Digital marketing is set to become the leading medium in India. GroupM’s future report estimates it will reach 45% of the media share, driven by 33% growth. For brands, marketers, and founders, the usual ways to tap into the digital marketing vein, like paid ads, are a challenge.
For one, it’s crowded. For two, consumers have become savvy. Collaborating with influencers is an easy way to get around these barriers and reach a broader audience. And that is the biggest benefit of influencer marketing, but it is worth investing for far more.
1. Suitable for all businesses
Irrespective of the industry – travel, health, finance, beauty – influencer marketing fits the bill for every brand of every size. There is a caveat, though. You need to find the right influencer who suits your niche. Take Shivesh Bhatia’s collaboration with StashFin powered by Do Your Thng.
The YouTuber, with more than 700K subscribers, created a video with StashFin’s co-founder, Parikshit Chitalkar. While the video focused on a recipe and stayed true to Shivesh’s niche, cooking, in the end, Parikshit had a small message for viewers.
With a single piece of content, the influencer marketing campaign for StashFin reached 730,000 people and created 85,209 engagements. The Cost Per Engagement (CPE)? ₹3.8. The average in this category is ₹4.
2. Gain credibility and trust
Today, brands often struggle to outrank their competitors, especially startups. Moreover, gaining trust from the customers is not an overnight #thng, which brings us to the next benefit of influencer marketing.
Influencers already have an established, trusted relationship with their followers. People follow them because they believe in the creator’s opinions. Brands can leverage this credibility and trust to promote their product or service. And do it almost organically because influencer campaigns give you native content that doesn’t feel like an advertisement to consumers.
3. Get diversified content with unlimited sharing potential
Influencer marketing campaigns unlock a world of content, from long-form videos to short Reels, from static posts to posts with augmented reality. This is particularly helpful for filling the gaps in digital content strategy.
In addition, brands can purchase perpetual rights to a creator’s content and whitelist it. The same piece can be re-used on the brand’s social media accounts, for digital ads, for email marketing, or on the website – the possibilities are endless.
4. Unleash targeted marketing
Influencer marketing allows brands to market to a particular cohort of consumers. All it takes is to discover creators whose follower demographic matches your target audience. Manually finding such creators is an arduous task as it requires deep diving into analytics. However, an influencer marketing tech platform can effortlessly do it.
5. Improve search engine rankings
Influencer marketing can also improve your search engine rankings. While keywords are an integral part of SEO and always will be, the other #thng that Google looks for is Domain Authority (DA). A high DA website has the potential to rank higher in search engines.
When an influencer places a brand’s link on their website or social media profiles, you can earn high-quality backlinks, increasing the DA of your website.
6. Pocket-friendly and better ROI
When it comes to online marketing, most brands are more likely to embrace SEO to generate better outcomes. But, it is wise to know that SEO is a time-consuming process. On the other hand, PPC gives instant results, but it is expensive. Influencer marketing is pocket-friendly. More so if brands partner with nano and micro-influencers. For every dollar spent on influencer marketing, brands get a return of $5.20!
7. Increase traffic, leads and sales
SEO and PPC do increase digital traffic, but as we said, they cost both money and time. Compared to them, influencer marketing can generate website traffic rather easily, with more leads and increased sales.
Take, for instance, Ekta Sandhir’s collaboration with Fateh Education, again powered by DYT. Fateh’s goal was to increase brand awareness of their new Ahmedabad branch.
For it, Ekta created an Instagram video. The 1-minute-long video was a raging success thanks to a perfect brand-creator synergy and Ekta’s incredible work.It received over 230K views and numerous engagements, which resulted in tangible leads. That’s the power of influencer marketing.
Social proof: the kahuna of influencer marketing
As a brand, if you want people to believe in your product/services, you need social proof. And the best way to generate that is to share user-generated content. Stop thinking of influencer marketing as a tactic to only gain followers.
Instead, think of it as a channel that provides your audience with useful and relevant content, using creators as the lever.
Looking for an effortless, frictionless way to run influencer marketing campaigns? Get in touch.
