Your Marketing Mix is outdated without this!

It’s safe to say that almost nobody believes that celebrity who claims to use a year old, young mobile company over the behemoth mobile companies that dictate style and status. We barely even believe any form of commercials anymore. In fact, only 33% consumers trust advertisements now. We even go to the extent of installing half-defective ad blockers and risk infecting our devices to avoid advertisements. An incredible 122 million people use browsers with ad blockers in India alone! Where do marketers go now? What element needs to be incorporated into the marketing mix to get passed this wave of the intellectual consumer? It’s time that every marketer understand the importance of influencers in marketing.

Let’s start off with some use-case scenarios. Try and think of the last restaurant you went to or the last 5 things you purchased. Most of those decisions have been governed by you seeing somebody share their experience on some platform, whether digital or in-person. This is the influencer marketing. Around 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. These peers are the influencers. Influencers are that link on the social standing scale where they are considered peers but not big celebrities.

Nowadays, every organisation is trying to build an influencer marketing strategy. Clothing brands provide their merchandise to influencers free of cost as a part of their influencer marketing strategy. Restaurants, clubs and venues invite and treat influencers like royalty. Even Nike, arguably the world’s biggest sports brand, conducted an influencer based marketing campaign. Nike even decided to have these everyday sports enthusiasts on their billboards and storefronts! Even B2B organisations are taking a page out of the influencer strategies for business and inculcating it in their marketing mix. Using influencers add the personal touch of word of mouth marketing whilst still retaining an element of glamour akin to the celebrity advertisements.

Influencer tie-ups are found to generate up to 16 times more engagement than any other forms of advertising. A whopping 92 percent of people trust recommendations from individuals (even if they don’t know them)! Influencer marketing for small businesses and big businesses is the same. Find the right people, build relations and influence! Following a 4 step process, one can easily identify the influencers that provide maximum impact.

1. Identify the type of topics where the customer base can be influenced
2. Verify the influencers who can help position you better in the eyes of the public.
3. Influencer marketing is all about building relations. Create a mutually beneficial relationship with these influencer. Build relations with the right influencers to convey the right message to relevant people.
4. Test the reach, responses and resonance that each influencer brings with them and maximise such associations by closely tracking the ROI attached to the influencer

Influencer marketing is a tool to provide sincere advertisements that helps solve problems, provide new intel and discover new directions for any brand. It’s new, it’s fresh and it works. This is primarily because consumers want authenticity from brands that they use or interact with. Although, influencer’s should be associated with carefully. Actual interactions and relations that influencers share with their followers are important factors to be considered while selecting influencers with whom you might want to collaborate. Once you can add a little bit of thought and direction, influencer marketing can be used to share entire experiences of brands and products that are way more engaging than flashy, expensive, (and even mindless) adverts.