Social media influencers drive more prospects down the marketing funnel compared to paid advertisements and thus, a lot of brands have started rethinking their marketing strategy. Even well-established brands have started collaborating with influencers to speak for their brand and personalise with niched audiences.

Moreover, collaborations with micro-influencers can also help a brand tap into the local audiences that basically resemble goldmines of prospective customers. Interested in launching an influencer marketing campaign for your brand? This chapter will furnish all the relevant tips and tricks that you need to learn in advance.

1. Find the right influencers

For any influencer campaign to be successful, it is crucial that brands pick the right choice from the relatively broad palette of social influencers available at their disposal.

For starters, you should collaborate with influencer marketing agencies that tend to maintain a detailed database of all the leading influencers. These databases are curated after thorough screenings that measure the authenticity, the engagement rate and the follower count of social media influencers.

Remember to choose quality over quantity as some influencers may have a lot of following but might not suit your brand image. Although both of these traits are desirable in an
influencer, the end goal is to create share-worthy content for your audience.

A Few Parameters That Will Help You Pick The Right Influencers

1. Reach on Social Media Channels

This can be measured as the number of likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter, Google+ and subscribers on YouTube. Gauging the reach of an influencer can help brands understand
how effective they are and whether these followers align with the brand’s target audience.

Brands can use tools like Winkl that can determine the follower count, average engagement rate and performance of influencers on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

2. Blog Alexa Ranking

This tool provides commercial web traffic, data and analytics on websites.
Alexa ranking helps brands analyse bloggers and determine the top-ranking ones based on the number of page views and average daily unique visitors that they get over a span of 3 months.
The better the rank of a website, the better choice they are for brands to collaborate with.

3. Authenticity

With influencer marketing on the rise, there are instances where influencers display a fake follower count or garner unreliable followers just to cross the base barrier to becoming an influencer.
Thus, it is crucial for brands to determine the authenticity of influencers before they collaborate with them.

4. Relevance

Brands generally display a unique image that replicates their values and believes and thus, determines how their audience perceives them.
So, it is crucial for brands to not just collaborate with authentic social media influencers but also ensure that their followers are the target audience for the brand.

2. Define your Strategy

Before you start working on influencer management and campaigns, it is important to plan and define the strategy right from deciding on who the target audience will be,
the objective of the campaign and so on. Each campaign must be carefully crafted and executed. Some of the aspects that you will be required to focus on are:

• Target audience
• Objective of the campaign
• No. of influencers required to launch the campaign
• Platforms to be used- Twitter/Instagram/Blog or Facebook
• Goals of the campaign

3. Bring out Authenticity

For any influencer campaign to work, it’s necessary to give the influencers the freedom to bring out their creativity.
Allow them to speak to the audience in their own sense of style because the more authentic the content is, the more successful
the campaign will be. This will answer the audiences’ question on are influencers really influencing.

For example, IBuyFresh invited bloggers and social media influencers to visit their warehouses and blog their experiences.
The campaign received enormous attention from the local population and as a result, the brand gained more popularity. The content
did not sound like an advertisement and rather sounded like an authentic piece and that’s the major reason why it was so successful.

4. Give a Clear Brief

While planning for an influencer campaign, you need to voice your expectations very clearly to the influencer you are working with.
Don’t hesitate to communicate the kind of ROI you are expecting out of the campaign. Clearly mention the objectives of the campaign and the
payment details in brief so that there are no misunderstandings in the future. Give influencers a decent amount of time to respond, and then produce the content.

5. Measure the Success of your Campaigns Through Marketing Tools

The most incredible advantage of social media influencer marketing is the ability to track your campaign’s performance.
To measure a campaign, you need to set parameters to track results. This will help you answer the question are influencers really influencing
and is the campaign working out. Key examples of social media metrics to track include:

• Reach
• Site traffic
• Leads generated
• Sign-ups and conversions
• Revenue generated
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Page views
• Followers
• Subscribers
• Cost per Click

Having said that, take a look at some tools that you can use to track your campaigns:

• Google Analytics
• Social Mention
• Google Adwords
• Tweet Reach

What Can You Expect from a Social Media Influencer?

