Influencer Marketing Courses

Influencer marketing is a social media marketing wing that capitalises on the popularity and fan following of celebrities and social media influencers. It leverages influencers’ platforms for service endorsements and product promotions in the relevant niche. Customers can perceive it as word-of-mouth from a trusted person - influencer marketing is significantly based on the trust and credibility a social media influencer shares with its followers through consistent two-way interactions and using the same for marketing.

Although similar to celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing relies on the fame and fan following of ‘influencers’ who can sway people by offering honest reviews of a brand’s offerings. Their influence and foothold on certain social media platforms allow brands to expand their customer outreach, create brand awareness, and fuel conversion. Digital spaces comprising a variety of audiences make influencer marketing essential for any brand to gain engagement and eventual success.

Initially, platforms like Instagram were solely used to share pictures with people. However, over time, it has become a marketing hub, which has helped many people opt for influencer marketing as their full-time career. One of the main reasons behind influencer marketing popularity is the content-driven approach.

Simple product marketing techniques, including digital advertisement or traditional marketing tactics, are considered old-age techniques. In their busy schedules, consumers do not want to spend much time watching a compelling yet lengthy ad film to purchase a product. Rather, they crave relatable content, served in a precise, quick, and consumable form, which influencer marketing often enables in its marketing strategy. Influencer marketing uses a content-driven approach, which means using relevant and informative content to seek audience attention and using the same to endorse a service. The content should be bite-sized but placed aptly between movies.

Take a look at one of India’s most popular social media influencers Kusha Kapila. Kapila largely uses her platform of nearly 2.5 million followers on Instagram to create entertaining content. While the content receives over 10 million views, she often plugs brand collaborations like beauty products or clothing brands within these videos. Her approach has led her to win consistent brand collaboration and an even wider follower base, implying the potential of influencer marketing.

Unlike previous marketing channels like television and newspapers, digital media has an expansive reach, though it draws one of the biggest cons for marketers- a scattered target audience. Digital channels such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are extensively used by many people, who consistently consume ads from all sources, reducing their eventual effectiveness. While ads are delivered on all channels, they often fail to target their niche audience through a spread-out media consumption.

Influencer marketing tackles this concern with homogenous platforms offered by niche influencers. For example, the brand collaboration of a health supplement brand with a physician or health and food influencer can target the right audience while using their trusted name to receive better conversion rates.

Consumers are highly detailed when it comes to engaging and buying services. As social media ads and commercials continue losing engagement through a simple skip button, choosing influencer marketing enables brands to associate with a name reliable to thousands of people with consistent engagement and loyalty.

According to Forbes, influencer marketing is faster than digital ads and other marketing tactics, citing ‘people trust people’ as the biggest reason behind its success. Leveraging an influencer’s reach and dedicated loyalty among people to promote your brand directly works as word of mouth but on a massive platform. Not being a new trend, many brands feel skeptical about approving influencer marketing for their brands, though brands must consider reaching where their audience resides. You must find the right, reliable influencer to work with your product.

Here are various other benefits your brand achieves, working with influencer marketing.

Brand awareness

Entering a new niche might take your brand years to reach a relevant customer base with traditional marketing channels. Engaging in influencer marketing to endorse your brand fuels awareness among new audiences following the influencer. If a brand engages with an influencer who shares a similar niche with its products, it has a chance to reach an already engaged audience. As the influencer will use and promote your brand more, you are likely to boost brand awareness and a higher conversion rate.

Build trust and credibility

Influencer marketing’s whole point revolves around influencer loyalty and credibility. An influencer with a large following often has its recommendations greatly valued by followers. So, imagine the conversion rate your brand can achieve with a single recommendation from a highly valued influencer! Around 51% of marketers claim influencer marketing to reap value for their business, and the numbers continue to grow by choosing the right influencers strategy.

