Is your influencer-led content marketing plan fool-proof?

At a time when FMCG giants like P&G and Unilever have called out influencers due to lack of credibility and authenticity in their followers, brands are learning the art of selecting right influencers after making trial and errors. What do influencers bring to the table and what are the things to keep in mind while designing content for influencers? BuzzInContent.com analyses

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Akanksha Nagar
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Marketing works only if credibility is earned and brands often rely on influencers to distribute their content to their targeted fan base. Globally, FMCG giants such as P&G and Unilever have called out influencers due to lack of credibility and authenticity in their followers, posts and other challenges. But then there are brands that have learned the art of selecting the right influencers after making a lot of trial and errors and ride heavily on influencers, not necessarily celebrities, to distribute and promote their content.

Social media influencers have become a critical marketing tool for most of the brands today. According to a survey report, up to 15% of digital media investments are now going into influencers. Apart from giving a unique voice to the marketing campaigns, they enable brands to reach newer audiences. Calling them new-age celebrities won’t be wrong since they have a high impact on their followers and fan base. 

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Karan Kumar

“There is a visibly higher return on investment when a brand works with influencers when compared to traditional forms of marketing. A successful influencer marketing strategy helps to increase brand exposure, build authority, and connect with new audiences, both current and new. It drives traffic to a website and leads generation. Content marketing and influencer marketing need to go hand in hand. Even high-quality engaging content performs better with influencer collaboration,” said Karan Kumar, Chief Brand and Marketing Officer, Fabindia.

Consumers have always looked up to experts, peers or friends for guidance and recommendations on their purchases. Clearly, influence is something that has always been an integral part of a consumer’s buying decisions.

Sanjay Vakharia, CEO, Spykar Lifestyle, said, “A good piece of content created by the influencer holds credentials and a personal touch.”

“Brands see influencers as a huge opportunity both in terms of cost effectiveness as well as reach these social celebs garner. It allows brands to place content in the mindset of the consumer in a more subtle yet impactful way as most of the influencers master the art of storytelling. This is missing in the case of celebrities in India and across the globe,” said Ashutosh Harbola, CEO and Co-founder, Buzzoka.

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Ashutosh Harbola

Brands are able to tap into a new market through influencers. These new potential customers can be redirected to a brand’s social media pages or website using influencer marketing, which was not very easy in the past.

“Influencers can be both known, well-respected experts in their fields, or micro-influencers. They are authentic voices who often have very high engagement with their fan bases but are often overlooked by brands in the social media campaigns,” said Madhavi Irani, Chief Officer Content, Nykaa.

How to pick a right influencer for your brand

Finding influencers isn’t about finding the person with the most followers but is about finding a person consumer’s trust and leveraging that influence to promote the brand. If the TG is clearly defined, it is important to seek out influencers who share similar beliefs to the brand and who can help connect the brand with a target market. The right influencer must be a combination of a good social presence, expertise, right match for the brand philosophy and credibility.

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Priyanka Gill

Apart from this, one of the major things to keep in mind is the influencer’s follower count. Authenticity of these followers has to be checked. “One should carefully look at the organic reach of the post and engagement rate of the selected influencer, also how many average engagements per post. It ensures the brand message goes across to a greater number of people, which in turn increases the CTA. Make sure the influencer you are looking to collaborate with is consistent with content and posts,” said Priyanka Gill, Founder and CEO, PopXO, Luxeva Limited.

“You need to find believable influencers who clearly understand the product and are looked up to for their expertise and know-how on the category. They should be reachable, able to disseminate content easily, have an engaged following, and, lastly, are they trusted within the community,” said Irani.

She added, “Influencers should be part of the content marketing strategy from the moment a brand wants to convince people to try its products. Brands need to collaborate with influencers who are convinced about their value-proposition and unique selling point. According to an Influencer Marketing study, almost 30% of marketers found it to be the fastest method of acquiring customers.”

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Pranay Swarup

Echoing the same view Pranay Swarup, CEO and Founder of Chtrbox.com, said, “Be it helping promote the marketing pre-launch message using teasers and ancillary content, or helping launch the marketing campaign by leading conversations and creating hero assets or even driving traffic and actions post-launch through contests and giveaways. Brands can and should use influencers in every step of the marketing cycle.”

