Is influencer marketing part of your marketing plan for business growth? If it is not, you might be missing out on the opportunities that could help you grow your business using someone’s popularity. With the rise of creative content creation and marketing strategy, brands and businesses are increasingly relying on influencer marketing to reach out and connect with their audiences.
The growth of new and more native aligned social platforms has led to unprecedented growth in influencer marketing in recent years. It is the newest form of marketing on the internet that has taken digital marketing by storm. Every brand or business is looking forward to getting a taste of it for its growth.
Influencer marketing can be a great way to increase your marketing ROI and sales using the face value of someone popular on the internet. But as it is the newest form of digital marketing, you need to know more about it, the kinds of influencers you can benefit from, and how to streamline your influencer marketing process in order to get the most of your efforts in 2022. In this influence marketing guide in 2022, you will learn:
- What is influencer marketing?
- Benefits of Influencer marketing
- How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
- The current state of the influencer marketing landscape
- The value of influencer marketing
- How to create an influencer marketing strategy?
- Growth and Future of Influencer Marketing in India
What is Influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is nothing but marketing through word of mouth that is still considered the most successful marketing tactic to let people know about a product or brand. With the growth in popularity of social media platforms and other digital spaces, influencer marketing is the recreation of the “word of mouth” marketing tactic via social media.
To be more specific, influencer marketing is the type of social media marketing that relies on popular personalities, celebrities, and industry pioneers to convey your business messages and promotions to the target audience and market. It involves endorsement and product placement from influencers in the bigger market. Like any other social media or paid campaign, it also delivers instant results to drive more sales and revenue in a short span of time.
An influencer can be anyone in your niche with a huge fan following. They have specialized insight, authority, knowledge, and power to drive your message to your target audience for brand endorsement. Businesses usually procure or pay influencers to convey their promotional messages in different ways.
Benefits of Influencer marketing to Grow Your Business
There is no denying the effectiveness of influencer marketing for your business growth. It is a great way to enhance the brand value and awareness to win over your customers’ trust. There are numerous benefits of influencer marketing that we can list here, and some of them include:
- Influencer marketing improves brand awareness and recognition.
- Influencer marketing boosts your reach to your potential customers through vast visibility.
- Influencer marketing helps you build brand trust and authority.
- Influencer marketing helps you drive more leads and sales effortlessly.
- Influencer marketing is a great way to connect Gen Z customers who are more intended for online shopping.
- Influencers help you set trends and values for long-term benefits.
- Influencer marketing helps businesses build long-term partnerships with influencers in their niche.
Most social sites now provide a space to help drive success and benefits to both the influencer and the business through creative content marketing.
How does influencer marketing work?
The internet has changed how we purchase things in the past few years. In recent years, especially after the COVID-19 breakdown, we have seen tremendous growth in online sales in almost every niche. Businesses have occupied at least some type of influencer marketing to grab the attention of their target audience browsing through social networks.
The growing use of technologies and native content for marketing has increasingly streamlined influencer marketing through a coordinated partnership between influencers and businesses. Today, brands no longer hold the center stage in the age of the internet, consumers do. Now, businesses need to play by the set of rules in which consumers want them to as they hold the key to deciding what they want to see and purchase on the internet. Social sites are the common playground for both businesses and consumers because most of the conversions are taking place there.
Influencer marketing is not a type of direct marketing, instead, hire/pay influencers to drive your brand’s message for you in a bigger market to generate positive leads or brand awareness. In more simple words, businesses take the help of external content creators to advocate or endorse your brand’s message. Influencers create unique and engaging content for their audience and help businesses convert their audience into their customers through some positive words.
- Influencer marketing has the following simple stages to connect businesses and customers:
- Brands or advertisers connect with influencers on social media sites.
- Influencers create unique content about the brand through posts, stories, videos, and live sessions.
- The influencer’s audience knows about the brand or product by browsing through these posts.
- Influencer’s audience becomes the brand’s new followers and customers.
It is quite clear that brands don’t directly communicate with their target audience but they use the authority and popularity of an influencer as they influence the purchasing decisions of many on the internet.
There are several ways for influencers to talk about a brand or let their audiences discover new things. It could be a barter deal or paid campaign, depending on how it works for both the brand and the influencer. Influencers are the content creator, and they can utilize any of the following ways for a brand’s messaging.
- Product reviews and unboxing videos
- Product placements in the content
- Talking about new product launches
- Sharing a unique coupon code to attract their audience
- Partnering for a co-branded product or campaign
- Giveaways and product donations
- Creating content like videos, blog posts, and social media posts talking about brands or products
Online activities of consumers play a great part in their decision-making process, and there are endless possibilities how influencers and brands can do together to influence consumers’ decisions. All they need is to find what is the best way to drive the brand’s message to generate the engagement they want from the audience.