Reach target audience

Influencer marketing saves your additional brand funds to analyse and find an audience in your relevant niche. As influencers already put content before audiences interested in the niche, it improves overall brand performance through visibility. Besides, the marketing strategy providing the brand with its target audience also extends the opportunity to connect with new customers through brand awareness. A brand can simultaneously capture its target audience as well as encourage new people to find the brand.

Does not appear forceful

In contrast to traditional and digital ads intruding on their ways to reach customers and spam their workspace, influencer marketing is more effective in delivering the message without appearing too forceful. As the audience willingly chooses to interact and connect with influencers, brand promotions extended through influencer marketing don’t seem pushy; hence, directing better influence on customers to obtain their interest. While ad blockers keep a brand’s advertising endeavors outdoors, influencer marketing gradually makes room in a customer’s mind.

SEO boost

Did you know that influencer marketing can fuel your DA ranking? DA or Domain Authority refers to a score assigned to your website based on how relevant, informative, and influential your website content is. The backlinks added to your website can also influence your DA score. Collaborating with a well-known influencer will allow you to backlink the authority website and eventually increase your DA score, leading your website to rank higher in search results. Therefore, influencer marketing also proves to fuel your SEO strategy.

To successfully tap into the relevant niches to raise conversion rates and extend your brand awareness, winning marketing campaigns are essential. These are curated following expert analysis and market trends to capture maximum audience engagement while delivering brand message among the people.

We have curated a list of successful influencer marketing campaigns to offer you insight into how small and large-scaled brands capture their audiences through winning campaigns.

CRED: Widely known for its nostalgic, entertaining, and iconic marketing tactics, CRED is leading India’s advertising and marketing scene, incorporating the nation’s most celebrated pop-culture references in its marketing campaigns. Recently, the brand took influencer marketing to another level and used a unique approach to catch attention.

Contrary to aiming for more views and followers, CRED went private on Instagram, enabling only chosen people to deliver its content. Social media influencers further endorsed the campaign by sharing the news of related memes. The unique approach managed to create a sense of FOMO (Fear of missing out) among audiences and influencers, which further led the brand to become the talk of the town through rising interaction successfully.

Olay: A well-known beauty brand nationally and internationally, Olay heavily endorses its new product range through social media channels, collaborating with every other prominent beauty guru and influencer with an extensive social media following. The reason behind the brand’s choice of beauty and lifestyle influencers led the product to seamlessly assimilate into their content, making value for both parties.

Olay has now adopted a consistent influencer marketing strategy to promote every other product line on social media channels. While brands prefer incorporating influencer marketing strategies infrequently, Olay proves the marketing channel to be highly effective through consistent implementation.

Google: On International Women’s Day, Google India opted for a particular campaign that advocated for a woman’s voice to catalyse change. The brand leveraged an extensive influencer marketing campaign called ‘#Searchforchange’, which led women influencers to use the hashtag and share their inspirational personal stories of overcoming gender-based stereotypes.

While the influencer campaign was created to fuel a social cause, Google successfully managed to promote its voice command feature offered on the application at the same time. The marketing campaign incorporated traditional and digital tactics from TV ads to prints, though influencer marketing campaigns successfully achieved the most engagement.

Hershey’s: Hershey’s incorporated its signature chocolates and influencer marketing to encourage people to buy chocolates for their fathers, successfully. Hershey’s ‘#ManOfAFewWords’ and ‘#SayItWithAKiss’ campaign was run widely on social media by influencers on Father’s Day to gift their father a box of Hershey’s. With the consistent use of hashtags by influencers, the audience soon jumped on the bandwagon and brought home their very own boxes of Hershey’s to celebrate Father’s Day.

While Hershey’s did not endorse any brand new product through the hashtag, using influencer marketing helped it to promote its age-old product with a new twist, enabling the brand to gain enormous customers who enjoyed the social participation successfully.

Reports claim young audiences get most likely influenced by influencer marketing served on social media, which should probably be the reason for a brand to incorporate influencer marketing in its promotional strategy. Influencers can largely affect buying decisions only if the brand has created an informed influencer marketing strategy, which demands more than just finding an influencer to post brand content on social media.

