Influence is the biggest external force that controls human lives from childhood. There are direct and indirect influences both positive and negative in nature. The advent of social media has particularly benefited marketing campaigns by developing a unique concept called Influencer Marketing, which has been an instant hit due to its high efficiency, low cost, and target audience reach.

Any marketing strategy is built around four objectives – increasing brand exposure, building brand authority, and acquiring new target audiences. A well-planned Influencer marketing strategy has proven to be a very efficient process of achieving the underlying objectives. It causes a large number of visits to your site, a high percentage of them is by new customers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is very much different from the conventional shout-out type of marketing that tries to create a strong impact through audio-visual advertising. Here the method is more organic in nature, that is to say, a function of trust and word of mouth recommendation.

While the cost implication for Influencer marketing is significantly low in comparison, its success depends on how well-planned is the influencer marketing strategy and its execution. It may be confusing and complicated if you don’t know the type and capacity of the influencer and their domain strength. Let’s delve into the subject for better clarity.

“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.”

– Seth Godin, Marketing Guru

Trust-building is the motto of all types of marketing. A very revealing statistics shows that only 1% of millennials trust advertisements in comparison to a whopping 33% that trust blog posts for their purchases. Also, 40% of them reported that they had decided their purchases after seeing influencers use the same product or services on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or other social media platform; millennials form the majority of the target market today.

How to go about your Influencer marketing campaign?

As mentioned earlier, Influencer marketing is a strategy that requires a good deal of planning and research. Your brand management in an influencer marketing strategy starts with identifying content creators in the same industry (celebrities, micro-influencers, social media influencers), in the sense that they create, curate, and publish content related to products or services same as yours or related to your industry and have large to very large follower count.

It’s crucial to learn the correct demographics of your potential customers and the channels/platforms they are likely to visit mostly. This will help you spot relevant influencers as they must be active with a large and engaged follower base on those platforms.

In an influencer marketing strategy, both the brand and the influencer should sit together to draw out the roadmap, content types such as post, story, blog post tweet, social network & marketing goals, etc. for setup, launch, and management of the influencer campaign. It’s like a partnership between the brand and the influencer in which the latter agrees to subtly promote the brand by spreading its messages and content by making comments, all in the garb of personal experiences, to their followers or target audience. This allows the brand to get a positive, natural and meaningful exposure to a fairly large base of targeted audience.

For budding businesses, it’s similar to brand leveraging because unknown or less known businesses can leverage established influencers to make a good foothold in the market.

What Influencer marketing benefits should you target in your campaign?

A successful Influencer marketing strategy can help you reach your marketing objectives such as:

• Brand Awareness

  – Prompt recognition and liking by a large number of people.

• Brand Identity

  – Establishing your brand image. Getting people to admire your brand personality and values.

• Popularity building

  – Getting a large base of followers and loyal customers through word of mouth

• More engagement

  – More following means more comments, likes, and shares.

• Lead Generation and sales

  – Generating a great number of organic traffic to your website with quality leads for the sales team and also more people opting for your sales offer. 

• Link Building

  – Generating more links directed back to your site.

Influencer Marketing in Indian perspective

Although it’s a global phenomenon, Influencer marketing has been particularly successful with the Indian audience. There are some remarkable influencer marketing examples in India such as Kaya Skin Clinics, Picchika, Allen Solly, Hotel Trident, Lunch Box, AxisThoughtFactory to name a few.

Wrap up

The secret of success of Influencer marketing campaigns is that it creates an honest and authentic voice to generate trust, attachment and loyalty in their target group. A recent study about influencer marketing says that influencer marketing yields an impressive return on investment, something to the tune of $6.5 on every dollar spent. From here it can go only upwards.

Source- Fluidscapes

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