Businesses Use Influencer Marketing to Lift Brand Recall
Companies choose to use influencer marketing for many possible reasons. The most straightforward reason for using influencer marketing, however, is that it can effectively help you attain your marketing goals. A typical marketing goal is to increase the reach and recognition of a brand’s name. Quite a few businesses have discovered that influencer marketing can be the best way for you to lift brand recall.
US Polo Assn Found Influencer Marketing Lifted Brand Recall by 95%
Marketing Dive recently reported about the success of influencer making for lifting brand recall for US Polo Assn, the official clothing line of the US Polo Association, who oversees the sport in the USA.
They joined with influencers Tommy DiDario, Elly Brown, Brittany Fullwood and Saul Rasco for a campaign designed to raise awareness and drive store sales. The campaign was a tremendous success, with surveys finding that it lifted brand recall by 95%.
Influencer Marketing Can Help at All Stages of the Marketing Funnel
In the past, there has been concern about the difficulty in measuring the benefits of influencer marketing. We recently suggested how you can track your influencer marketing campaigns to yield the best ROI. In that article, we stressed the importance of defining your goals, with expanding brand awareness being listed as the second most crucial type of goal set by brands engaged in influencer marketing.
On a simplistic level, marketing exists merely to sell goods. However, the reality is that in most industries, people are not going to immediately go and buy a product the moment they see an ad. Potential customers have to go through a whole series of stages, as they move down the marketing funnel, from initial awareness of the product at the top, until the point where they are ready to make a purchase at the bottom.
The exact marketing funnel, the number of levels potential customers must go through, and the time they take, differs from industry to industry. However, on a simple basis, you can split the funnel into three sections: Lead Generation → Lead Nurture → Sales.
You could split that one stage further down: Awareness→Interest→Consideration→Intent→Evaluation→Purchase
Now, as tempting as it may be to pitch all your influencer marketing to make sales (i.e., the Purchase sector of the funnel), you would probably be highly disappointed by your results. Unless you are in a highly generic niche with little interest in brands (a mass product such as fresh fruit and vegetables, perhaps) your sales-targeted marketing will do little good. You first need to create brand awareness and lift brand recall (the Awareness / Lead Generation part of the marketing funnel).
Of course, once you have established brand awareness you can also use influencer marketing to keep those people who have moved to lower stages of the funnel, helping build leads’ interest, nurturing them, proving them with precise product benefits once they reach the Intent and Evaluation stages.
Follow Up Surveys to the US Polo Assn Influencer Marketing
The primary aim of the US Polo Assn campaign was to build brand awareness and brand recall. They carried out a follow-up consumer survey and discovered that 88% of the respondents said influencer partnerships make them more aligned with the U.S. Polo Assn. brand. Specifically, 71% of the participants said they intended to take one or more actions after seeing an influencer partnership, 35% planned to visit the U.S. Polo Assn. website, with 35% deciding to make an immediate purchase with 56% likely to buy in the future.
The influencer campaign clearly captured people’s attention, at the top of the funnel, and channeled a high percentage of them down the various funnel levels.
Influencers Can Have a Huge Impact on Making Consumers Aware of a Product
influencers are respected people with fanbases of supporters, eager to hear their ideas and suggestions. Their followers/subscribers will usually even accept #sponsored or #ad posts because they believe that the influencer wouldn’t recommend anything, he didn’t value.
Most influencers have a more substantial following than the brands they work with. This gives an excellent opportunity for brands to build brand awareness and recall with people they would not have otherwise been able to reach.
Brand awareness tactics are now often more subtle than in the past. These are far more likely to work than heavy-handed sales pitches to people who scarcely know your product exists. It may be as simple as a fashion influencer wearing one of your outfits, making it look as attractive as possible. Foodies have long been the master of creating mouth-watering campaigns, featuring delectable food images.
Many of the most authentic influencer campaigns involve an influencer sharing photos of themselves using a particular product.