Go for influencer marketing by following these detailed steps to create effective influencer marketing campaigns.

1. Set your goals: Understanding and setting initial goals is essential to clarify further steps. Set realistic goals for your brand in the initial stages and slowly take it a step further. Unrealistic goals can hinder growth, so acknowledge your current market stance and set goals. The step also includes setting up your influencer marketing budget.

2. Recognise the relevant platform: Following your set goals, finding the right platform for your content is essential. Recognise your brand and its target audience. Research where most of the target crowd resides and target the same to attract the audience in the implementational stage of your influencer marketing. For example, your food brand might not gain as much attention through the microblogging site Twitter as much as YouTube can garner engagement for it. So, choose a relevant platform to run your influencer marketing campaign.

3. Find relevant influencers: While seeking influencers perfect for your marketing strategy might appear challenging, established marketing goals can help run analysis on influencers and find the perfect match to maximise reach and conversion rates. Consider the following features before collaborating with an influencer for maximum performance.

1. Relevance of the produced content by the influence

2. Audience demographics

3. Follower size

4. Amount of engagement received on the content

4. Negotiate and finalise your price: After compiling your goals and marketing plans, connect with influencers and verify details for credibility. Seek analytics before going ahead with the project to comprehend whether their platform extends relevant audience and engagement or not. Negotiate your deal keeping your distinguished budget in mind, and proceed if both parties are on the same page.

5. Measure campaign performance: Influencer marketing doesn’t end with finding the right influencer and running the campaign. Analysing the retrieved KPIs of running influencer campaigns is essential to map out further plans for your brand or pinpoint areas to improve strategies. Tracking analytical insights of your campaign helps measure the success rate and analyse if the invested funds are worth it or not.

Influencer Marketing Campaigns

An influencer marketing’s success heavily depends upon the type of campaign a brand curates in collaboration with the influencer. Distinct platforms, audience demographics, and content types imply the need to adopt the right type of marketing campaigns in order to target the right audience on the relevant platforms through the right media channel.

Here are some of the most profound influencer marketing campaign types that have garnered great response from audiences and are capable of providing your brand fuel for growth.

Social Media Marketing

With over 3.96 billion social media users, social media marketing is a sure-shot way for brands to reach their target audience. While finding a relevant audience can be a challenge for brands on its own, assimilating influencer marketing to your marketing technique is sure to find an audience relevant to your niche. Social media marketing influencers use content creation and sharing services extended to users for their marketing approach and to generate awareness.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing or SEM works as a digital strategy to obtain a higher rank on the search engine results page by performing well on several parameters, including better DA rank and compelling content.

Did you know influencer marketing can strengthen your search engine marketing efforts? Influencer marketing allows you to backlink their high-authority website to your own page, leading to a better DA rank for you and, as a result, a high place on the search engine result page.

Affiliate Influencer Marketing

Affiliate influencer marketing is similar to brand collaboration. Still, influencer marketing uses social media extensively to build a loyal relationship with the audience, and affiliate influencer marketing simply centers around referring products to the audience and gaining commission for them. These brand campaigns do not require as much loyalty as influencer marketing though it is an excellent advocate to promote your brand.

Content Influencer Marketing

With over 44% of users leveraging Instagram to accomplish their shopping demands, content influencer marketing sees a bright future in targeting and raising conversion leads. Content influencer marketing uses content creation platforms to produce engaging content and promote brands through the same. Precisely, it enables influencers to create content around the brand and expand brand awareness by sharing brand goals and offering services in a very organic manner.

Social Media Influencers: Who are They?

As the name suggests, an influencer could be anyone with a significant influence on many people, though social media influencers refer to people with extensive social media presence and fame. Influencers use various social content-sharing platforms as a tool to build a reputation and gain loyalty from audience interaction.