The current state of the influencer marketing landscape
Brands and businesses that aren’t part of the influencer economy are losing control over the market in recent years. Gen Z consumers are becoming more enthusiastic and adventurous when it comes to discovering new products and services online. With the advancement of digital promotions, there is no backing off for businesses in a time when influencer marketing was expected to be INR 900Cr. market in India by the end of 2021.
We have already headed into 2023, and this trend is not going down in a market with more than 400 million active consumers with access to social media. During the COVID pandemic, there is a significant shift in consumers’ purchasing decisions on the internet, and more businesses are intended to increase their influencer marketing spending in 2023 and beyond.
Influencer marketing is undergoing a transformation triggered by many factors as the brands looking to connect with consumers directly without a direct promotion. According to a report:
- Personal care, F&B, Mobile & Electronics, and Fashion & Jewelry are the top 4 categories contributing to influencer marketing.
- Celebrities contribute around 27% to the influencer economy while dedicated influencers hold around 73% of the total volume of influencer marketing.
- Nearly 2/3rd of the Indian population on the internet follows at least one influencer in their favorite niche.
- Many brands are spending around 35% of their marketing budget on influencer marketing.
The value of influencer marketing
Today, consumers are looking easiest ways to shop for a product that is tried and tested by many to save their time. Influencer marketing fills this gap as it delivers a seamless shopping experience to consumers by driving the brand’s message through someone who has authority and knowledge in the industry. It not only generates brand awareness but facilitates online sales via social sites.
Influencer marketing is no longer a trend, it is the need of the hour for advertisers to stay competitive and relevant in the market. It has outranked many digital marketing tactics such as email marketing and organic searches. Influencer marketing has emerged as the most cost-effective and reliable tactic in recent years.
According to Nielsen’s famous “Trust in Advertising” report, more than 90% of shoppers trust recommendations, and 83% of consumers out of that take shopping decisions based on those recommendations. As influencer marketing is a great tool to build trust and recommend brands through word of mouth, it is vital for businesses to understand its value and integrate it into their marketing strategy.
How to create an influencer marketing strategy?
When it comes to creating an influencer marketing strategy for your business, there should be an influencer system and process to assist brands with influencers programs more effectively. It requires advertisers to focus on building long-term partnerships with key influencers in their niche for targeted results whenever they need. Here’re some steps to create your influencer marketing strategy for great outcomes.
- Discover influencers in your domain who can effectively drive your brand’s message to their audience.
- Settle your influencer marketing objectives and brand’s messages to decide on the right type of influencer programs for your business.
- Decide on how and what to pay influencers for speaking your words to convert their audiences into your followers or customers.
- Budget management and allocation to achieve your marketing ROI and business goals.
- Survey, monitor, and analyze influencer marketing states to change your procedures to achieve better results.
- Thanks to the new monetization model on social media sites, the role of influencer marketing will be more professionalized in 2022 and beyond.
Growth and Future of Influencer Marketing in India
India, with more than 400 million active social media users, sees tremendous growth in the influencer marketing industry. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25% to reach a size of Rs 2,200 crore in 2025. It is now an integral part of brand marketing strategy for many businesses as there is a surge in reaching out to target audiences with word-of-mouth marketing tactics.
Influencer marketing has the trust and authenticity that no other marketing tactic has due to the direct connection between influencers and their audiences. There is scope for both mega and micro-influencers in India with a paramount of opportunities in every domain. Businesses are always in search of trusted partners for influencer marketing to communicate with their audience through the words of recommendations.
There are many reasons why influencer marketing has seen significant growth in India over the last few years:
- Increase in the usage of social media
- Native content-based marketing is on the rise
- The market is now more consumer-centric
- People trust influencers and recommendations more than any other marketing tactic
Brands choose influencers based on their fan following and social media platforms where they want to promote and endorse. There are many influencer marketing platforms in India, and some of them are:
- Plixxo
- Influencer.in
- Mad Influence
- Pulp Key
- Winkl
- Eleve Media
- StarNgage
- Blog Mint
Whether you are a blogger, YouTuber, Instagram influencer, or a big name on any other social platform, you can connect with brands and businesses on these influencer marketing platforms for various opportunities. There is always space for brands and influencers to benefit from influencer marketing with the right strategy and methodology to generate greater conversion rates and profits.
Influencer marketing is the newest and most advanced form of social media marketing at present, and one needs to learn how it works before getting into it. Brands need to learn about their niche audience, where they are, and what kinds of influencers they are following to get the most out of their efforts. If you are a business and want to drive your brand’s message to a more targeted audience, connect with a professional digital marketing agency to start with your influencer marketing strategy.
