Guest Column: How Influencer Marketing Can Push Small Businesses

There are over 36 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India that provide employment to nearly 80 million people. In case you noticed, it’s a big number and forms the backbone of the Indian economy. However, only a small percentage of these businesses are recognised outside their immediate surroundings. One of the primary reasons is the lack of proper advertising and marketing that presumptuously is out of their small scale budgets.

Evidently, the traders overlook the potential of the 3 million strong digital footprint of the world. While traditional advertising may dig a hole in the pocket, digital marketing offers a niche route to your business within your budget. Hiring a celebrity in this day and age, for instance, may cost you in millions but leveraging a social media influencer with dedicated followers can make you reach the target market in much less expense.

Bharath Kolluru, founder, F for U, a growing fashion brand from South India, told the Indian daily, Times of India, "Something newly emerging in the market needs influencers to make the discerning customer understand the product's utility. It works out more for mid end low-end niche brands, for which the influencers are relatable." The brand went on to get a 40 pc increase in the orders in the next two weeks, exclusively through one fashion blogger. Kolluru added that of other marketing campaigns, spending on the influencer turned out the least expensive.

Additionally, customers acquired through influencer-centric campaigns are 37 percent more loyal, says Adweek. Looking at these advantages, here’s how the emerging businesses can benefit from influencer marketing:

1. Create a cost-effective campaign: An influencer-marketing campaign is exceedingly flexible, connoting that your primary investment can be small but a successful program can immediately be scaled up.
2. Build brand loyalty fast: A small or new business does not have the benefit of years of customer relationships and brand loyalty. Through an influencer creating content with your brand’s message, you can build trust amongst the potential customers more swiftly. Thus, you leverage the relationship an influencer has established with an audience based on a crucial pre-established trust. You are basically being introduced to the person's followers with an implicit credibility. This gives a company a major advantage, especially when paired with the vital market research that social media can provide on consumers (from "likes," shares and comments).
3. Focussed advertising: The traditional means to reach a large, broad audience proves to be very costly and inefficient. On the other hand, through influencer-marketing, you can create an extremely focussed campaign by zeroing in on very specific variables, like the geography of consumers or an age group. For instance, pairing with an influencer who has a dense following in a particular geographic location and a high concentration of millennial followers could make a campaign more targeted and budget sensitive. Reaching the right people is sometimes far more important than reaching a lot of people.
4. Return on investment can be easily tracked: With influencer marketing, return on investment is measureable. You can draw on a wide range of metrics to track the effectiveness of individual posts, considering how well followers react to the content and if it translates to sales. Hashtags and promo codes let you monitor sales, usage and click-through rates, making them valuable indicators of a return on investment.
5. Create premium content without paying model or a photographer: Influencers are also major content creators, not just distributors. Tying up with a fashion influencer, for instance, will not only bring you marketing but professionally produced texts and photographs that you can reuse.

(The author is  Govind Mahadevan, Digital PR Professional & Founder at Look Who’s Talking. Govind was one of the first professional to identify the potential of digital PR in India.)