Influencers use their subject expertise to generate expansive reach by consistently creating valuable content which informs and entertains the consumer audience. Consistent public interaction is one of the most significant aspects of influencers as such engagements build a loyal relationship with audiences, which later help influencers achieve brand collaborations and successful marketing campaigns.

Influencers have the power to influence a customer's buying behaviour through simple recommendations, making use of the established loyalty with customers. Therefore, influencers are approached by brands to endorse their products by running marketing campaigns in the targeted niche offered by the influencer.

With more than 500,000 active influencers on Instagram, finding the right influencers for your brand campaign can be significantly challenging. Brands cannot pick any influencer based on a large following or great reputation. Marketers must delve into detailed parameters to find the right match for targeting the right set of audiences and improve conversion rates.

Here are a few factors you should consider to find the right influencer for your influencer marketing campaign.

1. Relevant Niche: Considering just any influencer with an extensive following will only bring you exhausted funds. Try finding influencers in the relevant niches. Look up the hashtags related to your brand, product, or service and find the ones you feel relate the most to the type of campaign you aim to publish.

2. Engagement: Engagement is a key defining component in choosing influencers. Compare engagement in their collaborative and non-collaborative posts to see how interactive audiences are. Do not simply judge influencers’ engagement through their most promoted posts.

3. Reach: Reach refers to the number of visits and engagement garnered by a brand through its content strategy. Marketers must analyze influencer metrics and consider important aspects like audience demographics and engagement to expect what their brand marketing campaign can receive working along with the said influencer.

4. Content quality: Marketing tactics served with high-quality content have a greater impact on receiving customer engagement and improved conversion rates. Scroll through an influencer's relevant social media platform and see the type of content they put out. With relevance and reach, quality is another significant aspect marketers must consider as it has the potential to impact your brand reputation.

Niche Influencers

As the name suggests, niche influencers refer to social media influencers who create and engage with a specific type of content. For example, a niche food content creator delivers content revolving around food and works in collaboration with brands comprising food and kitchen components. Niche influencers are usually what brands approach to run their native marketing campaign when targeting a particular audience group. With an exciting audience following influencers to seek recommendations and suggestions, marketers can use the platform to their advantage.

Mega Influencers

Mega influencers refer to social media influencers who have more than 1 million followers on their platform. They have high visibility on social media, but mega influencers usually don’t work under niche categories. Most of the mega influencers are affluent celebrities, online and in real life. Therefore, marketers often prefer going for mega influencers when aiming to target a large customer base or to raise extensive brand awareness.

Macro Influencers

Macro influencers are considered to be mid-tier influencers, ideal to approach for influencer marketing campaigns. These influencers comprise a substantial following of 100,000 to 1 million followers and ideally work in their niche category. Macro influencers, unlike mega influencers, usually work their way up from the ground to build an extensive following making influencers fluent in accumulating masses while establishing a healthy engagement with the audience.

After an in-depth market analysis of current influencer marketing trends, target audience, a planned campaign, and required metrics, marketers must cover a few more factors while driving towards a successful influencer marketing campaign. These factors contribute to the consistent growth of your brand while making a suitable usage of your ROIs. Here are a few of the many key factors you must consider for influencer marketing.

• Choosing between micro and macro-influencers is often a concern for brands, with both attaining a similar result. The best approach is to go through your planned goals, budget, and niche. Opt for macro-influencers if your brand is dedicated to raising awareness without budget restrictions. On the other hand, approach micro-influencers when working with a relevant niche within a limited budget.
• Association with credible influencers in influencer marketing is more significant for the brand reputation than the promotion it offers. Ensure your influencer is considered an expert in its working niche and their content reflects the same value. Influencers generating content that correlates to your brand’s agenda must be considered.
• Considering geographic location is another significant factor of influencer marketing. Before choosing relevant influencers, marketers must understand that their brand’s representation is dedicated to the local or global market before choosing relevant influencers. Research region-specific influencers and find if their content approach is relevant to your offered services. Marketers can also raise awareness following influencer marketing.
• Influencer marketing delivers peak impact when used on the right platform; therefore, run a thorough research on your audience and the major channels they reside on to target the same with influencer marketing. For instance, the millennial and above generation can be easily found on social media apps like Facebook and YouTube. Though, targeting Gen Z would lead any marketer to choose platforms like Tiktok and Instagram.

