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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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!
Influencer Marketing Agency | Influencer Marketing Platform |
---|---|
A creative agency comprises people working to make winning influencer campaigns through creatives and influencers. | An entirely digital, software-run influencer marketing platform enabling specialized marketing software to seek relevant influencers and create winning campaigns. |
You get to build an organic relationship with influencers. | Uses digital tools to reach audiences through inorganic ways. |
Might not contain as much extensive searchable database as a system. | Contains an extensive searchable database. |
Cannot manage more than a few influencers. | Manages thousands of influencers at once. |
Receiving in-depth insights relevant to campaigns through in-depth offline research. | Receiving in-depth insights relevant to campaigns through an online databas |
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 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’s 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’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’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!
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.
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.
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.
Influencer marketing specialist salaries abroad are highly dependent on several factors which vary with changing living and working conditions. Here are a few such factors affecting influencer marketing specialist salary.
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A successful marketing campaign establishes by preparing an outline and creating realistic goals for yourself. These goals are aimed with a suitable marketing strategy and worked on by an influencer with a substantial following, working in the same niche as your brand. You can consider an influencer marketing campaign successful if it manages to win greater conversion rates and better engagements with the target audience.
Analyse the daily engagement on campaign posts and compare it with followers of the said influencer. Use analytics tools such as the ones available on Instagram to learn demographics and the amount of engagement received on campaign posts. A higher engagement will imply your influencer marketing campaign is successful.
There are various benefits a brand as well as influencer shares with a strong influencer marketing campaign. Here are some of those.
No, they are entirely different. Influencers are not as well-known as celebrities, but because of their distinctive style, they are respected by their fans. Celebrities rarely communicate with their fans outside of promotional purposes, but influencers are more likely to do so. While hiring celebrities to promote your brand can be costly, working with influencers will save you both money and time.
Influencer marketing is closely related to social media marketing (SMM) as many brands grab their audience through social media platforms. SMM can give you access to a vast audience which is the global population that uses social networks to connect. Influencer marketing can help you find an audience which wasn’t accessible via traditional advertising.
With social media being more potent than ever, influencer marketing is considered the next big thing in the digital marketing industry and is deemed the future. In fact, as per Marketing Hub, 9 out of 10 marketers say that it is an effective way to get more leads and brand reach.
Absolutely. Influencer marketing is ethical. Many influencers gain the trust of their audience by providing quality content that’s not only genuine but relatable as well. Moreover, there are FTC and social media platform community guidelines that one needs to abide by to protect both the consumers and the brand from legal issues.
Brands such as Lynda, Adidas, Blue Apron, etc., are some of the top brands that use influencer marketing to boost their sales by enhancing customer outreach.
Yes. Statistics say it. 80% of marketers say that influencer marketing is very much effective. Consumers rely on influencers’ recommendations when deciding to purchase something. Influencer campaigns focus on branding and user engagement which will generate huge revenue.
Yes. Even though links reign SEO, influencer marketing can really help you generate traffic and can help you get authoritative links by boosting user engagement signals, traffic and visibility.
The influencer has a direct relationship with the customers. Using ethical methods, an influencer can promote a brand’s products or services using numerous social media platforms such as Instagram or Youtube. Moreover, influencers have a good knowledge or experience about the product they are advertising, which gives them the upper hand. This can impact your brand value significantly.
Absolutely. Influencer marketing remains one of the most important forms of marketing. It delivers 11x more ROI than other conventional forms of digital marketing. Why? Because influencers not only build trust and show authority, they are also trendsetters and improve brand awareness.
One can tell whether the influencers you've chosen are genuine or not by using a specific approach. Check the influencer's followers first, then the ratio of likes to followers. An influencer marketing agency is the best choice for this screening procedure because there are many additional ways to evaluate an influencer's quality.
Choosing the influencers you want to collaborate with first is necessary. When it comes to interacting with influencers, there are no set rules. You can write to them, call them, visit them in person, or all three. Try to keep a nice tone throughout the dialogue, regardless of how you choose to communicate with your influencers. It is advised to communicate by email from a professional standpoint. To simplify it for the influencers to grasp what you are seeking from the campaign, including all the deliverables information in the email.
Influencer marketing works well on all major social media networks, particularly Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. However, you may also give it a shot on other social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.
The price varies from one firm to another and from one market to another. Additionally, it will depend on the deliverables and the number of influencers you wish to collaborate with. You will receive more inquiries, and your campaign will cost you more if you want to run it naturally across several social media networks.
Regarding the number of followers, there is no established guideline. It may range from less than 1000 to more than 1000,000. In some cases, influencers with less than 10,000 followers have a greater engagement ratio than those with more followers. Work with an influencer with at least 5000 followers on the relevant social media page if you are a start-up or mid-sized brand. Remember to include the like-to-follower ratio, which shouldn't be lower than 1%.
Yes, it is less expensive than conventional marketing. Additionally, you can use the influence of numerous social media channels to boost your sales. An exact breakdown of your investment is available.