Increase Awareness

When you partner with an influencer, you create the ability to increase awareness around your business. Being able to share your brand with a new set of followers can be incredibly beneficial to increasing your recognition.

To effectively approach a partnership, it’s important to work with someone who has a similar niche as you. If your brand is similar to an influencer’s, you have a stronger chance in not only appealing to their audience, but in retaining them as your followers too. For example, if a health and wellness company partners with an individual in the fitness industry, their audience is already known to have a genuine interest in that lifestyle. It’s a natural fit.

A great way to start off this relationship is to provide the influencer with access to your services or products. Simply having them highlight your services or products with their audience builds excitement and interest around your business.

It’s well known that it can be difficult to build trust. People are much more likely to rely on the recommendations and suggestions from a friend or family member. Luckily for businesses, influencers have become an extension of that trusted inner circle.

Influencers play an integral role in humanizing a brand and making it feel more approachable to their audience. Influencers have dedicated their time to building relationships with their audience and creating a natural and authentic space with them. When an influencer talks about products they love, services they use, or places they go, it feels like a conversation with a friend. This is a large benefit of influencer marketing.

User Generated Content or UGC is any form of content (videos, reels, images, copy, etc.) that is created by someone using a product or service outside of its brand. This is another area where influencers can play a vital role.

In partnering with an influencer, they can create content and provide it to you to use on your website, social media channels and in your advertising. Your partner influencer has a strong following because of who they are and how they approach their content. Having influencers create content for you is having UGC in their tone of voice and in their style. This helps further your brand recognition by being relatable to their audience, while also building trust with yours.

This plays to your advantage because it allows the content from your brand to look natural, authentic, credible, and trustworthy. It’s a win-win scenario. Their audience can see someone they know using your product or service, and they can then visualize it fitting into their own lives.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Stanley Cup, and we don’t mean the end of season NHL championship. We’re talking about the Instagram favourite 40 ounce, insulated, reusable drink cup. It seems that the Stanley Cup is all over social media. But would you believe that this beloved product was actually discontinued in 2019 because they weren’t popular? 

This is where the influencer marketing strategy came in. The team behind The Buy Guide loved the Stanley Cup, and after finding out it was discontinued, they decided to take action. The Buy Guide sent the cup to popular figures on social media. This piqued the interest of Stanley executives, especially after a former Bachelorette reached out to them asking why her favourite cup had been discontinued. 

Stanley finally agreed to let The Buy Guide purchase 5000 cups to sell to see if they could make it a “must-have” accessory and reach a new market of women. The cup sold out. With smart marketing from The Buy Guide partnering with influencers online and using a women-selling-to-women model, the Stanley Cup became the must-have drink accessory. Stanley Cup content has been viewed on TikTok 3.4 billion times and sales are up 300% year over year. 

With each new collection drop, the Stanley cup sells out within days, if not hours. Influencer marketing turned a run-of-the-mill cup in an over saturated market into a status symbol that every influencer and follower wants to have. 

Ready to Add Influencer Marketing to Your Strategy?

Influencer marketing is all the buzz right now and we don’t see it going anywhere. It can be approached by any business, no matter your size, to build awareness and trust through online content in a meaningful way.

If you’re looking for support getting started with an influencer marketing strategy, or would like more information, reach out to us at hello@thesmallsocial.com. We would be happy to set up a discovery call to find out how we can help you grow your business online.