With the consistent rise of influencer marketing strategy being incorporated into brand endorsements, diverse support systems are also extended to comprehend, implement and run winning marketing campaigns. An influencer marketing agency and platform are two of the most preferred variants marketers can use to implement influencer marketing strategies.

Here’s how the two trending influencer marketing techniques differ from each other!

Extensive usage of influencer marketing campaigns has helped millions of brands to achieve estimated success goals within a limited time, making influencer marketing a widely-accepted approach to promoting services. Let’s look at examples of some leading influencer marketing campaigns to grasp what it contains and how it benefits a brand

Dunkin’ Donuts

Dunkin’ Donuts created a special campaign on the occasion of National Donut Day, where it collaborated with eight social media influencers and enabled them to take over Snapchat. Dunkin featured a special visually bright and engaging creative and geo-filters, featuring influencers to promote on their social platforms. These influencers further took over the official Dunkin Donuts Snapchat and attained significant traffic on its social media platforms, encouraging people to recreate the creative videos with their own Dunkin’s.

Tinder

Tinder’ primary audience being young, led them to work with Gen Z influencers to promote their services in 2021. Tinder collaborated with mega influencers that matched their brand identity. Influencers also took a keen interest in the same, following smooth integration of the brand post to their usually offered content. Influencer marketing enabled the brand to acquire organic growth and a greater application download rate.

Baggit

Baggit’s #PlayTheLifeGame influencer marketing campaign asks followers to guess the bag name with the related hashtag and tagging friends interested in the same. Baggit approached many influencers to engage in the activity and attend their promotional event flaunting their new Baggit collection. Combining the Baggit event and social media campaign, Baggit achieved nearly 5 million impressions, reaching 2.8 million followers on Twitter, and extensive popularity for their new Spring-Summer Collection.

Magnum

Magnum’s ‘True to Pleasure’ campaign collaborated with the mega influencer, singer, and songwriter Halsey, featuring the star and various other influencers to feature in a short film encouraging people to explore individuality by being true to themselves. The brand managed to win success with its creative approach, while its additional endeavor to contribute to Halsey-led Black Creators Funding Initiative (BCFI) shined even more light on the brand’s genuine interest in promoting art and humanitarian causes, attaining further success among the masses.

Influencer marketing platforms are the offered software solutions created to support influencer marketing campaigns through digital databases and smart algorithms. Instead of working along with a large team, many brands prefer taking insightful actions through digital assistance, which works in the shape of analytically sound software helping in campaign management and other related tasks.

Let’s look at some of the leading influencer marketing platforms!

• Mavrck: The influencer marketing platform is an all-in-one source of influencer management, finding the right talent for your brand while managing many marketing influencers simultaneously. It sieves effective metrics from a hoard of information to find the most relevant and valuable niche influencer.
• Upfluence: The massive database owned by Upfluence software works as an assessment card for influencers to map out their metrics and opt for the right one. The self-serve platform also allows marketers to choose the budget level from low to high, depending on their requirements.
• Grin: Grin is an influencer marketing management offering software that enables eCommerce brands to find the best influencer for their niche. Grin provides a detailed list of metrics to make well-informed decisions.
• Influencity: The AI-powered influencer management platform works by running through heaps of data to find value and important insights into influencer performance, received audience engagement, and assessed conversion rate.
• Klear: The influencer marketing platform works by helping agencies to find a suitable influencer and managing relationships with the said influencer to work on campaign management and seek insights. Microsoft, Adidas, and Huawei are some of the big names included in its user list.

