Digital Chai Pe Charcha: Secrets of Influencer Marketing

The sixth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at our office on 27th August 2016. It received an excellent response with about 15 participants including entrepreneurs, professionals, digital marketers and social media influencers taking an active part. The topic of discussion was the secret to a successful Influencer marketing campaign.

Here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways from the session:

What is Influencer Marketing?

• Word of Mouth – Digitally
• Brand Ambassador
• Key/Celebrity Influencers, Social Influencers and Peer Influencers

Word-of-mouth advertising has always been the most powerful tool, and influencer marketing is WOM Advertising 2.0.  In simple terms, it means shaping the opinions about your brand using the most influential people amidst your potential customers. If you are a brand, you make friends with the most influential people at a place where you want to sell. Now, they talk about your brand and recommend you to their followers (potential customers).

Why use Influencer marketing?

The main reason that brands are looking at influencer marketing are:

• Ad Blockers
• Neutral + Engaging – Not an Ad
• SEO + Organic Growth

Given that word of mouth, marketing generates more sales than paid advertising; more brands are beginning to think about influencer marketing as part of their branding strategy. In the last 12-16 months, we have seen many interesting influencer marketing campaigns in India run by the likes of Cadbury, Allen Solly, Ford & much more.

How to identify right influencer?

For any influencer campaign, selecting the right influencer and partnering with them is crucial. Checking the influencer's reach is the first thing you would need to do. This can be measured in terms of the number of followers/fans or the number of visitors to their blog/posts. Always remember to choose quality over quantity.

The following are the parameters you should be using while choosing the right influencer.

• Moz Domain Authority– This is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines.
• Reach in Social channels– This will include page likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.
• Estimated traffic from similar web – This tool provides user engagement statistics for websites.
• Blog Alexa Ranking – This tool provides commercial web traffic data and analytics.

Challenges in Influencer Marketing

• Inability to attribute to ROI
• Getting the right influencers and Lack of large quality influencers
• Focusing on wrong goals/metrics – e.g. Twitter Hashtag
• Transparency of Pricing – No metrics/benchmark

What ROI to expect?

• Short Term: Engagement, Content Creation
• Mid Term: SEO
• Long Term: Brand Building, Loyalty, Sales

Challenges for an Influencer

Based on our interactions with influencers, the survey we ran amongst influencers, and learnings from various events such as Social Media Week Bengaluru, there are a few challenges in influencer marketing.

• Brief is not always clear
• Not enough freedom given
• Payment delays
• Changes mid-way during campaign
• Not communicating expectations upfront

Those of you who missed the first four editions of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha can check them out below:

• Edition 1 –Challenges Faced In Marketing A Startup
• Edition 2 –Content Marketing Success In 2016
• Edition 3  –101 On Digital Advertising For Startups
• Edition 4 –How To Use Instagram For Business
• Edition 5 - Measuring ROI from Digital Marketing

You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter! Check out the hashtag #DigitalCPC for more details on the next Digital Chai Pe Charcha meet.