Quite a few of the more memorable influencer campaigns don’t even feature the sponsor’s product. They merely aim to build up a greater awareness of their name, improving the chances of brand recall.
Red Bull Influencer Marketing
Red Bull is an unusual brand. They work extensively with influencers. Yet, they have built their own social accounts up so successfully that they have the same support levels as mega- influencers, support that otter brands can only dream about.
To quote Superrb: “It’s safe to say Red Bull are pretty badass when it comes to marketing. They haven’t just got their ducks in a row; they’ve got ducks with frickin’ laser beams.”
Red Bull has dramatically built up awareness both of its product and its slogan: “Red Bull gives you wings.” Red Bull played on their slogan to “give wings” to athletes’ ideas, giving them a platform where they could make some of these crazy ideas a reality. Red Bull hasn’t restricted itself to working with athletes, either. They have also taken on board talented people in music and gaming.
The influencers aren’t spending their time actively promoting the Red Bull energy drink. All Red Bull wants is a brand association with talented, innovative people. Each post showing an influencer doing something crazy, inventive or clever, merely includes a reference to Red Bull, keeping their name in peoples’ minds. They work with Red Bull’s other marketing activities to ensure excellent brand awareness and recall.
You Want High Influencer Reach for Effective Brand Recall, but it Must be Relevant
You may find that different influencers work most effectively for your brand at varying stages of the marketing funnel. Lower down the funnel, when you are trying to move towards a sale, you need to work on building up trust. At this stage, niche micro-influencers will often be your best bet, particularly if they have a reputation for authentic, reliable content.
However, at the top of the funnel, you want your message to go far and wide. The more people who see posts about you, the greater awareness there is of you. Your budget obviously affects your decisions here, but it is often advisable to go for more significant influencers with a sizable reach at this stage. Of course, you still need to ensure that you are targeting influencers who appeal to your target customer — there is little point in having thousands of irrelevant people knowing about your brand.
Adidas knew how to find this balance when they looked to increase their share of the female sports apparel market. Being a well-known sports clothing brand, they can work with celebrity influencers if they choose. But they had to think about who they were targeting with their influencer marketing. According to Adidas’ senior vice president of brand marketing, Eric Liedtke, the typical person they wanted to enter the marketing funnel was not the kind who would “follow the Real Madrid’s, she doesn’t follow the James Hardens, she follows her own cycle of influencers, and they are typically on Instagram or YouTube or the social media areas we tap into”.
Instead, Adidas worked with 25 relevant influencers who could enable brand recall from the correct market. The influencers weren’t all athletes. They included models, authors and personal trainers. The common factor was that they held a high social media presence in the places where young women spent their time.
Using SocialBook to Find Influencers Who Will Help Your Brand Recall
As we have stated many times in the past, the first stage of influencer marketing is setting your goals. If your goals relate to brand recall and focus on top-of-the-funnel awareness, you are probably going to want to begin your search by focusing on audience demographics. Look for people who target the types of people who you think could eventually make useful customers. You don’t need to narrow your search too closely now but eliminate people whose audience is clearly wrong for your brand. For example, if you sell lipstick, you will probably want to work with a female-skewed demographic and can eliminate any male-focused influencer.
Then look closely at your potential influencers’ reach and engagement rates. Does their channel perform better than the average person’s? For brand awareness, you want to work with influencers with a reasonable number of followers who still have time to engage with their followers.
Look at their past brand mentions. Do they have a record of mentioning firms like yours? Go into their social media channels and examine the types of mentions they have made. Do you believe that they have generated brand awareness and recall for those brands?
Finally, you will obviously know your own budget. Check each potential influencer’s estimated price range, and cost per 1,000 impressions. Is this influencer a possibility for you to partner with, or are they beyond your financial capabilities at the moment?
Remember, when you focus on partnering with influencers for brand recall, you need to target influencers with a broad reach, but who still target your potential customers, without going too far outside that market.
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