Influencer Marketing: A Perfect Fit for Brand Building

- Author: ADMIN
- Feb 08, 2024
The influencer marketing industry has been growing at an exponential rate. So much so that it is said that the influencer marketing space is expected to grow from $1.7 billion in 2016 to at least $15 billion in this year.
So what makes influencer marketing a perfect tool for brand building? Let us help you decode it.
What is it?
Influencer marketing means when a brand teams up with ‘social media influencers’ (actors, bloggers, vloggers, photographers, etc.) who in turn promote the brand on social media platforms.
An influencer is a content creator who has a substantial number of social media following. These social media influencers develop a following by sharing quality content that inspires, entertains, informs, and connects them with his or her followers.
Let’s start with an example. Imagine superstar Shah Rukh Khan endorsing Navratna Cool talc on his social media handle. He has a huge fan base. These fans ‘trust’ him and look up to him. The psychological technique used here is that if Shah Rukh is using the product it must be good.
Advantages
- Using trusted and popular figures to endorse your brand is the quickest path to establish trustworthiness of the brand.
- You reach a large audience at one go.
- Your own following increases.
- This also increases website traffic. You will often find the official website of a particular brand on their social media handles. It has been seen that many who visit the social media page of a particular brand also end up exploring their website.
- Establish brand recall in a competitive and saturated market.
How to do it?
Your first step would be to identify a social media influencer. There are about five kinds of influencers depending on their following:
- Mega-influencers with more than a million followers
- Macro-influencers with 500K to 1 million followers
- Mid-tier influencers with 50K to 500K followers
- Micro-influencers with 10K to 50K followers
- Nano-influencers with 1K to 10K followers
Now this rule is not written in stone because nowadays people can buy followers and then there are bots. So you will have to do a bit of analysis. Because a person with 10,000 dedicated followers who like and share all the content every day is better off than a person with 50,000 followers who barely comment on the posts.
This step is closely tied up with your allotted budget for influencer marketing, because social media influencers will not be endorsing your product or service for free. So, what do you have to offer? Are you going to pay per post, or are you going to give her/him discount coupons or free stuff?
The next step would be to use either an influencer marketing tool to vet their following, audience engagement and brand alignment so that you can get the right person for your work. Otherwise if you already have a few people in mind then you can analyse their followers and how well their content is received.
One other way would be to use your public relations (PR) team, if you have one, to help building networks with social media influencers. The PR team could later also help the influencer determine the content, the frequency of the posts, finalise the pay or incentive, etc.
Kinds of social media influencers
- Niche Bloggers and Video Bloggers
- Experts/entrepreneurs/academic
- Niche Photographers
- Celebrities
Influencer marketing is increasingly popular because it has often proven to be cheaper than ads, and also sometimes more attractive. Experts believe there is still a large scope for experimentation in this industry. But in case if you still need help then you can reach out to MensenTock Communications, which has years of experience in providing 360 degree solutions in brand positioning and image building.
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