Influencer Marketing is spreading its root through Brand promotions and becoming an essential part Digital marketing across industries in India. However, at times it could be difficult and often confusing for Influencers as well as brands while getting started. Hence, we present you a guide to help you get started and choose the Best Influencer Marketing Platform in India for your brand.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer Marketing is a subset of Digital Marketing where the Promotion, Branding and Awareness of Brands are done by people called Influencers or people with a strong follower base and high engagement across different Social Media Platforms.
Influencers serve as broadcasters on their respective platforms and are followed by people due to either their craft, expertise, charisma or talent in their respective fields or industries. They are in the position where their audience care about their opinions and recommendations and rely on them for the same which also influence purchase decisions or product awareness.
Influencer Marketing’s main goal is not to directly increase sale but to create a hype about a brand or create awareness regarding a product. This indirectly or directly leads to increment in sales numbers as well.
Who are Influencers?
The word ‘Influencer’ means a person who has the power to influence a crowd of followers.
In the context of Marketing, Influencers are people who hold command or specialize in a particular craft, topic, skill and are followed by people for the same. In many cases, an influencer may instead be a Jack of All Trades and is widely respected by their large audiences over anytime they choose to speak or content they present. The trust and personal relationship, an Influencer built with his audience or followers are what serve as a base of influencing them.
For example, A person who is a fitness freak, posting health-related content, having thousands of followers, shares a health drink he uses and as a result, a lot of their followers become aware of that health drink and some even make purchases. So he’s being an Influencer to all those followers who bought this health drink after his recommendation.
In a similar fashion, you have micro or macro influencers on different platforms influencing a large group of people whether it is about a product, service or simply awareness.
When the Brand that makes that health drink used in our example above choose to partner and run campaigns with many influencers like the one we mentioned across the platform in order to increase awareness, boost sales or simply build their Brand’s position, we call this Influencer Marketing.
How does Influencer Marketing differ from General Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing mainly focuses on commercials for brand endorsements whereas Influencer Marketing comprehends with two-way communications between the influencer and the audience that builds a trustworthy relationship.
In Influencer Marketing, the role of consumers has changed drastically. The audience comes out as active participants now. Remember how you comment and ask your favourite influencer the query you were having about a specific product? Imagine the faith one puts in them!
Digital marketing had celebrities for brand endorsements or commercials but the emerging rise of social media influencers changed the method of marketing and especially Influencer Marketing in India – it boomed.
How to start with Influencers Marketing?
Starting with Influencer marketing can be a complex process but one has to go undergo following steps to go with it-
- Defining Goals
The foremost thing for any brand looking forward to starting an influencer marketing campaign is the definition the goal or the outcome we ought to achieve with the campaign. Goals can differ and it varies from brand to brand or person to person. Increasing sales of a specific product, creating brand awareness, building strong links with the customer, attracting a wide audience or making a brand famous and spreading the brand’s identity to the masses, these can be some of the most common goals.
- Defining Target Audience
For targeting the appropriate audience one must define the audience first. For example, If the campaign is about a maternity brand then all the expectant mothers or new moms will be the appropriate target audience for that campaign. The target group becomes an essential part of the definition of a campaign. A mismatch between the product and it’s appropriate to the target audience can derail the entire campaign
- Finding the right Influencers
Here we discuss the execution and for that, we need to pick our influencers very carefully. Although the number of followers an influencer matters, factors like their engagement rate, impressions, audience, other affiliations, industry, reach, content, creativity among various other factors matter much more. A group of micro-influencers with 10,000 followers each and a high engagement rate will give you better returns than a single influencer with 100,000 followers lower engagement rate. It can be often tiring and impossible to pick influencers keeping all these criteria in mind and that’s exactly where Influencer Marketing Platforms come in. They help you design your Influencer Marketing campaign from scratch and also help you execute your campaign and track the results in real-time all based on data and numbers. They also have a huge repository of influencers to choose from so you don’t end up scrambling for them. Choose the top Influencer Marketing Platform in India for your next campaign and make your Brand go Viral.
- Choosing your campaign
Different kind of campaigns are prevailing in the market. Depending upon the requirements one can go for a barter i.e. offering products or services to the influencers vs. paid. One can even go for contest or giveaway with their choice of an influencer. Co-content writing, sponsored posts and affiliates are some other popular form of campaigns.
- Create content
Content should be created while keeping Influencer’s consent in the mind. The requirement of the campaign and targeted audience are other factors that influence content creation. Creativity should be the magic potion of content creation.
- Track final measurements
Last but not the least, once you have Defined your goal, Narrowed down the Target Audience, decided on a campaign type and chose your Influencers, the only step left is to execute and track your campaign. It should be noted that the campaign reached the desired audience, made the desired sales, and was competent enough to create brand awareness and achieve the defined goals.
Tracking of measurements should go hand-in-hand with the defined goals. One must check and compare the final outcome with these defined goals. To be able to Find. Curate. Execute. Analyse. An Influencer Marketing campaign is how it is executed. If all the right steps are followed, you will end up achieving your defined goal with ease. Now, as much as these parameters are important, so is choosing the right Influencer marketing platform. Hence, do your due diligence in order to choose The Best Influencer Marketing platform in India and make your Brand Go Viral.
