6 Pro Tips to Craft an A+ Brand Awareness Influencer Marketing Campaign
November 27, 2024
·
Author
Contributors
... and
more expert contributors
91.4% of marketers in our survey said brand awareness is one of their top three goals with influencer marketing. Then it’s no wonder why influencer marketers are besotted with brand awareness influencer marketing campaigns.
But as simple as brand awareness campaigns sound in theory, they’re riddled with complexities in the real world:
- Should you aim to partner with as many creators as possible to scale brand awareness?
- How should your performance-driven campaigns be different from your brand awareness campaigns?
- What kind of deliverables are suited for brand awareness?
There has to be a method to the madness. In this article, I share six actionable expert tips from influencer marketer pros that’ll answer all your questions.
1: Do influencer gifting campaigns (especially in the beginning)
Influencer gifting campaigns were our survey’s most popular choice of brand awareness initiatives.
And for good reason: gifting campaigns can help you test new creators at scale without burning a hole in your pocket. Unless you sell expensive products, it’s possible to gift your product to many relevant influencers and get the word out about your brand.
Cheyanne Pettyjohn, Director of Influencer Marketing at Rookie Wellness, agrees:
I would recommend starting with gifted brand awareness campaigns. So many creators make their name off of "haul" videos, and would be open to receiving and promoting products for free if they like it.
Here’s an example that illustrates Cheyanne’s advice: Ailyn Oritz (over 2.3M followers) featured Mary's Boutique clothes in one of her hauls. Ailyn’s niche is clothing-related, so Mary’s Boutique isn’t just reaching a large number of people; they’re reaching a large number of its potential customer base.
The best part? Ailyn also continued featuring Mary’s Boutique items in her future videos.
If you’re new to brand awareness campaigns, influencer gifting also gives you a chance to test the waters with minimal financial risk. If you’re experienced, you can also use gifting brand awareness campaigns to experiment with new tactics, make mistakes, and use those insights for your paid partnerships.
Zia Ur Rehman Awais, Influencer Marketing Manager at Vitauthority, also uses influencer gifting in his brand awareness campaigns to put a spotlight on the less popular products in the company’s catalog:
While working on brand awareness campaigns, we usually offer products that might not be popular at the moment. This gets them exposure in the market and helps us get quality content for those products.
💡 Curious about how to run and manage gifting programs? Read the insights from our influencer gifting survey.
2: Set impressions and reach related KPIs
Can you get conversions from brand awareness campaigns? Yes. But should you use sales as a yardstick to measure the success of your brand awareness campaigns? No.
It’s in the name: brand awareness campaigns are designed to raise awareness about your brand and products. The goal is to become a familiar, trusted name in your industry. An anonymous marketer in our survey elaborates:
“For brand awareness initiatives, the focus is typically on increasing visibility, reaching a larger audience, and building a strong, recognizable brand presence. The goal is more about long-term engagement and creating a connection with the audience.”
Take this collab video between Suman and Curlsmith. Suman showcased the differences between a strong hold hair gel and a light hold hair gel. The call-to-action or caption doesn’t entice the viewers to purchase a gel, but to help them decide which type of gel is right for them.
Suman has been creating haircare videos for wavy and curly hair for years. This kind of educational content is right up her alley – helping Curlsmith borrow her seal of trust. And these types of videos can also be easily repurposed, too. Imagine Curlsmith adding a landing page that says, “Confused about which gel is right for you?” and embedding Suman’s video.
Anna-Maria Klappenbach, Community & Brand Marketing Lead at Aumio, explains with an example of how she (very creatively, if I might say!) repurposed influencer content from one of her brand awareness campaigns on Mental Health Awareness Day. First, she collected real stories from her influencer’s audiences:
We asked a handful of creators to talk about mental health in children and asked them to post a sticker to collect personal experiences from their audience.
And then she used those stories as ideas for her Aumio’s social media posts:
A while later, we took those answers and (anonymously) turned them into social media posts, where we had identified the most common themes and some techniques to meet those issues or challenges. The influencers then shared that post in their Stories.
Tamara Torrecillas, Influencer Marketing Manager at Dialect Fragrances, also explains that she doesn’t use brand awareness campaigns to drive sales:
We use brand initiatives to build long-term brand identity and awareness through storytelling and values, rather than driving immediate sales. It’s about being known and shaping loyalty – using broad reach and less direct metrics.
So it’s only natural that you use different metrics to measure the success of your brand awareness campaigns. In our survey, engagement, reach, likes, and clicks – in that order – were the most popular metrics to track the performance of brand awareness campaigns.
Bottom line: use only visibility metrics (like social shares, comments, likes, engagement, etc.) to calculate the ROI from brand awareness campaigns. And also keep a side eye ( 👀) to monitor your website traffic. Customer journey is rarely linear. If direct sales come via a creator, great! But treat it as a bonus – don’t expect it.