Given the track record of social media marketing, brands are now relying heavily on it to boost their sales, increase their brand’s visibility,
gain more customers and engage with existing customers. While planning any marketing activity, it’s important to set a benchmark and have expectations on the ROI.
Social media influencer marketing is no different.

How should you measure the ROI of Influencer marketing? Below are some of the key areas of impact that a brand can expect from influencer marketing.

1. Extent of reach

In order to measure a campaign’s success it’s important to keep an eye on how many people it has reached and how much coverage the brand is getting.
This can be measured in terms of the number of followers or the number of visitors to their blog/posts. The number of times an influencer’s post is viewed is also a good measure of success.

2. Level of engagement

No matter how big the following an influencer has, the only aspect that really counts is if their blog/post is engaging enough. Indicators like shares, likes,
retweets and comments on the blog help identify the top influencers to collaborate with for your campaign.

3. Relevant Traffic to the website or mobile App

Although influencer marketing is often regarded as a branding strategy, marketers are quickly realising its power to drive sales and sign-ups.
Brands must measure the impact of influencers, in terms of their effectiveness in sending relevant traffic to the website or mobile app of the brand.
This can be measured by ensuring unique URLs with tracking parameters for each influencer. You can use Google URL builder and Google URL shortener tools to
create trackable links that you can go back and see in Google Analytics and measure your success.

The most vital aspect of influencer marketing is co-creating content with influencers. However, brands should also make sure that the content is not one-sided and
let the influencers tell a story too. Content co-creation is about realising that your audience is a part of your brand too, and harnessing that connection to keep
consumers as engaged as possible.

Build a Strong Relationship with Influencers

Influencers are going to be advocates of your brand and what they say is going to make a lot of difference.
So it’s important to look after this relationship. Wondering how to do that? Here is a guide to help you build a sustainable relationship with the influencers.

STEP 1: Shortlist your influencers

The first step is to find top influencers in India that are most suitable for your brand. Their work and profile must align with the characteristics of your brand.
There are many influencer marketing platforms that maintain large databases of influencers. One such platform is Influencer.in, which has more than 25,000 influencers listed.

STEP 2: Set up a meeting

In order to maintain a good relationship with the influencers, it’s best to organise meet-ups at least once a month to get input from the industry and discuss your expectations.
Meeting them out of a corporate setting will certainly bring out the best in them and also help you in connecting with them better.

STEP 3: Quote them

You can express your appreciation by quoting them in your own content and linking it back to them. It is a great way to give credit where it’s
due and also build trust with them. Whether it is a quote in an opinion piece or a detailed interview of the influencer, the extra exposure you give them will certainly put you in their good books.

STEP 4: Go the extra mile

In order to maintain a good relationship with the influencers, it’s best to organise meet-ups at least once a month to get inputs from the industry
and discuss your expectations. Meeting them out of a corporate setting will certainly bring out the best in them and also help you in connecting with them better.

Influencer Marketing Cannot Help a Bad Product

If a product is going through a rough patch, influencer marketing can turn its fortunes, but there is never a guarantee that the product in question will go from bad to great in a flash.

Here are some reasons why influencer marketing cannot help save a bad product.

1. Influencer marketing is a gradual process

The truth is that influencer marketing is not a quick solution. Influencer marketing can either make or break your brand.
This is because the brand is handing over its credibility, and image to someone who will be communicating with the brand’s
target audience directly. They have the power to either make it look good or bad through their brand narratives, and this will
have a direct impact on the brand. This is why Influencer management is crucial as your chosen influencers will be a direct representation of your brand.

2. Influencers also think like consumers

If you have a great product and take it to an Influencer or the thought leaders in the industry they can help build the brand by giving it their voice.
However, on the contrary, an Influencer cannot help save a bad product. A genuine Influencer who has put efforts into building their following over a period of
time will not flash a joy-filled post about a bad product only because they are paid to create content around the brand.

3. Influencers can’t fool the consumers

Next, even if an Influencer risks their credibility and posts a good review on a bad product, their audience will be quick to see through it.
Someone who is ready to offer a fake review may not have an engaged or genuine following.

Like any other marketing effort Influencer marketing also involves strategy, planning, direction & flawless execution. There are no shortcuts to building engagement for the brand.

