Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns in India

Influencer marketing is becoming super popular, with lots of brands teaming up with influencers to promote their stuff. It’s a big deal in India too. According to Financial Express, the influencer marketing industry is expected to reach ₹2,200 crores by 2025. But who are these influencers, and why are they so important?

Well, influencers are usually people on social media who have a ton of followers. What makes them influencers is their ability to persuade people and their huge following. They can convince their followers to buy things just by talking about them. That’s why influencer marketing is cool—it’s like sneaking ads into content that people find interesting and want to buy.

Why Should You Consider Influencer Marketing?

Now that you know the hype around this buzzword, let’s see why your business should consider influencer marketing to achieve exponential growth. Influencers are easing the lives of brands as they bring creativity to your brand campaign and help you achieve your top 3 goals:

1. Increasing brand awareness

This is done by getting more relevant eyeballs on your brand, making an excellent way for brands to communicate their message to the target audience through their favourite bloggers.

2. Lead generation

Influencers turn these eyeballs into future customers and help brands achieve more sales. They have loyal followers who regularly consume their content and look up to what they suggest because people trust the recommendations and experiences of people they know.

3. Creating brand advocacy

Influencers help many businesses build brand loyalty as it’s easier for them to catch the audience’s attention. Most of the time, it can be more effective than brands doing the same thing by themselves.

How to Run a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign in India

If you want to build brand awareness and reputation, reach a wider audience by launching influencer marketing campaigns, and be a part of the most successful marketing campaigns in India, check out some of the tried-and-tested influencer marketing tactics performed by other brands. You can replicate the same strategy and see the magic in your business. These tips will help you achieve your goals and ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign for both parties. 

Don’t try to sell products, sell stories 

Hey, business owners! Remember, influencer marketing works because influencers have a real connection with their followers. That’s what makes people trust their recommendations. So, when you team up with influencers, give them the freedom to get creative with their posts. Let them tell a story about your product that their followers will love.

By doing this, the posts will fit perfectly with the influencer’s profile and seem more genuine. If the content feels fake, it could harm the influencer’s relationship with their audience, and that’s not good for your brand. To avoid this, pick an influencer who matches your brand’s vibe and values.

Here’s an example: Imagine a busy guy who loves staying fit but struggles to eat right and hit the gym regularly. If a fitness influencer he follows recommends protein bars, he’s more likely to give them a try. Yogabar, an online health food store, did just that. They teamed up with fitness influencers to promote their products, and it worked like a charm!

Try not to impose rules

When you collaborate with an influencer, you expect them to talk about everything positive about the product, sometimes even providing them with a script of what is to be said and what must be avoided. Sure, this is important, but by being so rigid, you take away the essence of the post, and it doesn’t look natural and appealing to the viewers, who can easily see that.

Instead, try to understand that each influencer has their way of approaching content, so do not impose any rules and give them some decent amount of control. This doesn’t mean that you should not maintain oversight of influencer campaigns. Just avoid micromanaging influencers and let them bring their creativity to light. Remember that the idea is to create engaging content and not advertisements.

Unacademy, an education platform, excellently does this job as it gets promoted through teachers and speakers with a great online presence, each with its unique way of explaining the platform’s benefits. Karan Shroff, Chief Marketing Officer at Unacademy, says that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have been the significant platforms they have leveraged influencer marketing, a brilliant example of one the most successful marketing campaigns in India.

Conduct product giveaways

Who doesn’t love free products? As a part of the collaboration with an influencer, you may ask them to conduct a giveaway of your product or services to a few selected followers. Some common criteria for giveaways are asking your audience to follow or engage with your brand on social media handles, asking your friends to do the same, posting why you want to win the giveaway, tagging your brand, etc. This itself acts as a promotion. 

Giveaways work well, especially in the initial stages of any business. You can also organise giveaways on special occasions to drive more traffic and sales, like the one done by Namyaa and mCaffeine on Instagram handles.  

Keep it simple by tapping into everyday concerns

One of the ways to keep your brand authentic is to keep it as raw as possible so that it becomes relatable to the audience. Use real, unfiltered images that connect with the audience.

Consider this. Earlier, money talks were a hush-hush topic in every household, and elders refrained from discussing it openly. But due to the rise of fi influencers (finance influencers), people are becoming more aware and discovering different ways to save and invest. Seeing this, financial service platforms such as Groww and Zerodha are leveraging this by collaborating with these finance influencers, making boring finance topics more exciting and further using their services.

Use unique hashtags for campaigns

Hashtags run social media for discoverability among the right audience. It’s more important to be seen by the right individuals than it is to be seen by a large number of people. A lot of businesses are coming up with unique hashtags that highlight a particular campaign. This also serves as a unique jingle for your brand. 

You can see this with brands like Mamaearth that come up with new and unique hashtags like #ShaadiWalaGlowEveryday during the wedding season. Similarly, Gillette Venus came up with #whatsyourrepeat campaign featuring multiple celebrities and other Instagram influencers with a huge following base in their respective niche markets. Likewise, Sugar Cosmetics too adopted the #boldandfree in their latest campaign.

Build long-term influencer relationships

Consider focusing on long-term relationships instead of one or two sponsored posts. This benefits both parties and establishes credibility in the audience’s minds when they see their influencers talking about a product for a longer duration. This will also ensure that the influencer will invest in your brand and produce high-quality content. 

It also shows the influencers that the brands trust them completely and opens up new collaboration opportunities. Product collaborations are a great way to build a great long-term partnership.

Mamaearth’s brand integration is widespread throughout social media channels. From your favourite YouTuber to a well-known Instagram influencer, you’ll probably see this brand all over. The brand mainly relied on its influencer marketing initiatives to expand its reach, and the increase in profits is evident. Yet another example of one of the successful marketing campaigns in India.

Choose the right influencer

Getting the right influencer is pivotal in expanding your customer base, as it can significantly increase your sales. But who is the right influencer? Is it the one with millions of followers? Probably not.

You should look for influencers who have knowledge in their field. An expert will bring credibility to the campaign, whereas a generic social media star might advertise anything that might not be that reliable for the audience. Further, your brand should be represented by people who genuinely believe in your product or service, that is, a niche influencer. 

For instance, let’s talk about Nykaa. Instead of going for expensive billboards and TV ads, they chose to work with micro and macro beauty content bloggers on Instagram and look at how seamlessly it changed their game.

Check the track record of the influencer

Further, don’t forget to check the track record of the influencer you wish to work with. Look at their past collaborations and content and how people have engaged with it. It’s highly recommended to look at the previous campaigns that they have done instead of simply focusing on their number of followers. 

Check how they have promoted products or services for other companies and ensure that the content aligns with your own. This way, you can ensure that the campaign will be relevant and effective in addition to the popularity of the influencers.

Conclusion: Start with Your Own influencer Marketing Campaign

Now that you know how rapidly you can grow your business by running an influencer marketing campaign, the next big step is to find the right influencer. At Expand My Business, we help you connect with the right social media influencers and take care of your marketing campaigns. Feel free to reach out to us for your social media marketing concerns.

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Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.