What are the different ways of leveraging influencer marketing apart from content creation?

• Shuchi Sethi, India Lead - AnyTag, POKKT writes how influencer marketing is becoming omnipresent today.
• She shares how one can leverage influencer marketing beyond content creation by including influencers in product development and marketing ideation.

These days influencer marketing is omnipresent. Whether you log in to Instagram or YouTube, you would find tons of examples of brands using influencers to tap into a new audience. From big brand launches to small niche brand awareness campaigns, influencer marketing has a big role to play.

Although influencer marketing is not a new phenomenon, it is evolving more quickly than any other forms of marketing. Smart brands and agencies are aware that the trick to partner with an influencer effectively is not solely dependent on their number of followers. Still, the key is to leverage the organic influence of the key opinion leaders to create strong engagement between their followers and your brand.

Best advice amid the pandemic

In the current times, when people are working from home, maintaining social distancing, and trying to minimise their outdoor visits, influencer marketing can come in handy for businesses to engage with their audience and influence them to purchase their products and services.

Since physical shopping has taken a severe hit, people are more prone to buying products online or through social media. Consumers would be more interested than ever to listen to influencers and try out their suggested/promoted products. Influencers can bring more authenticity and creativity to these programs and can also provide insights into what they believe will resonate more with your target audience.

Ways to leverage influencer marketing beyond content creation

Including Influencers in product development and marketing ideation

Influencers can get involved in product development to create original products that will appeal to your brand’s customers and the influencer’s followers. You should focus on genuine, zealous content creators with small but loyal followings. These are regular people who closely engage with their audience and produce relevant content to their line of interest. Such people are called “micro-influencers” who enjoy a decent following on social media. Micro-influencers are true to their audience and hence authenticity becomes better.

Such influencers are well-aware of your industry’s products and trends, thus providing relevant insights into what your target consumers seek and would be willing to pay for. There is a lot you can learn from these influencers. Their insights can be used to broaden your marketing initiatives and make them more effective.

Daniel Wellington is a watch brand that does not do traditional advertising and is often featured by fashion and style bloggers. In order to reach out to a wider audience, the brand has identified influencers of different styles and niches.

Source - @joyful_jax

Coca-Cola benefits from long-term relationships with micro-influencers such as Miette Dierckx, a travel and food micro-influencer with more than 35000 followers. She has been creating content for their heritage soda brand for several years now. She regularly posts photos of herself with a coke in hand. Long term influencer relationships are a great way to build reach and engagement over time.

Source- @miettedierckx

Another such example is of travel micro-influencer - Yannick Merckx who includes Coke into his worldly travels. He has nearly 48,000 followers with whom he shares frequent photos of either donning a Coca Cola sweater, taking a sip of Coke or holding recycled Coke can objects.

Souce - @hetisdemerckx

Cause Marketing
Influencers can help you in promoting a cause that will resonate with your audience. Cause Marketing is similar to Corporate Social Responsibility but with a dual purpose of increasing profitability while bettering society.

Mahindra #SeedTheRise campaign was a huge digitally-driven crowdfunding campaign to enhance the lives of Indian farmers. SeedTheRise was successful in collecting digital donations amounting to INR 1 crore. This campaign kicked off with a fundraising appeal film made with Bollywood actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who is incidentally a farmer’s son himself. This money will be utilised to improve the lives of farmers and their families in ways such as providing alternate forms of livelihood, educating their daughters and assisting them in modernising agriculture. You can check out the film here:


#NotAshamed by TLLLF Foundation - The Live Love Laugh Foundation was set up in 2015 by Deepika Padukone to champion the cause of mental health in India, with a focus on depression, stress and anxiety. On the World Mental Health Day, TLLLF started a worldwide campaign with the objective to get people to share their stories on mental health using #NotAshamed to reduce the stigma. One of the survivors who was a part of the campaign was Deepika herself. Such campaigns backed by a social influencer like Deepika have the potential to remove the stigma around mental health and bring it out in the open.

Narrative testing

Influencers can help you identify the right narrative/messaging to drive the goals of a given campaign. You may test narratives to assess which would provide the desired outcome. One influencer may use a particular narrative while the other can focus on a completely different narrative, and you can then check the effectiveness of one over the other. For example, if you want to test which narrative would result in increasing the purchase ticket size, you may use one influencer to advocate the long-term benefits of your product and the other to focus on the immediate advantages. You can assess the outcome of both narratives and select accordingly.

Giveaways and Contests

Influencers organise giveaways and contests in association with brands. In such contests and giveaways, people are required to follow certain instructions such as liking a post or comment, tagging people or following a page. Such activities enhance brand awareness and increase visibility in front of your target audience.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing has proven itself to be an effective marketing technique time and again. However, it doesn’t work alone but in tandem with content marketing and social media marketing. It encompasses curating highly engaging content, sharing it in a strategic way to reach more people and engaging with the audience to build a relationship.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to influencer marketing. You have to be willing to take risks and try out new things to see what works and what doesn’t for your brand. You may also use platforms such as Anytag to discover, activate, manage, track and attribute influencer marketing activities that drive recurring revenue. AnyTag is one of the most comprehensive influencer marketing platforms in the market, providing an integrated platform for influencer marketing and social media analysis.