Influencer marketing has democratised the creation business: Experts

The whole process of creation has been democratised with the arrival of influencer marketing, experts said during a panel discussion on “Influencer marketing: Using it intelligently” organised by Adgully as part of the CMOs’ Charcha, held last week.

Independent communication consultant Anup Sharma moderated the session. The panellists included:

Aditya Gurwara, Managing Partner - Services, Qoruz

Chandni Shah, Founder & COO, Kinnect

Manikanta Yadavalli, VP - Growth & Marketing, Trell

Rohan Tyagi, VP - Marketing, Triller India

Shalabh Atray, Senior VP - Marketing & Digital, Rupeek

The beauty of this whole thing is that creation has been democratised, said Shalabh Atray, Senior Vice President - Marketing and Digital, Rupeek. “The moment it gets democratised ideas can come from anybody. Multiple creators: that is the beauty of it. This is not going to be an empire of a few people, but a kingdom of many people,” he added.

The beauty of influencer marketing, according to Atray, is about getting influenced by the advocates who are truly passionate about the subject. “It is a real example of how power has shifted from large and small companies to consumers out there and to people out there who are in the culture. Influencer marketing is authentic or supposed to be authentic. That’s the beauty of it. In the olden times it was companies which were trying to influence consumers; it was like a broadcast. Now it is more like a charcha, not a broadcast. That’s the difference. It has democratised marketing in a way when done properly,” he explained.

According to Kinnect founder and COO Chandni Shah, there has been a shift in the way CMOs perceive influencer marketing. “There has been a huge shift in terms of CMOs’ traditional strategies to digital marketing. In digital marketing there is a great influence on influencer marketing. I see that shift. Initially, brand managers were sceptical in allocating budget for influencer marketing.  Now things have changed; budgets have increased. Influencers have now become too important for the brands in making that connection or the bridge between the brand and the final audience. They are the familiar faces that the audiences are connecting with. Whatever they are saying they are able to relate with the influencers and believe in the brands and products that the influencers are recommending,” remarked Shah.

At the same time, it is important to weed out fake influencers and address the measurability issue.

Rohan Tyagi, Vice President, Strategy and Operations of Triller India, said that it is actually a dilemma now. “Brands really want to keep it organic by keeping it in a really intimate or organic way, which makes it really tough to measure and weed out fake influencers. That is why we need regulation but we need to be careful because if it is overregulated it will be back to like digital media: over-measured and overregulated. We need to balance it in a way because we want brands to be at the crux of content and communication,” he added.

According to him, there are tools and measurement metrics available to measure and evaluate an influencer marketing plan to a certain extent. “But there is no absolute attribution to it. Now the industry is evolving; it is not as nascent as it was before. But there is a long way to go. We will have much more ‘templatised’ solutions to measure how the monies have been spent,” he noted.

How to find the right influencer?

Finding the right influencer is dependent on a lot of key factors, the industry experts said. Every brand has an understanding of what it wants, said Aditya Gurwara, Managing Partner - Services, Qoruz. Every parameter is different for every brand. Budget is one of the factors. “I might want to work with a top influencer, but I may not have the budget. Analytics play a key role in understanding and picking the correct influencers. There are a lot of key factors. Budget, whether the audience analytics of the influencer was matching with the brand analytics, location, demography, etc.,” he explained.

How do marketers and brands equip with the right tools to measure the engagement rates and ROI?

Choosing the influencer and executing the campaign requires utmost care, said Manikanta Yadavalli, VP Growth, Trell, adding, “Choosing the right influencer who is expert in the particular domain by researching about the influencer is important: whether he/she has the particular expertise to do it or not, whether the screen presence is proper, the kind of content is proper, etc.”

According to Rohan, the demand for short snackable content is increasing, fairly driven by growth in small towns. Consumption behaviour is changing overall.

Shalabh Atray felt that the most important thing for any brand was to own the share of the brand. “It has two parts to it. One is to make sure that people remember you, and second is that the people remember you for the right things that you want to be remembered for. Now the thing is that owning the share of mind has become really challenging for the last couple of years because there is so much that is getting absorbed in the mind. I am sure there are great stats available in terms of how much audio-visual stimulus is available to the human mind in India today. And it is a creative challenge: how I am going to come up with an idea that is going to own that share of mind,” he said.

“It is really important for the content that the creators are putting out to look genuine,” Shah added. “If it doesn’t look genuine and looks branded, then the audiences don’t connect really well with the influencers. As an agency we have a process where we put down brand guidelines as to what the campaign is about and the kind of messaging that needs to be put out there, etc. We give the influencers creative liberty. We also jointly work on the script. But at the end of the day, it is dependent on the creative influencer delivering it in the most genuine way possible without looking very scripted. Because that also doesn’t work for the brand. There is a process of checks and balances. It is a collaborative process between the agency, the influencer, as well as the client to ensure that the right kind of messaging is put out, looking genuine, and it is connecting with the audience. All these three things are really important,” she added.

Everyone agreed on the fact that regional content plays a key role especially in a country like ours. Regional is what is really growing. Regional is the way to go. Growth will come from regional content and snackable content.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXD-WHRr9Ao