3: Prioritize quality over quantity
When you’re finding influencers for your brand awareness campaigns, you need to ensure two things:
- The influencer’s followers should overlap with your potential customer demographics as much as possible
- The influencer has excellent storytelling skills
Now, the first point is true regardless of brand awareness or performance-based campaigns. As Michael Todner, Influencer Marketing Lead at Gear4music, says: not all views are of the same value.
Not all views are equal. While awareness campaigns aim to get the brand in front of as many eyes as possible, these still need to be relevant eyes for the business.
It doesn’t matter if an influencer creates a video that garners millions of views if none of those people would actually ever consider purchasing your product. Ensure you thoroughly analyze an influencer’s profile for audience details.
- Do they have enough followers that overlap with your potential buyers?
- Do they publish videos that align with your brand’s vision and values?
- Do they create content that your target audience would watch and resonate with?
You can use an influencer analysis tool like Modash to examine every nook and cranny of a creator’s profile without doing the heavy lifting of asking them for screenshots.
💡 Wondering what other marketers look at while examining creator profiles? Check the insights from our influencer vetting survey.
The second pointer is crucial for brand awareness influencer campaigns. Storytelling is a useful tool regardless of the kind of campaign, but it has a special emphasis in brand awareness campaigns.
In a performance-driven initiative, a creator could also directly lead into the benefits/results of using a product without much storytelling – especially in short-form videos like Instagram Reels or TikTok videos. It’d still serve the purpose.
But that’s not the case with brand awareness. People will zone out if a story isn’t gripping them. Storytelling will also help increase your brand's recall value since stories are more memorable (and more interesting!) than plain facts.
Anna from Aumio asked creators to share their own stories for the Mental Health Awareness Campaign:
The content needs to be different from a sales-campaign, therefore less scripted and often closer to the heart of the creators. For example, we run campaigns for Mental Health Awareness Day in October where the creators talk about mental health in children.
Lee Drysdale, Affiliate and Partnership Executive at Argento, looks for influencers with storytelling skills (in addition to brand alignment) for awareness campaigns:
When working on a brand awareness campaign, influencers are normally selected for their alignment with the brand, authenticity, and a lot of creative storytelling ability to build trust.
So, while examining a creator’s profile, check if they have impeccable storytelling skills. You have to manually run a fine tooth comb in their content, but it’s 100% worth the effort. Storytelling will allow your product to be presented authentically and seamlessly.
Take the collaboration between Melissa and the paint & wallpaper company Lick. Melissa paints her wall using Lick’s products – you can see the paint can in the entirety of the video. But she isn’t doing a hard-sell of Lick and its products. She’s telling the story of the wall she’s painting, why she has chosen pink as the color for this wall, and bits about her toddler.
Due to her storytelling skills and the video format, viewers will watch till the end to close the loop and see the finished wall.
4: Convert one-off partnerships into long-term influencer relationships when a creator performs well
You can start your brand awareness campaigns with a one-off collaboration to test the waters. But suppose the creator performs well (aka, gives your brand visibility via engagement, website visitors, creates content you can repurpose, etc.). In that case, it’s advisable to double down on their strengths by promoting them to a long-term brand partner.
One anonymous influencer marketer in our survey said:
“Consider establishing ongoing partnerships with influencers rather than one-off campaigns. This can foster deeper connections and authenticity. If you're able to form a friendship based relationship with your influencers, that will be passed on to their followers who will trust and believe in your brand through them.”
This is also why Nycole Hampton, Senior Director of Marketing at GoodRx, advises tracking every metric possible (even if you’re not using them to measure success) while running influencer campaigns:
Just because your goal is awareness doesn't mean you don't care if they're amazing converters or traffic drivers.
You can foster a long-term collaboration via two routes:
- Convert the creator into a brand ambassador
- Convert the creator into an affiliate
The difference: moving a creator from brand awareness campaigns to performance campaigns means you’re expecting them to bring in conversions and not just visibility.
If a creator is bringing in more sales than you expected, convert them into an affiliate by giving them a unique URL or discount code that they can share with their followers. Anna also advises following up your brand awareness campaigns with performance campaigns to see an uptick in sales:
Use a select number of influencers that kick off with a brand awareness post, but then follow up with a performance campaign. Chances are you’ll actually increase sales.
But if you know an influencer’s strength area is their reach, growth rate, and storytelling, recruit them as a brand ambassador. You can set your own terms and conditions, but usually, a brand ambassador is exclusive to your brand and does much more than create influencer content. They attend/participate in events, promote your products unasked, and can have more creative freedom than traditional influencer partners.
A great example is Niamh as a brand partner for Neutrogena. She continually promotes their sunscreen continually on her feed – creating a strong association between the brand and Niamh. She embeds Neutrogena like a chameleon on a leaf. You’d automatically remember Neutrogena if you followed her. (How else do you think I remembered this example? 😉)
Andreea Moise, Influencer Marketing Consultant at HypeMaven, also offers a third option if affiliate partnerships or brand ambassador programs aren’t your thing:
If an influencer performs really well, introduce a gamification table tiered by views with cash bonuses to keep them incentivised to always create content that reaches a lot of people.
