should I measure brand awareness campaigns?

Tracking brand awareness campaigns tends to be a little more freestyle than tracking performance campaigns – which hinge on hard sales.

While some metrics popped up consistently in our respondents’ answers, it turns out that marketers were tracking a variety of metrics to measure brand awareness.

Results:

• Engagement: 91.4%
• Reach: 82.9%
• Likes: 74.3%
• Clicks: 54.3%
• Webpage visits: 43.9%
• Downloads: 22.9%
• Other: 8.6%

While engagement, reach, and likes were the most popular metrics for brand awareness, don’t sleep on some of these other metrics.

For example, webpage visits, while not necessarily a direct goal for brand awareness campaigns, is still worth tracking for these campaigns. Customer journeys are often not linear – and having to navigate to an influencer’s profile and through their list of links is friction that not everyone is ready to deal with.

If you’re running a brand awareness campaign, and you see a higher uptick in traffic coming from direct or brand-searches, you can safely assume that your brand awareness campaign is making an impact.

What about ROI?

According to 65.7% of marketers, ROI isn’t the right metric to measure the success of a brand awareness campaign.

For the majority of marketers, ROI just doesn’t correspond to the way you have to quantify a brand awareness initiative. Instead of sales, you’re measuring eyes. You’ll want to think about media value in terms of reach and engagement, which will be easier to measure than dollar amounts.

For Valerija Somi, she measures brand awareness success by how low her costs are:

Valerija Somi

Influencer Manager, Qure Skincare

The main value we're evaluating is CPV/CPM, and the goal is for this number to be as low as possible. Besides that, we will monitor link clicks and website visits to understand how interested the audience is in the brand.

For Kat, she uses the reach and engagement of organic posts as a benchmark and measures her sponsored content against those metrics.

Kat LaFata

Founder, NY&Bagels

ROI is defined by the number of eyes on a campaign within the desired demographic compared to that of the brands average organic posts.

Zuzana mentions that followers can be an interesting metric to measure as well.

Zuzana Jirickova

Influencer Relations Manager, Notino

We're counting with metrics like reach, impressions, views, engagement rate, CPM and CPE but we're also look for a followers growth

But long-term, non-immediate results can be difficult to measure, and even harder to justify – especially facing shrinking marketing budgets. So is brand awareness actually worth it to marketers?

How should I budget brand awareness initiatives?

First, I asked marketers if they were satisfied with the amount of brand initiatives they were doing.

Results:

• I’m happy with the amount of brand awareness we’re doing now: 57.1%
• I wish we were doing more brand initiatives: 42.9%

Over 40% of marketers say they wish they were doing more brand awareness initiatives – and absolutely no one said they wish they were doing fewer brand campaigns.

The short answer is that brand awareness should be a priority for marketers. Performance campaigns are great for that short-term win, but unless you’re competing in a race to the bottom with your prices, brand trust has to be built.

That brand trust is especially important for huge shopping events, like BFCM – where customers don’t necessarily go for the best deals from brands they aren’t already familiar with. Instead, they look among their trusted brands for discounts and deals on the products they already want.

Mark Dandy expressed as much in our recent survey on BFCM.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

The brands that cut through the noise are going to do so in September or October. They’re already ahead of the game. It’s not about discounting early – it’s about making sure you’re front of mind and your customer already knows where to go.

How should I balance brand awareness with performance campaigns?

Marketers, no matter the niche, are always pulled between brand awareness and performance campaigns. I wanted to know how marketers balanced between the two, and whether they focused on one or the other.

Results:

• We only focus on one or the other at a time: 60%
• We only focus on performance: 20%
• We only focus on brand: 5.7%
• Other: 14.3%

For 60% of marketers, they pull their focus to one or the other at a time, for the most part – like Michael Todner.

Michael Todner

Influencer Marketing, Gear4music

It depends on the campaign but largely we will separate the two goals and select influencers and content that matches said goal.