4. The competition is massive

A lot of brands are roping in influencers in their marketing campaigns. The quest to find Instagram influencers is never ending for brands.
This strong digital marketing tool is growing and is here to stay! As Social media channels continue to grow, Influencers will remain relevant in the face of programmatic advertising as people need human involvement to trust a brand. A person who you look up to, recommending a brand to you is always going to influence you more than an Ad that follows you online, no matter how insistent your retargeting is. Human connection is what makes influencer advertising a better alternative to traditional advertising methods.

When it comes to selecting the right influencers, the world is your oyster. There are two types of influencers. As per your business requirements, you can choose from macro-influencers
who have a large following but may have a weaker level of trust with their audience or micro-influencers who appear more genuine and authentic but provide limited reach. You can also choose these types of influencers based on the geographic location you are planning to target and opt for a veteran or novice for brand exclusivity. However, make sure your influencer’s followers are a subset of your audience at all times.

It’s important to keep in mind that not every influencer is going to fit well for your brand campaign. You can either manually search for influencers, scour internet databases,
or find them with influencer marketing platforms.

Influencer marketing companies like Influencer.in, which has a coverage of more than 25,000 social media influencers and bloggers, can be a good place to start your search for the right influencer.

Following are some of the key factors you can use to determine the suitability of the influencer for your brand.

FACTOR 1: Micro-influencers vs. Macro-influencers

When it comes to selecting influencers, marketers are faced with two possible choices: micro Vs macro-influencers. Given the huge difference between micro and macro-influencers,
most marketers are naturally faced with the dilemma of which one is best for their brand. On the face of it, macro social media influencers might seem more effective because of their
huge reach. But things are not always that straightforward. To understand which type of influencer would work best for your brand, you need to first understand the difference between them.

The biggest difference between micro and macro-influencers is the size of their following. Macro-influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers, often exceeding a million. Their followers are often spread out all over the country (sometimes the globe) and have very diverse interests. Kylie Jenner with 99.9 million followers would be considered one of the biggest macro social media influencers in the world. Virat Kohli with 193M followers is one of the biggest macro-influencers in India.

On the other hand, micro-influencer meaning is more small scale. They usually have a niche audience and they are perceived as ‘peers’ by their followers. These followers are generally
concentrated in one specific region and have a single common interest binding them together. A thrifty Instagram fashion Influencer with 1500 followers would be considered a micro-influencer.

They might have a smaller number of followers, but they can still be very useful for brands.

While there’s no denying the efficacy of macro-influencers, micro-influencers can be more helpful for small businesses and start-ups. Your final decision on whom to use depends largely upon your marketing goals, your time constraints and your resources.

FACTOR 2: Geographic location

While choosing an influencer to launch a brand campaign, be sure of whether the campaign is a global or country/region/city-specific campaign. The geographical location is a key factor which can help you make the best decision regarding the selection of influencers for your campaign.
If you are launching a campaign worldwide but it’s not available globally then it doesn’t make sense. It’s best to target your location and pick influencers from that region for a better reach.

FACTOR 3: Veteran or novice?

While seniority in grade holds more importance in an influencer marketing campaign, you must also consider if the seniority actually has an effect on your campaign objectives. Though a veteran influencer may have more recognition and a larger audience, new and emerging influencers come with their own distinctive benefits. They are more cost-effective and have a level of exclusivity with brands.

The influencers who have been in the market for a long time would have endorsed countless brands throughout their journey establishing them as paid brand promoters. Using a new influencer will give you the opportunity to achieve brand exclusivity.

FACTOR 4: Influencer’s audience

This is a key factor to take into consideration while choosing the right influencer for your campaign. This is an important entity to keep in mind when wondering how to find influencers on Instagram. Determine the age category of the audience and check if the brand aligns with the interests and preferences of the influencer’s fan base.

FACTOR 5: Use of regional content

Your influencer marketing strategy will be even more effective if you adopt a multilingual content strategy. This is highly relevant for a country like India where the majority of the people especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities consume content in their regional language.

If you want your brand content to touch the emotional chord of your target audience, it will be a good idea to invest in influencers who are well-versed in regional languages. For instance, in order to empower the youth of Tamilnadu, we, at Influencer.in have launched a Tamil YouTube channel called Arrear Irundalum Career which offers career tips and advice. Check out this interesting video on how to create a good resume.

