A successful call-to-action campaign depends less on the sweetness of the deal than it does on the familiarity of the brand.
The same can be said for influencer engagement when targeting journalists and/or media outlets.
Journalists and other influencers tend to follow the brands of well-known companies, and therefore news that concerns them, whether good or bad, is picked up quickly. How nice for those companies.
The problem is that it takes time to build your foundation; months or even years can be spent marketing your brand, getting it to a level where influencers recall you with zero effort. But the time and money spent targeting journalists, interest groups, and the general public pays off when you have their ear for a major announcement or product launch.
Here are three tips to increase influencer engagement through brand awareness:
1. Create and tell your brand’s story
The importance of the human connection can not be overstated. A product without an appealing human story is just a product, but when people feel a connection, that product assumes a powerful emotional quality. If your brand’s story can build a connection, you’ll be that much closer to achieving quick and easy recall, and that much closer to having journalists choose you to talk about.
2. Be consistent
By being consistent, you build trust, and trust leads to loyalty, loyalty to repeated interactions. And those are the source of success. As a marketer and best-selling author Seth Godin says, “Being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business.” Influencers, too, prefer to be associated with steady and consistent companies.
3. Make an impact
Your product solves a problem, even if your audience doesn’t realize they have one. Choose to market the difference: this is you before our product, this is you after. There’s a reason they should choose you; keep showing them. Influencers like sharing tidy arguments.
It isn’t difficult to point out companies that excel with their branding; they’re the ones that the media continuously puts in front of us.
The cycle is simple: elevated public awareness will result in ever more publicity, which results in elevated public awareness. The hard part is inserting your company into that cycle.
Use these three tips as guidelines for influencer engagement. If you can effectively tell your brand’s story, be consistent in every outward-facing activity, and make a worthy impact in your market, your brand will grow in visibility and clout. If you stick with it, you’ll reach a tipping point, journalists will start coming to you instead of the other way around, and struggling with media outreach will be a thing of the past.
Struggling to find influencers to amplify coverage? Contact us to discover how you can leverage Agility PR Solution’s global media database and pinpoint key contacts and influential audiences for your communications.