For others, like Nacho Selma, it was possible to do both.

Nacho Selma

Influencer Marketing Manager, Isnach

It all depends on the type of campaign, but in many cases, it is possible to combine both actions. There are collaborations with influencers that provide you with brand recognition as well as conversions and sales.

While a lot of influencer marketing can achieve both goals simultaneously, every collaboration or campaign should have one clear primary goal. Whether you decide to have a secondary goal or not, it’s always important to keep that primary goal in mind, whether you’re focusing on brand awareness or performance.

What percentage of my budget should I dedicate to brand awareness?

I asked marketers what percentage of their budgets was dedicated to brand campaigns (vs performance).

Results:

• 0-25%: 47.1%
• 25%-50%: 41.2%
• 50%-75%: 5.9%
• 75%-100%: 5.9

88.3% of the marketers we polled said they dedicated half or less of their total budget to brand awareness initiatives.

I then asked marketers how willing they (or their companies) were to pay for brand awareness initiatives. It turns out that only a quarter of marketers were willing to spend more for brand awareness initiatives.

Results:

• I’m willing to spend less for brand: 37.1%
• I’m willing to spend the same/similar amounts: 31.4%
• I’m willing to spend more for brand: 24.7%
• Other: 5.7%

I then wondered if maybe budget allocation was on a creator-by-creator basis. I asked marketers if they adjusted their creator compensation budget for brand awareness.

Results:

• I pay creators the same amount (their rates) regardless of the goal of the campaign: 57.1%
• I’m not willing to pay a creator more for brand awareness campaigns: 22.9%
• I’m willing to pay a creator more for brand awareness campaigns: 11.4%
• Other: 8.6%

Well over half of marketers said that they simply pay creators their normal rates, regardless of whether the campaign is focused on brand awareness or performance.

For another nearly 23%, it just wasn’t worth it to pay more for brand awareness campaigns.

The overall trend is that marketers just aren’t willing to pay more for brand awareness – and I get it. It’s really hard to justify when you can’t point to clear sales coming from it, especially since brand awareness campaigns take some time to cook.

Some marketers mentioned anonymously that they wanted to dedicate more to brand awareness, but some companies are a little more shy about dedicating budget to something that doesn’t offer an immediate ROI (even if the ROI comes later).

It’s absolutely worth investing in – as a great brand awareness campaign running concurrently with (or before) a performance campaign can pack a real punch. We also know that when larger shopping events roll around, brand awareness built up over the months prior are what drives customers to think of your brand first and foremost.

That said, it’s normal to be hesitant to dedicate more budget to brand awareness alone in a time where we’re looking for ROI of every last cent. On average, marketers dedicated 31.8% of their overall budgets to brand awareness. A good benchmark for you is 25-35% minimum.

Takeaways

Here are our biggest takeaways from our marketers:

• Brand awareness isn’t as easy as it sounds – especially since it’s a long-term initiative. The good news is that, since it is long-term, there’s plenty of time to make mistakes, learn, and try new things.
• Brand awareness should absolutely be a priority for you: it's about building trust with your audience. This will also help you stay top-of-mind when BFCM and other large shopping events roll around.
• Relax on your briefs and CTAs. Give influencers more freedom for brand campaigns, and opt for softer CTAs that aren’t trying to drive a hard sell.
• Gifting is particularly well-adapted for brand awareness, as are long-term campaigns. Prioritize relationship building with your influencers and transform them into brand ambassadors.
• When tracking brand awareness, opt for engagement, reach, and likes as your benchmarks. However, don’t sleep on monitoring your site visits – as customer journeys are rarely as linear as we imagine them to be.
• Try to dedicate at least 25-35% of your budget to brand awareness. While it’s hard to justify more than that because the return is a bit slower, this is a good amount to still engage in trust-building.

This report was created by expert advice given by influencer marketers just like you! Want to join them? Sign up to take part in our next survey here!

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