List of influencers from each category

Here are the lists of the top influencers in fashion, beauty and food categories. This diverse types of influencer marketing services could help boost your brand campaigns.

Top Fashion and Beauty Bloggers in India

• Anshita Juneja
• Kritika Khurana
• Aashna Shroff
• Aakriti Rana
• Aayushi Bangur
• Kavya D’souza
• Pratibha Bhadauria
• Himanshi
• Pallavi Ruhail
• Ankita

Top Food Bloggers in India

• Nidhi
• Radhika Subramanian
• Chandrima Sarkar
• Anubhav Sapra
• Neeru Singh

Top travel bloggers in India

• Shifa Merchant
• Shivya Nath
• Revati & Charles
• Rachel Jones
• Meenakshi Pamnani

For more influencers, here are the lists of all influencers in various categories
from automobile to parenting and technology to name a few.

Collaborating with Influencer Marketing Agencies

If you are wondering how to find influencers on Instagram, Youtube or other platforms, one of the easiest ways to get your influencer campaign up and running is by collaborating with influencer marketing companies like Influencer.in. By logging on to Influencer.in, brands can easily find influencers of their choice by choosing from an extensive database of 25,000 influencers based on category, location, channel and reach.

Additionally, once the influencer gets shortlisted, they are automatically notified with a short brief of the campaign, making the entire process quick, easy and hassle-free. From keeping track of the posts being uploaded by the influencers to examining the reach of the campaign, the entire process of influencer marketing can be performed on one single platform.

Our influencer marketing services also include the usage of an app that makes this entire process as convenient as the click of a button. It essentially gives an automated approach to large-scale influencer marketing campaigns thereby, improving efficiency and saving time.

Furthermore, with an exceptional content sharing feature, influencers can share all types of content in one central system, adding a lot of transparency and ease to the process.

Influencer marketing offers a subtle approach to promoting your business through various platforms that fit your brand’s identity. From the visually-appealing medium of Instagram to the engaging video platform of YouTube, choose an approach that will attract your audience like a moth to a flame.

However, it is not all about socially shareable posts! You can also opt for blogging and other forms of content marketing for brand awareness with valuable backlinks.

Instagram as an Influencer Marketing Platform

Instagram has grown to become the biggest and most successful social media platform with around 50,000,000 Indian users. Marketers have begun recognising the potential within this
platform and have been leveraging its power to their benefit. So what exactly is it about Instagram that makes influencer marketing so effective?

1. Visual appeal

Human beings are visual creatures and their attention is more easily captured by a beautiful, catchy image than by a long expanse of text. Instagram lets the users tell a story through pictures and that’s essentially why it’s so successful to this very day. Influencers have mastered the art of storytelling through images and that has created a significant marketing avenue for brands. Most consumers will be captivated by the images and will want to know more about the product and the brand. Additionally, the top Instagram updates ensure that each post has a fresh new approach to it, making it all the more intriguing to followers.

2. Subtle and organic way of marketing

Today, consumers have begun to reject outright the ‘annoying salesman’ approach most advertisers resorted to in the past. But Instagram allows you to be yourself and develop an actual connection with the audience. A paid partnership on Instagram is one of the many ways through which you can reach out to your target audiences.

When you find an Instagram Influencer to promote your product, your brand becomes a part of the influencer’s personality, which, in turn, extends to thousands of their followers. Consumers are more compelled to check out the product when marketed in a more natural way.

3. Tagging the brand

One of the most popular techniques that influencers use is tagging the brands that they swear by. While posting a picture, they will add a link to your account in the description and ask their followers to visit your page. This technique is helpful in driving more traffic to your brand and this indirect approach works a lot better than directly telling their followers to use the product, which might make them suspicious.

Take note, that influencers who get paid for promoting a brand also need to disclaim to their audience if a particular post is a result of them leveraging the feature of paid partnerships on Instagram. This also adds transparency to the entire influencer marketing process.

Capture, post, chat, tag, follow- Instagram offers so many ways for influencers to reach out to their audience. The Instagram stories feature is also a great way to create engaging content that converts. This personal touch is exactly what makes Instagram the powerhouse for influencer marketing.

