Leveraging Creator Marketing to Drive Brand Awareness At Scale

By Lindsay Jerutis

While Creator Marketing is a crucial tactic for driving sales and conversions, it can be even more effective for generating strong brand awareness. A brand awareness campaign allows brands to spread their messaging in an authentic way by utilizing Creator partnerships and engaging, meaning content. With a multi-channel approach and diverse casting strategy, brand awareness campaigns can amplify brand visibility and build engagement and buzz with a brand’s target audience.

Here’s how Collective Voice’s strategic approach harnesses the power of Creators to supercharge brand partners’ social media reach.

The benefits of a brand awareness campaign

Building brand awareness is crucial for brands seeking to establish their presence, engage with their target audience, and achieve wide-ranging business goals. While many Marketers focus on sales and conversions, the key to establishing brand identity and growing your audience is awareness. 

Awareness builds identity and trust. As awareness grows, try leveraging emotional connection to drive more conversions. Then from awareness to conversion, it’s a natural progression for sustained growth and success. 

Here are some of its benefits:

Establishing a brand’s identity

A brand awareness Creator campaign plays a pivotal role in establishing and solidifying a brand’s identity. By partnering with relevant Creators who align with the brand’s values, personality, and target audience, the campaign can effectively communicate the brand’s unique attributes, mission, and positioning. 

Through authentic and engaging content creation, Creators can showcase the brand’s core values, visual aesthetics, and brand messaging, helping establish a distinctive and recognizable identity to an audience.

Enabling brand storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool for brands to create emotional connections and deeper engagement with their audience. A brand awareness Creator campaign offers a platform to tell compelling stories about the brand’s values, mission, and/or impact it seeks to make in the world. Such a campaign can create a compelling and memorable brand story that resonates with their audience, fostering brand affinity and long-term brand awareness. 

Targeting the right audience

A brand awareness campaign enables brands to establish, reach, and expand their target audience. Creators are trusted resources with the power to introduce a brand to their followers and foster a genuine audience connection. 

By strategically partnering with Creators whose followers align with the desired audience demographics, interests, and behaviors, the campaign can effectively target desired customers and followers.

Increasing cultural relevance

Tapping into viral cultural moments through awareness campaigns not only helps brands stay current and relatable, but also supercharges their potential social media reach.

How creator marketing creates brand awareness on social media

With the increasing number of brands vying for attention and the constant evolution of algorithms and user behavior, standing out amongst competitors has become more challenging. However, utilizing Creators for a brand awareness campaign can help brands break through the noise, tap into new audiences, and accelerate the growth of their social media channels.

Attracting new demographics

Creator campaigns offer an opportunity to tap into new demographics, expand the brand’s reach beyond its existing customer base, and access previously untapped markets. Casting Creators from different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, genders, and locations allows the brand’s message to resonate with a wide range of new audience members.

Increasing social media reach

A Creator campaign can serve as a catalyst for significantly increasing a brand’s social media reach and impressions. Leveraging a Creator’s extensive network can multiply the brand’s visibility and generate impressions that may have otherwise been difficult to achieve organically.

By strategically partnering with Creators who possess a large and engaged audience relevant to the brand’s target market, brands can tap into the vast potential of these Creators’ followers. These are household names with larger followings who are used to reaching a wide number of people at once, like placing a Super Bowl ad. 

There is also a huge value in working with Micro-Creators to target a more active and engaged audience. These Creators often specialize in niche content verticals like clean beauty or interior design, and help a brand gain awareness among a specific demographic. 

Encouraging more social engagement

Through a strategic Creator campaign, brands can generate higher levels of engagement, including likes, comments, shares, and saves, on their social media posts. In addition to this notable boost in engagement metrics, Creators’ unique, authentic, and inspiring content can help brands foster meaningful conversations, create a sense of community, and ultimately deepen the relationship between the brand and its audience.