Long-term partnerships will help you solidify the brand trust by continually getting associated with the influencer. And you’ll also improve your brand’s overall recall value by getting exposed more times.
💡 Here’s how the pros manage long-term influencer partnerships.
5: Tailor the deliverables and influencer briefs to fit your goals
Your brand awareness campaigns have different goals than your performance-driven initiatives. Then, it’s only natural to shift your expected creator deliverables, too. In our survey, marketers said demonstration or tutorial-style content works best for brand awareness influencer campaigns.
Michael Todner explains the nuances of fitting your deliverables to your objectives:
Largely it's down to what we want to achieve from the awareness. Are we looking to bring light to a particular product (as people don't know it exists), or are we looking to alter the perception of the product? Are we looking to bring awareness to us as a business more generally?
He continues:
We'll tailor the deliverables to fit these needs. Changing messaging, platform, type of influencer we work with, and so on.
In performance-based campaigns, you might focus more on highlighting limited time offers or sales. Even if some content overlaps, the messaging would differ entirely from a brand awareness campaign. For example, at Aumio, brand awareness campaigns focus less on the product but more on topics closely related to the product:
Our brand campaigns always try to do something that doesn’t necessarily bring awareness to the brand, but to an important topic that is important to our brand, like mental health.
Take the collab post between Kayleigh Taylor and The Pink Stuff. Kayleigh is showcasing the product and its effects, but there’s no insistent CTA. You can see a before and after, but there’s no discount code, unique URL, or special offers. The messaging is product-centered, but it still puts awareness front and center.
The primary difference is the call-to-action. In brand awareness campaigns, the sell is softer while in performance-based campaigns, the sell is a bit more direct. Senith Berhane, Global Influencer & Content Marketing Manager at We Are Brands, elaborates:
The deliverables for a brand initiative are all about storytelling and building connections. They usually involve visually appealing content, like lifestyle posts or videos, that highlight the brand’s personality without pushing for a sale.
She continues explaining how performance campaigns’ deliverables differ:
On the other hand, for a performance-based campaign, the deliverables are more direct – focused on driving actions like sales or sign-ups. These include posts with clear calls to action, often using discount codes or affiliate links to track results and measure success.
In a brand awareness campaign, you don’t want to create influencer briefs that speak about buying your products. 82.9% of marketers in our survey said they alter their briefs for brand awareness campaigns.
What should you change? Zoom out and look at the larger picture – focus on building a long-term brand image. Include more details about:
- Your content philosophy
- The kind of reputation you want to uphold in your industry
- Explanation of your brand values and how you embody them
- What differentiates you as a company (not just in products) from your competitors
For example, if you’re a clothing company that believes in inclusivity and sustainability, explain why and how. Do you use only sustainable materials to produce your clothes? Do you offer a wide variety of sizes? Do you offer recycling options to your customers? Include all of these brand-related details in your influencer brief.
Cheyanne Pettyjohn says the ultimate goal is for your brand to become recognizable from influencer content:
When building brand awareness, we ask creators to speak to the brand as a whole. We obviously want them to speak about product benefits, but we also want them to go over the company's mission and who we are, so people can recognize the company from their content.
6: Use brand awareness campaigns to test new niches
If you’ve been in the influencer marketing game for a while, you’ll soon have that itch to experiment – test new kinds of creators, content formats, messaging delivery, and more. Brand awareness campaigns are the perfect place to do that. Lee Drysdale agrees:
This is a perfect good time to pitch some super cool incentives. I also think that if you personally align with the brand you're working with, you've probably already got a lot of creators in mind that you want to partner with the brand – now's the chance!
You don’t want to experiment a lot in performance campaigns because you usually put more money, resources, and tangible ROI expectations on them. Brand awareness campaigns give you a lot of room to branch out of your comfort zone and navigate new waters. Mark a section of your budget for these experimental campaigns.
For example, suppose you’re trying to promote a sunscreen and have only collaborated with skincare creators. In that case, you can:
- experiment with partnering with a fitness creator who recommends using your sunscreen while hiking or running
- or maybe you gift your product to a travel creator who tests your sunscreen's performance on a sunny beach
POKS Spices sending their product to Benedicte Kalala is a perfect example of using awareness campaigns to test new things. Benedicte isn’t a food creator, but she might have audience demographics that overlap with POKS Spices’ customer base. It’s worth a bet!
And Benedicte aces it – she shares a funny, unique, and memorable video. This might not have been possible if POKS Spices hadn’t taken a chance and experimented with a new kind of creator.
💡 Learn: how to identify and test new niches for your influencer program
Brand awareness campaigns are a long game
More than anything, brand awareness campaigns require patience. You might be able to see conversions rolling in right off the bat with performance campaigns, but you might not become a well-known company through brand awareness campaigns that quickly. It takes time for the impressions and engagement to scale.
But the payoff is worth it. Brand awareness campaigns – when done right – build long lasting company trust. This, in turn, will also help your performance campaigns gain momentum.
Find your next brand awareness influencer on Modash. We have over 250M influencer profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to help you find the right creator match. Take it for a spin today. No credit card needed.