YouTube as an Influencer Marketing Platform

It is true that a brand that does not use video content for marketing its product will have trouble reaching its maximum potential. According to recent research, around 476 million Indians use YouTube regularly. With such a rapidly expanding audience base, YouTube has become one platform that brands need to leverage in order to expand their reach.

According to another research, 65% of audiences who view videos have brand opinions, which have been strongly influenced by a YouTube influencer they follow. Read further to understand why YouTube has been one of the most desired platforms for influencer marketing.

The YouTube Brandcast 2018 event revealed very important figures about how powerful influencers on YouTube really are.

• 7 out of 10 people relate to YouTube influencers more than celebrities
• 76% of businessmen who regularly consume video content say that YouTubers shape their perception of culture
• 65% of audiences who view videos have brand opinions that have been strongly influenced by a YouTube influencer they follow
• More than 75% of moms’ brand opinions have been shaped by YouTube influencers

These numbers prove that YouTube is an indispensable platform for brands trying to widen
their consumer base through video content that converts.

Blogging as an Influencer Marketing Platform

While Instagram and YouTube are great visual ways of reaching your target market, leveraging influencers with a strong blog is one of the sure-shot ways of convincing your target audience about your brand.

Collaborating with influencers to do a sponsored post with engaging content is a great way to get the word out there. This is essentially the bloggers’ view of the brand’s product or service in their own voice and tone.

Two of the biggest advantage of a sponsored blog post are:

1. Brand awareness

Be it a product launch or a review, an influencer writing about your product can create a buzz in the market. Their entire network and followers get to see it, giving a huge boost to your brand
awareness campaign. You can also leverage the power of regional content through influencer marketing to widen your reach.

2. Valuable backlinks

Let’s face it, in this competitive world, appearing at the top of a Google search is everything. While there are plenty of methods and steps to be followed to
achieve this, one of the prominent ways is have adequate backlinks to your website. Ensure that these backlinks are of high quality and from an authoritative domain for best results.

BlaBla Cars, a company that connects car owners and co-travellers to share city-to-city journeys, used this method when they launched in India. As part of their marketing campaign, they tied up with Influencer.in to reach out to a travel influencer.

For this campaign, the brand chose a popular travel influencer, Siddhartha Joshi who took a ride from Pune to Mumbai using BlaBla cars and wrote a piece on it on his blog. The blog not only got around 500 shares but also included links to the brand’s website.

Want to tie up with travel influencers? Check out our top 20 travel influencers!

Every marketing approach comes with a set of do’s and don’ts and influencer marketing is no exception to this. To begin with, a few influencers may have a predefined way of showcasing their content. Give them the freedom to speak about your brand in their unique way to make the campaign seem more authentic and relatable. It is also important to ensure that the brief given to influencers is crystal clear and to the point with no payment delays. While planning to launch an influencer marketing campaign, there are a few areas where you could go wrong. There are a few issues faced by influencers, you can understand their issues and help create a smooth and successful campaign by understanding these issues and overcoming them together.

These issues were compiled based on our interactions with influencers, the survey we ran amongst influencers and learnings from various events such as Social Media week Bengaluru.

1. Undervaluing the efforts

Although most influencers are working for a fee, it is important to understand that they are putting in a lot of effort to make your brand and product look good. So it is important to acknowledge the effort that they put in. When the influencers see that you are valuing their effort, they are bound to do a good job with the products and it also helps build a good relationship with influencers.

2. Failing to provide a clear brief

Whether it is a Twitter campaign or a product review that you are looking at or influencer marketing for your event, the first thing you need to communicate is a brief. This will help them understand the expectation of the brand. The brief needs to be extremely clear and you will need to introduce your brands and what you would like the influencers to do in it. Specify time, social media channel and the deadline for all their actions.

3. Not giving creative freedom to influencers

For any influencer campaign to work, brands need to give the influencers some space and freedom to bring out their creativity. Allow them to speak in their own voice only giving them guidelines on your message. They are representatives of the brand and the more authentic the content is, the more successful the campaign will be.

4. Payment delays

As a brand, it is important to make timely payments as delayed payments can lead to influencers not wanting to work with you on a future campaign. Also, as you delay payments there are chances of them taking to the internet to talk about your brand. It is always a good idea to give influencers timelines about the payments and stick to it and if there is a delay it is advisable to keep them informed.