With a significant base of influencer marketing-learning crowd operating online, a majority of people prefer pursuing influencer marketing courses online than offline. The entire course revolves around digital marketing awareness, with nearly all of the tools, software, and marketing tactics accessible on the web. Convenient accessibility saves you time from seeking an offline course that is most likely to offer as much of the course details if not less.

upGrad’s Digital Marketing Certificate Program, is one such online course extending knowledge relevant to influencer marketing tactics and leveraging analytics to create a winning brand reputation among audiences. As much as you gain marketing insights from an offline course, upGrad will offer a similar experience with a far better learning environment and online assistance

Influencer marketing is slowly seeping as a professionally opted course among young people. As a result, online and offline educational institutes are offering specialisation in influencer marketing and digital marketing courses. Here’s what the course covers through its detailed syllabus.

• Introduction to Influencers Marketing
• Authenticity/Defining your brand
• Case study: Influencer Marketing Campaigns
• Growing your audience
• Personal Branding
• Audience engagement and retaining your audience
• Best practices for brands/ influencer sourcing and relationship building
• Contracts, negotiation, pricing
• Social network niches
• Types of posts
• Campaign design
• Leveraging analytics for improved results
• Ethics/Compliance
• Selected presentations and panel of distinguished guests

Traditional marketing techniques failing day by day to penetrate through adblockers makes it difficult to promote services among an audience segment demanding extra efforts on products and services. People no longer invest in products simply through advertisements or print marketing channels. Lack of interaction with the audience is no more an option since millennials and Gen Z demand brand loyalty, and influencer marketing tactics target the exact pain point for successful penetration.

Rise of marketing tactics and the strengthening position of influencer marketing in the Indian job market is visible through the reported statistics, which claim the influencer marketing industry to have experienced a growth worth 9 billion Indian rupees in the year 2021. India’s influencer marketing field is likely to expand further with a rise in people opting for social media as a full-time career. The job ensures a creatively convenient lifestyle most people are willing to go towards.

Until now, uncertainty widely loomed over choosing influencer marketing as a career choice, though consistent performance and insightful results enabled influencer marketing as a widely opted medium for marketers to fuel their brands. As the nation’s influencer market continues projecting a compound annual growth rate of 25%, it is estimated to cross 22 billion Indian rupees worth of market by 2025.

Influencer marketing is a fairly new and emerging job profile in India which still requires a lot more boost among locals to gain prominence. An influencer marketing specialist’s initial offered salary in India can range anywhere from 2.0 LPA to 5.0 LPA. The numbers keep increasing with addition to your experience.

According to reports, an influencer marketing specialist’s annual earnings in India range between 4.5 to 5 lakhs/ year.

India’s influencer marketing workspace is yet to receive growth and recognition among people. With a very limited amount of workforce to contribute to the field, candidates are judged and appointed based on several factors, which also impact the salary an influencer marketing specialist receives. Let’s take a look at some of these factors.

• Experience: Work experience in the relevant field is a much-needed requirement for brands to appoint candidates and receive value from their insightful previous work experience. As much as you have years on your resume, your chances of getting attractive job opportunities also increase.
• Region: Regional influence is pretty obvious when it comes to the assigned salary of a marketing specialist. Salaries are subject to change from one region to another due to working scale, living conditions, and available opportunities present in certain locations.
• Engagement and performance: Influencer marketing specialists’ performance towards reaping greater audience engagement can lead to more attractive salary packages.

Influencer marketing job profile is a well-known and widely pursued job profile by individuals residing outside of India. Social media marketing through influencer marketing has extended thousands of people the opportunity to work with brands and extend value to them.

An influencer marketing specialist’s initial offered salary abroad can range anywhere from $45k to $56,250k in a year, which is subject to change with experience and work efficiency.

According to reports, an influencer marketing specialist abroad roughly earns around $65k in a year for its services on digital platforms. While these numbers represent an average specialist salary of individuals working abroad, places like Colorado and California vary in the range of salaries they offer.

• Colorado: $65k/ annum
• California: $60k/ annum