You can’t make a sale without having any brand awareness.

Gatorade knows this, which is why they, like all other successful brands, capitalized on the power of influencer marketing as a part of their social media marketing strategy.

A successful social media strategy begins with understanding your audience.

Gatorade knows its audience well: athletes of all ages, levels, and abilities. While all athletes have differing goals and dreams about what they want out of life, one thing is consistent: they all want to feel good while performing, and they all have athletes they look up to and aspire to be.

Gatorade also knows that its target audience is heavily attached to social media (as most audiences are), and are easily influenced (as most people are).

Enter in: influencer marketing.

Gatorade invests in partnering with influential athletes as a large part of their advertising budget.

One thing that Gatorade does well is they understand the impact that comes with a good investment. While many businesses are scared to invest and spend money on marketing and advertising, it’s the businesses that understand how crucial it is to have strong marketing and advertising. The key is to make sure that the investment is strategic.

As a marketing agency headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we are very familiar with the hype and influence that Caitlin Clark, Iowa Woman’s Basketball star, has; not only with Iowa Hawkeye fans, but as a female athlete nationwide. To Gatorade, she is a highly strategic and impactful partner to help build Gatorade’s brand awareness with the right people.

Influencer marketing done right matches the right person with the right product.

Let’s go back to Gatorade’s target audience again: athletes. For influencer marketing to REALLY make an impact, a brand needs to understand that there are subsets to their audience. For example, Gatorade understands that “young female athletes” is a, perhaps, under-reached segment of their overall audience of athletes.

Knowing that “young female athletes” are the exact audience that is wildly supportive of and influenced by Caitlin Clark created a massive opportunity; one that Gatorade took full advantage of.

In order to make the most out of a pricey brand awareness campaign that involves content creation, advertising, influencer payout, and product placement, they needed a product that is attractive to the audience they’re trying to reach.

They nailed it. A purple, pink, blue, and yellow bottle with Caitlin’s number and her mission of empowering young girls to dream big central to the bottle’s design – Gatorade has the influencer and product design matched perfectly.

Influencer marketing done right will strategically build hype and anticipation.

Hype and anticipation were built with ease in this campaign.

Fuel Your Dreams was the name of the campaign, and it perfectly blended the taglines and missions of both Gatorade and Caitlin.

It took precisely one post to break the website; the one flaw I see in this campaign. Their product design, the quality and precision of the social media post imagery, and the thoughtful partnership all came together to create a wildly successful start to the campaign.

The goal of influencer marketing should be established prior to strategizing the campaign.

What’s the use of spending millions of dollars on a brand awareness campaign?

Before you begin marketing and advertising, you must ask yourself what you want to get out of it. What will give you a positive return? How will you determine success?

For Gatorade, theirs is seemingly two-fold.

First, is brand awareness. They will undoubtedly be tracking the reach and impact this campaign creates and correlating that data with the increase in sales.

Second is the sales. How many $45 bottle-and-towel sets will be sold? Will their sales revenue from the product sales outweigh the costs they spent on this campaign? Maybe they expect it to, and it’s one of their goals. Maybe they don’t expect it to, but they are also measuring success as sales + reach + future sales.

If you’re going to engage in influencer marketing (or social media marketing in general), you need to maximize the effectiveness of your efforts.

You can’t just partner with an influencer, take some product shots, have them post a few posts, and expect high sales.

Gatorade knows this, which is why they’ve implemented a brilliant funnel.

They made a post that announced the product and partnership. The Call To Action was to visit the Gatorade website, where the product was available.

They invested in quality, well-planned imagery of the offer, which increased the perceived value and created a more substantial buzz. When you see the visual, you are immediately drawn to desire.

The landing page setup for the product was perfect. Easy to navigate with the product at the top, a clear button to click, some images of Caitlin and the product, and then slide of related products.

Here’s my favorite thing about what Gatorade has done in this entire campaign (from a marketing perspective). They knew their audience SO well, and they knew their product was going to draw deep desire; quickly, they knew they could add in an extra step prior to allowing people to purchase. In order to purchase, you have to make a Gatorade iD account on their website. You have to enter your email address and make a password. And you know what? People didn’t blink an eye before creating an account. SO many people did so that it broke the site temporarily.

This makes me believe that their main goal for this campaign isn’t sales of this water bottle but to capture and gain new and lasting customers.

Gatorade has now successfully captured the email addresses and demographic information of thousands of people.

Absolutely brilliant. Gatorade will use the demographic information as a data set and tool for future marketing and advertising initiatives. Data is priceless.

Gatorade will also now be able to move all of those newly subscribed people into a nurturing email communication system. They will likely create a new segment that contains only people who subscribed to emails and created an account on their website through the Fuel Your Dreams campaign and will, over time, send emails specifically to that segment when it strategically makes sense to.

Those people will also now be receiving sales emails that will undoubtedly increase sales of other Gatorade products. Over time, new sales will be harder to attribute to this campaign, but generally speaking, Gatorade’s annual revenue will grow for years to come because of this campaign.

What can you learn from the Fuel Your Dreams campaign, which utilized influencer marketing on social media, to apply to your own business?

There are 5 main takeaways here that you apply to your own social media marketing strategy:

1. Understand your audience and the different segments within your audience. Understand what drives them, what their interests are, what their goals and dreams are, and how they are influenced.
2. Before you decide to market an offer or launch a new campaign, you need to clearly understand your business goal and how your campaign will help you achieve it. Goals don’t always have to be measured in immediate sales. Goals can be measured by reach, annual revenue, email subscribers, etc.
3. When you think of a social media campaign, you have to understand that to have your business benefit in a revenue capacity from it, you have to include off-social media tactics that nurture your audience. You need to think of your Call-To-Actions and how you will use each touchpoint to further nurture and engage your audience.
4. Campaigns aren’t free, and growth isn’t quick. Most businesses we have worked with experience sticker shock when they find out what it actually costs to achieve their goals in their time frame. Understanding the expectations is critical.
5. Don’t fear the investment. If you don’t invest in capturing the awareness, you won’t make sales.

At Hello Digital, we specialize in bridging the gap between social media marketing and business monetization.

Social media is the most powerful channel for organic marketing, advertisement placements, and community building, and it holds great influence. If you’re looking to uplevel your social media marketing and utilize integrated marketing channels to nurture and drive sales, we encourage you to visit our Services page and fill out an interest form. We would love to partner with you so you can experience successful campaigns that will build short and long-term growth for your business.