How Angel Broking will capitalise on its ‘influencer marketing' platform Amplifiers

Almost two months ago, stockbroker firm Angel Broking launched its influencer marketing platform ‘Amplifiers’. The first thought that could come to anyone’s mind is why would a broking company start something that is poles apart from what they do? An influencer marketing platform helps marketers engage with the audience through social media influencers, while a stock broking company helps people invest in stocks and multiply money.

But for Angel Broking, it is a well thought through, long-term content strategy to empower millennials to get into stock trading and at the same time create powerful content for other brands and offer a platform for the influencer marketing ecosystem to grow.

Prabhakar Tiwari

“We started our content marketing journey almost a year back and we are doing full-fledged content in every possible format. The idea is to make it bigger as we move along. Amplifiers will complement our content marketing efforts,” said Prabhakar Tiwari, CMO, Angel Broking. “Every influencer is either an entertainer or a teacher and they have their unique way of giving a spin to the content. They can make our messaging more entertaining and hence, content creation in collaboration with influencers is a scalable phenomenon for us.”

Explaining the rationale of the platform for a stockbroking business, Tiwari said, “The new-age millennials like to learn and try out things on their own. In the same way, they learn the nuances of the stock market investment also on the internet. Over time, the influencer marketing space has also grown, and they create plenty of useful content in multiple formats and languages that can benefit the new-age millennials. Influencers play an important role in the customers’ path to purchase. If you can maintain a direct relationship with influencers and help them educate customers on your behalf with some bit of branding of Angel Broking, it is always beneficial for us.”

The brand could have tapped the potential of the growing influencer marketing space by just collaborating with influencers. Why launch a platform?

Tiwari answered, “The relation between a single influencer and the company is slightly a complex process. It is okay to deal with mega influencers, but people with even 10k following are important influencers because they are giving us unique and unduplicated reach. However, to have a conversation with them on a continuous basis may not be viable for a brand. Also, they are worried about perfect tracking mechanisms for their engagement with the brand and payment processes. These are genuine concerns of any influencer. We believe that with Amplifiers, we can take care of the long tail of influencers.”

The platform enables the influencers to pick curated offers, use its content library, receive brand briefs and easy-to-use platform-based templates. The agency route is also circumvented in this approach, and its direct financial benefits are extended to the on-boarded Amplifiers.

Although, Tiwari added, “We are not getting away from agencies as they play an important role. They have their own expertise and strengths. They will continue to offer different tools and resources. Amplifiers has just begun its journey and will develop various capabilities if need be. In the meantime, we will continue to collaborate with agencies for such requirements.”

He said, “These agencies have very deep relationships with some influencers. There is no point in not leveraging such relationships. Amplifiers is a platform to serve the long tail of influencers. However, we still need the agencies for major influencers and also to explore the newer content formats.”

Tiwari assured that they don’t want to compete with the agencies in the influencer marketing space, but have entered the space to target a much larger pool of influencers.

“Several agencies claim to have 10-15k influencers. But is that all? No. We have done our analysis and realised there is a broad base of influencers out there. If we come out with more compelling ideas, our collaboration with a broader base of influencers will multiply our reach to consumers. It is not like some influencers coming on Amplifiers will impact agencies in any manner. They already have a large pool of influencers with deep relationships. We are not trying to poach.

“If the influencers come to Amplifiers, it is because they can deal directly with us in a more transparent manner with time-bound payments. However, if the agency has a superior system of managing them, they would stay with them,” he added.

With the Amplifiers platform’s interactive and straightforward UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience), Indian influencers will be able to get an overview of the live content and performance metrics (such as views, engagement, leads, conversions, revenue, etc.), and their payment status. They can participate in monthly and quarterly contests and gigs. The app can be downloaded from Google Play Store or App Store. Both the brands and influencers can collaborate with each other and also learn from the domain leaders from Google, Facebook and others via web series, training sessions and webinars on influencer marketing, which will also be hosted by Amplifiers.

Amplifiers would not just collaborate with influencers who come from a financial background, but across categories like cooking, music, gaming and others as the brand finds several affinities with finance that exists in the field of cooking, music, gaming, etc.

A lot of data came out after TikTok was banned in India which suggested a large part of the income was generated by top influencers only. Tiwari feels there has to be more democratisation and Amplifiers aims to address this issue. “Somewhere benchmarking is missing in the influencer marketing space which needs immediate attention,” he highlighted.