Using influencers to increase brand awareness is a relatively new marketing tactic, but it’s quickly growing in popularity. This is because it allows you to work with a trailblazer in your industry, introduce your brand to their already engaged audience, and, if all goes well, pique interest in your business that prompts brand loyalty.
Marketers everywhere find that influencer marketing is beneficial when reaching out to new demographics. It’s easier to reach new demographics when you have someone they trust making the introduction. That’s essentially the role of influencers.
Read on for how to utilize influencer marketing to help build brand awareness among new market demographics.
Establish Clear Goals for Influencer Marketing
Before you do anything, you must be clear about why you want to deploy an influencer marketing strategy. It shouldn’t be because it’s the “it” marketing tactic right now. Instead, influencer marketing must make sense for the demographic you’re trying to reach.
Answer the following questions to establish clear goals for your influencer marketing strategy:
- Why influencer marketing?
- How do you envision influencer marketing helping you break into a new market demographic?
- Why influencer marketing for this demographic?
- What results do you want from these campaigns?
- What KPIs will you measure to ensure you’re on track to get those results?
After you’ve established goals for your influencer marketing efforts, it’s time to do some research.
Do Some Serious Market and Target Audience Research
When your influencer marketing goals are in place, it’s best to conduct thorough research on your market and target audience. Find out how your market has changed and why this new demographic is a great landing place for expanding your target audience.
Additionally, you want to research how influencers impact your market and resonate with your target audience. You can start with manual research, but implementing data analytics tools is the best strategy for gathering large amounts of data and obtaining insights.
In addition to market research, you must spend just as much time studying potential influencers.
Thoroughly Research Potential Influencers
With so many influencers out there, it’s easy to just pick a few famous people in your niche and blindly go with them. However, it’s in your best interest to spend lots of time researching potential influencers. Just because they have a huge following doesn’t mean they’re suitable for your business or the demographic you’re trying to connect with.
In your research, you want to pay special attention to protecting your business from fraudulent influencer marketing. Unfortunately, there’s a long list of influencers out there using fraudulent strategies to increase their appeal to marketers. For instance, an influencer may purchase fake followers to increase their numbers. Then, you work with them and they generate little to no results because their following is artificial.
So, do your due diligence when researching potential influencers to work with. Ensure you’re knowledgeable of the red flags on someone’s profile, like thousands of likes on a post but no engagement. Also, you can use artificial intelligence to sift through influencer profiles and spot potential fraud for you.
In researching potential fits for your influencer marketing strategy, some, if not all, of your top choices should be micro-influencers.
Start With Micro-Influencers
According to Impact Plus, “Micro-influencers are individuals that have between 1,000 to 1,000,000 followers/audience members and are considered experts in their respective niche.” These smaller audiences allow these influencers to have personalized interactions. This deeper connection also results in greater engagement.
Micro-influencers are much more affordable to work with than a celebrity or influencer with millions of followers. Influencers with a following of 1,000-100,000 are who you want to focus on. Ensure their target audience matches yours and that it includes the new demographic you wish to reach.
Once you’ve generated a solid list of potential micro-influencers to work with, start growing your relationship with them by doing the following:
- Follow them on all of their social media accounts
- Like, share, and comment on their posts
- Join their live streams
- Visit their website and share content from it on your page
- Tag them in relevant posts
- Join their email lists
- Subscribe to their Youtube channel
As you grow your relationships with potential influencers, start drafting ideas for your partnership.
Map Out the Details of Each Partnership
As you develop your relationship with your chosen influencers, you’ll eventually initiate the conversation about partnering with them. Should they show interest, be prepared to show them how you envision the partnership by sharing a loose outline of what it would entail.
For instance, let’s say you’re looking to launch a new product to capture your new market segment. An element of that new launch is your influencer marketing campaign with this particular influencer. You would share with them:
- The launch date
- If you’d like to create a custom package design
- Branding designs
- Their role in the product announcement
- The promotional and sales materials you want to create with them
- Which platforms you wish to market on
- How you plan to include them in the content creation process
- Cross-promotion opportunities
Ultimately, you want to have an idea of how you want to work with each influencer so you can clearly communicate this vision to them when the time is right.
Conclusion
Using influencers to increase brand awareness in a new market demographic requires a solid strategy, an openness to experiment, and patience. Use the above information as a guide to utilizing influencer marketing to tap into a part of your market you couldn’t before.