Brands are also leveraging influencers and their data for research.

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Khushboo Benani

Khushboo Benani, Content and Brand Advocacy Head, Diageo India, suggested that young brands should start engaging influencers when they have reached a strong width of distribution and their products are easily available for consumers. “More mature brands should engage influencers when they want to generate conversations around a new aspect linked to the brand,” she said.

Audiences are more aware than ever before and are no longer receptive to in-the-face branding. Providing influencers with talking points and letting them create their own content is the most optimal strategy. This process, however, has to be carefully crafted and co-created at times.

“Influencers should be given creative freedom to tell the story about their experience with the brand and product while making them aware of the brand’s core message and promise. It is very important in this partnership that both the brand and the influencer maintain their authenticity of message and tone of voice. Those are critical ingredients to that fuel credibility into influencer campaigns,” said Kumar.

“The brand messaging needs to be clearly explained so pertinent facts are conveyed. Influencers’ own experiences using the product lend that credibility that today’s consumers definitely crave,” said Irani.

Things to keep in mind while creating content for influencers

Influencer marketing is on the rise and consumers are aware of paid collaborations with influencers and bloggers and often, and rightfully so, view it with a degree of co-scepticism. The medium should not be used as a broadcaster of a brand’s advertising but one that curates and encourages organic conversations.

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Pankaj Vermani

“The content should make sure that you get a customer’s wallet share, their wardrobe share, and their mindshare,” said Pankaj Vermani, Founder and CEO, Clovia. “The holy grail is the mindshare. The predominant agenda is to reach out to the end customer with what the brand stands for.”

Hashtags are campaign lead. The hashtags should be contextual, relevant, immediately identifiable and quirky, and identify with the brand. It of course helps to pick hashtags that are already trending. These help in the overall discoverability of branded campaigns as they plug into larger on-going, contextual conversations.

“As basic hygiene check, it is also important to ensure that hashtags are simple to call out, visually register with ease and are also easy to spell,” said Kumar.

In a big update, Instagram added the ability to “follow” hashtags. For brands and businesses, this opens up a great opportunity to regularly appear in a follower’s feed. If you have a branded hashtag or community hashtags for your business, you can invite your followers to also follow your unique hashtag, said Vakharia.

What other roles do influencers play?

Influencers are great at driving store visits and other offline actions; they are also impactful at driving trials, sampling, and surveys. Here, the influencer, personally, is not involved in posting content, but through follower-led user generated content, a brand’s message/ branding can be marketed effectively.

A brand could work towards a good cause through a campaign while collaborating with an influencer.

Quoting Fabindia’s Indigogram campaign, where the brand had asked Instagram users to find inspirations and take photographs of anything that stirs them with a little bit of the Indigo colour thrown in, Kumar said, “We received overwhelming responses from the users and even influencers participated in the UGC-driven campaign, making it one of the most successful activities. #IndigoGram and #NotJustAnyIndigo are now one of the most frequently used hashtags and as a result, the content bucket associated with these hashtags continues to grow organically and is owned by users and not just by the brand.”

“There are a lot of brands who are creating content with influencers beyond a post. Biswapati Sarkar made a digital film with Cars24 and Chhavi Mittal creating video content with UrbanClap,” said Harbola.

Brands can also use influencers for reputation management by engaging with them constantly and making them their brand advocates, suggested Vermani.

How credible and authentic are influencers?

“Marketers are becoming more critical and less likely to take influencers’ claims about reach and engagement on face value. Every new-age activity goes through teething issues. It takes a while for any such platform to settle down and gain a great meaningful foothold,” said Vakharia.

Plixxo, influencer marketing platform of PopXO, which contributes 30% of the revenue for the brand, has more than 37,000 influencers on board. Stating an example, Gill said, “Influencer marketing is key and will only get better in time. Authentic influencers will only prevail.”

How can one make look influencer-led content more real and not paid for?

By creating content that is tailored to their individual audiences and by choosing influencers who align closely with your brand image, one can make look influencer-led content more real and not paid for, said Vermani.

Partnering with influencers who are users or potential users of the product/ service that the brand offers helps the content feel more organic and as a recommendation than something that they are paid for, Swarup said.

Benani said that the brands and influencers should always disclose sponsored content.

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