September 10, 2020
Social media has proven to be the single greatest change in our lives over the past decade. So much so that it has forced us to re-evaluate the way we perceive celebrity branding. What was restricted to film and tv personalities, sportspersons and their kinds has now shifted to a more singular personality called social media influencers. They have become celebrities while also gradually diminishing the line of divide between them and other conventional celebrities.
Today, they are the real game changers. Instagram and YouTube are the platforms where such social media personalities are born. These influencers have followers running into millions, and they have such command over their followers that anything they wear, anything they eat, basically anything they endorse begin trending almost immediately.
They have become the single point spokespeople of the current generation and corporates haven’t turned a blind eye to this. In fact, they have begun devising strategies around these influencers to maximise promotion of their brands/products/services.
But irrespective of the immense popularity and following these influencers enjoy, is it money well spent? That’s the million-dollar question we need to find answers for. Like most other trends on the internet, it is strongly believed that influencer marketing will also gradually lose its charm and eventually end us another burst bubble. That’s also probably why companies treat it as one part of their overall marketing strategy in addition to SEO , email marketing , content marketing– marketing modes that has continued to prove effective means of marketing.
To understand this better Let us take a deeper look at influencer marketing. While one segment of marketers tends to believe that influencer marketing is already a dead end, data we have says otherwise. Businesses are still engaging influencers and it continues to prove effective as well.
In fact, it perhaps the quickest way to reach a large group of end users. Research has also shown that return on investment on such marketing campaigns have proven to be strong. But like all processes there is a flip side to this as well. Failures have been found in influencer marketing, but mostly because of the digital company’s inability to put the influencer’s talent to best use. AN influencer is only as good as your marketing strategy. So yes, it is too early write off influencer marketing as a failure.
Influencer marketing is well past its experimental phase and over time has repeatedly proven to be a successful online marketing tool. In simple words, it is the best thing to have happened to digital marketing. Below we’ll see three examples of how influencer marketing has been effectively used by leading brands to their benefit.
When Motorola was devising marketing plans for their Moto Z mobile phone and Moto Mods, they realised that their target audience was the youth. Through further research they realised that this target audience spent most of their time watch YouTube videos. They identified and worked with 13 influencers across platforms to reach a wider base of their target audience. Each influencer created a video of their partnership with Motorola for the launch of the product and subsequently these videos garnered a collective viewership of 11.6 million with 38.1 social impressions. What this eventually generated was a humongous traffic of 80000 first time viewers of Motomods.com
Paytm launched railway ticket booking facility by integrating it within their app and website. To promote this they engaged 50 travel and lifestyle bloggers to create a buzz about the product while also conveying the fact that users didn’t have to login to IRCTC each time to book tickets and instead could do so at just a click of a button through Paytm. These influencers used multiple platforms to promote this feature eventually reaching almost a million users.
Axis Bank tied up with technology bloggers to launch their innovation lab aptly called “Thought Factory”. These tech bloggers attended the launch event and addressed the same through live tweets and blogs. On an average each influencer blog attracted over 1000 views, where one of the blogs went on to garner almost 200000 impressions.Influencer Marketing Strategy continues to work and so long as there is a well-defined strategy in place, it will succeed each time, every time.
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