Month: August 2023

In recent years, influencer marketing has emerged as a powerful tool for brands looking to connect with their target audiences in an authentic and engaging manner. Unlike traditional expensive television commercials (TVCs), which can often be disruptive and face diminishing returns, influencer marketing offers a more subtle and effective way to resonate with audiences. By leveraging the right influencers and employing advanced tactics, brands can significantly amplify their return on investment (ROI) and create lasting connections with their customers.

While macro-influencers might have a larger following, micro-influencers (influencers with relatively smaller followings, typically between 10,000 to 50,000) have become a force to be reckoned with. These individuals often have highly engaged, niche audiences with whom they have developed genuine relationships. Using the right influencer insights tool, like the one WALEE has, can help you compare avg. engagement of micro vs. macro influencers, and their particular audience sets to see what works better for your brand.

Selecting the right influencers is crucial to the success of any influencer marketing campaign. Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can now help brands identify the best-fit influencers based on factors like audience demographics, interests, and past campaign performance. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI enables brands to make data-driven decisions and partner with influencers who are more likely to resonate with their target audience.

Rather than pursuing one-off influencer collaborations, consider forging long-term partnerships. Long-term associations create a sense of authenticity and trust between the influencer and the brand, which can significantly impact the effectiveness of the sponsored content. As the influencer continues to promote the brand over time, their audience is more likely to view the association as genuine, leading to increased brand loyalty. In recent times, many brands are now working on building such partnerships for e.g. Foodpanda (easy deliveries for groceries and food)and HBL(discounts on restaurants)- the brands collaborated with multiple influencers(Muzammil Hassan, Human Raza, Waliya Najib etc.) plugging in the 2 services into their story & post content over the course of several months, making it look genuine.

Gone are the days of overtly promotional sponsored content. To connect with audiences, influencers should focus on storytelling that integrates the brand seamlessly into their narrative. Story-driven content enables influencers to create a meaningful and emotional connection with their followers, resulting in higher engagement and improved ROI. A Lahore/London based influencer named Baekartoot recently did a similar piece, in which she connected with her audience over how hard it is for kids living abroad, to send back remittances, and she struggled with this too, then plugging in an application which can now help you do so operational in many countries.

User-generated content (UGC) has gained immense popularity due to its authentic and relatable nature. Encouraging influencers and their followers to create UGC around your brand or products not only expands your reach but also bolsters trust among potential customers. Reposting UGC also reinforces the influencer-brand connection and shows appreciation for their support. Influencers now do stories on ‘post your moment’ and ‘share your photos’ in relevance to a topic to leverage UGC for a sponsored plug.

The beauty of influencer marketing lies in its measurability. While traditionally brands rely on PR agencies sending in post-campaign reports that may be plagered or exaggerated, brands can now instead resolve to look at live insights for their campaigns, track key performance metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Using these insights, marketers can refine their strategies, identify successful content formats, and optimise future campaigns for better ROI.

While some brands may have identified a few top-performing influencers, relying solely on a handful of creators can limit your reach. Diversifying your influencer portfolio allows you to engage with a broader range of audiences. Collaborating with influencers from different niches and platforms ensures that your brand message reaches new demographics and helps avoid overexposure to a specific audience segment. Also, reusing the same influencers with high engagement rates, may give you good numbers, but doesn’t help capture newer audiences. So utilising all available platforms(one that works wonders is now TikTok), and influencers help capture broader audience sets.

In conclusion, influencer marketing has evolved into a sophisticated and highly effective marketing strategy, often surpassing the ROI achieved through traditional expensive TVCs, activations, free sampling, billboarding etc. But to justify spending and get the targeted ROI, BMs and account managers need to grow smarter with their strategies

Marketers often confuse two strategies building brands and engaging target audiences: influencer marketing and public relations (PR). It’s easy to brush off saying “We want to do digital PR” and interchange both. It is crucial for marketers to understand the fundamental differences between these two approaches.

Focuses on results and ROI through media buying. Marketers and media planners buy influencer collaborations with individuals who possess a significant online following, enabling brands to tap into their established credibility and influence. By partnering with influencers, brands can access these engaged audiences, leverage their authenticity, and get reach, impressions, engagements, and conversions as a result. In 2022, the Creator Economy is worth US $104 billion comprising 50+ million creators around the world.

On the other hand, focuses on managing the public image and reputation of a brand. PR pros foster media and stakeholder ties for positive coverage, crisis management, and shaping public perception. It seeks to craft positive brand narratives and build public credibility.

1. How you pay: Influencer Marketing often pays for specific activities (such as posts, stories, reels, videos, etc) similar to media, whereas PR pays for the PR team’s time costs.
2. What you achieve: PR sets out to achieve an overall brand or company narrative and sentiment whereas Influencer Marketing is focused on results and ROI such as reach, impressions, engagement, and conversions.
3. Audiences: PR targets broad audience sets and is focused on generic positive sentiment whereas Influencer Marketing tends to zoom in on specific audience niches with a set brand-level objective such as awareness, consideration or conversion.
4. Measurement: Because of the absence of measurement solutions in Pakistan, marketers often confuse them. However, with Walee’s measurement solutions, you can unveil the Creator Economy and influencer measurement, providing granular audience and campaign data.

A cola brand creates a campaign to promote their stronger, more flavorful cola drink. It reached around 2.05 million people and generated 3.2 million impressions. The campaign managed to engage 116,279 users impacting its brand awareness and consideration. For their PR, they put up kiosks in malls and did press releases and digital news items at the launch. These tactics differ significantly even in their execution.

Zooming out, the brand team likely approved one budget: a digital PR campaign for brand growth, blending its results. And the results they got for these were all jumbled up and lacked measurement. Were they able to attribute a specific ROI to this campaign? What was the impact on their brand health? Could they quantify how they paid influencers – what cost-efficiency metrics did they achieve? What kind of benchmarks did they set out to achieve? The simple answer as of today is NO.

Influencer marketing has a long way to go in Pakistan. Marketers are spending over PKR 5 billion in this space. Just as digital media arrived, we chased elusive metrics, seeking true ROI and brand growth in the influencer marketing landscape. Walee aims to change this by providing real-time reporting with a strong focus on ROI. They utilize proprietary technology for results-focused activation with influencers.