Below, you can find more details about the goals that our product can help you achieve.
The goals listed here are under constant assessment by the Social Cat team to align with what brands are looking for.
The Brand Awareness Goal
Brand Awareness is a term used to describe how familiar are consumers with a particular brand and its products. Therefore, there is a good chance that when you read the previous sentence, you thought of a brand you are familiar with, and you are in his target audience.
That means you are aware of the brand's existence, which for them translates into Brand Awareness.
Brand Awareness becomes challenging for businesses, especially for small, emerging brands, due to multiple reasons:
- Hard to track or measure - I would even say impossible (probably not even something you want to track)
- Financial Resources - It requires a constant allocation of financial resources
- Other Resources - Dedicate time, effort, and energy on a monthly or even weekly basis
- The Time Component - It takes time to see results, and sometimes you don't even know results are coming from Brand Awareness
There are multiple ways to build brand awareness, but we will focus specifically on building this by working with micro-creators on Social Cat in this guide.
- Understand how many products you can send to influencers every month.
Understanding this mainly depends on your business cash flow. Do the math to know how many you can send out monthly just for Brand Awareness. As mentioned, it does not need to be a significant number as much as it needs to be constant. - Read this guide and see which type of campaign better suits the Brand Awareness Goal.
- Pay attention to potential collaborations you receive from Social Cat, and based on what type of campaign is suited for this goal, try to match with one, two or how many you would like for this goal.
- Match with the influencer, discuss the details, send the product out
Notes:
Brand Awareness is a long-term initiative, and it works like a snowball effect. The more you do it, the more people will talk about your brand, which means you can get more feedback to improve your product, and eventually, more customers.
At the same time, Brand Awareness needs to be done regularly; that is why we recommend setting up a process in place. Even sending out only one product a month or working with one influencer for this goal will reap benefits.
Often, this is an overlooked goal for brands as they focus on the short-term benefits - conversions.
Which influencers are a better fit for Brand Awareness?
- High Engagement Rate (> 1.0) See this guide to understand this metric
- A minimum of 5000 followers
User-Generated Content
User-generated content - photos and videos of specific products or even services created by users, in this case - influencers.
In advertising, the content is usually called creative.
Why is this important?
Content is needed to cover your other marketing channels - Email Marketing, Website, Social Media Advertising and so on. As a brand, you need fresh content regularly to cover your products or services.
Most of the time, brands hire professional photographers or do it themselves in house.
Hiring professionals turn out to be expensive, and if you opt to do it yourself, it takes quite a bit of time and energy, which could be dedicated to other business tasks.
Which influencers are a better fit for user generated content?
- A feed with high-quality photos. What you are looking for here is people with good photography skills that can provide quality content with your products.
- Personality. If you are looking for videos with your product in action, make sure the influencers are not camera-shy, and they regularly post stories or reels with voice over them.
Conversions
Ultimately, each brand is looking to leverage Influencer Marketing and generate conversions.
In marketing, a conversion happens when a user takes a specific, desired action - download your e-book, book an appointment, purchase an item and more.
On Social Cat, the two most common types of conversions are purchases (sales) since we work with numerous e-commerce brands and book appointments for different services as we work with a lot of brands offering a wide range of in-person services.
Influencer Marketing proves to be effective in bringing conversions when done right. The challenge for most brands is finding the influencers that can get conversions and work with them regularly.
From our experience, this is a matter of A/B testing with different influencers, different types of placements, and messaging to find the right formula. As with any Marketing channel, unfortunately, there is no silver bullet here either, and you have to be aware that the formula that works, for now, might not work in a few weeks or months.
To make this process smoother, we have a few suggestions: 👇
- Stories Campaign
If you are looking for conversions particularly, we suggest working exclusively via Instagram Stories, with influencers willing to add link stickers to your product.
Adding a link sticker allows users to come directly to your website, making the process smoothly without any extra steps. - Engagement
Pay close attention to the engagement, especially for conversions. For example, if you are looking just for content, then engagement might not be as critical, as you are more interested in the quality of the content.
For conversions, it is different. You need an authentic and engaged audience to convert.
If the influencer has a lot of random comments (plain emojis, basic comments, etc.), this is usually a sign of fake engagement, and we recommend avoiding it altogether. - Followers/Following Ratio
When we approve influencers, we look for 3 to 1 followers - following ratio. For example, 1500 followers with 500 following.
We found out that influencers with similar numbers of followers and following are usually part of follow per follow loops, and we recommend avoiding them.
Final Notes
On Social Cat, we see different types of approaches to the goals above. Working with influencers for conversions solely takes time and requires finding the right creators and the right kind of message.
Whenever brands find this type of influencer, they make sure they stick together and collaborate regularly. As a result, brands can build long-term connections with several creators that generate conversions and work exclusively with them.
For the rest of them, brands, in general, go for user-generated content they later use in Social Media Ads, which is a more powerful way to generate the much-desired conversions.
For more details on Social Media Ads and how to integrate content from influencers, check out these guides.
In regards to the Awareness goal, brands usually mix this either with conversions or user-generated content.