Brand awareness campaigns are also ideal for utilizing paid Creator boosting to amplify messaging. When working with a Creator in a paid boosting campaign, brands can build highly relevant audiences from their engaged followers. These look-a-like audiences enable brands to expand reach even further to users who are likely to be interested in their content and products.

Collective Voice’s strategic execution of brand awareness campaigns

Collective Voice’s approach to brand awareness campaigns leverages four core strategies to maximize social reach and brand buzz:

1. Selection of relevant, diverse Creators: Collective Voice meticulously selects Creators based on audience demographics, interests, and engagement levels. Our campaigns cast a diverse range of Creators and activate Creators skilled at building brand excitement, helping our partners reach larger, more diverse audiences to amplify their brand message.
2. Collaborative content creation: Through engaging and relatable content optimized for each Creator’s top-performing channels, Creators have the flexibility to showcase how the brand’s products are central to their lives. This creative freedom encourages the development of engaging, meaningful, and authentic content that aligns with the brand’s values and message to create a genuine connection with the audience and enhance brand credibility.
3. Deployment of a multi-channel approach: With our brand partners, we employ a multi-channel strategy and optimize Creator deliverables based on their own top-performing platforms to maximize brand visibility and engagement. This ensures that the campaign reaches a wider audience and facilitates engagement on platforms where the target audience is most active. 
4. Tracking and optimization: Collective Voice utilizes robust tracking tools to measure campaign effectiveness, track key performance indicators, and optimize performance in real-time. These data-driven insights enable continuous improvement and strategic decision-making throughout the campaign.
5. 360 Creator activations: Our strategy doesn’t begin and end with a Creator’s social media post. Through customized gifting, event activations, live streaming, in-store visits, and more, our activations have reached audiences both online and offline, building brand buzz across a variety of touch points.
6. Paid boosting: Through boosting, we amplify the Creator content to a brand’s target audience to ensure we’re maximizing reach to the right people.

Enabling brand partners to achieve their brand awareness objectives

Collective Voice’s strategic approach to Creator campaigns has effectively empowered our brand partners to achieve their brand awareness goals. Here are a few examples of how our brand awareness strategy has helped partners achieve important marketing wins:

1. Increased brand mentions and reach: By activating TikTok Creators to create their own content to participate in a branded TikTok dance challenge for a brand partner, a Collective Voice campaign received over 15 million social media impressions, increased cultural relevance, and generated interest. 
2. Achieved virality: With our customized, multi-tiered casting and campaign management, one brand partner’s campaign received high-traffic press mentions, and one of the Creator’s videos garnered over three million organic views and a 187% engagement rate on social media.
3. Amplified brand values: Through an evergreen approach, Collective Voice worked with beauty Creators to create buzz around key products for a high-end skincare brand, effectively informing and engaging audiences by emphasizing the brand’s values of clean and sustainable ingredients.
4. Reached younger demographics: By partnering with LGBTQIA+ and other diverse Creators, one brand partner drove awareness and visibility for their products among Gen Z audiences. The campaign effectively targeted this coveted young audience and achieved impressive organic reach.
5. Enhanced brand positioning: For a well-known heritage brand looking to re-establish themselves as a modern luxury lifestyle brand, Collective Voice leveraged our Creator network to drive awareness and buzz for the rebrand. The campaign successfully repositioned the brand in the market, serving nearly 12 million impressions to date and supporting various brand initiatives, including the brand’s latest category launch. Not to mention, the brand was able to repurpose imagery Creator’s made for their owned and operated channels, giving the campaign more legs. 

Overall, Collective Voice’s strategic execution of brand awareness campaigns, combined with our curated network of Creators, has consistently delivered impactful results for our brand partners, helping them achieve their brand awareness objectives and drive business growth.

About The Author

Lindsay Jerutis

As the driving force behind Collective Voice, Lindsay is at the forefront of the Creator Marketing industry as the company’s General Manager. With over 2 decades of experience in digital commerce and operations, she navigates consumer trends, empowers Creators to build thriving businesses, and emphasizes the importance of brands investing in Creator marketing to drive growth and success. Learn more about her here.