Influencer Marketing — Why it is so wrong in many ways? | The Indian Scenario

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There are so many things that are going wrong in the Indian blogging community, and one such is Influencer marketing. Many social media influencers have tremendous potential to reach the product to a wider audience, but there’s a catch to it. Things are not like before — the way PRs, social media managers, and marketing managers choose influencers has changed a lot.

It’s not about wider reach but about the pay per post.

Before talking about what went wrong, let’s take a look at what exactly is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is yet another type of marketing where a key person/s is influential in a particular niche/audience and is willing to promote a service/product either free or paid. The advantage of this type of marketing is, you can directly promote your product/service to your target audience [the potential audience] rather than focusing on the entire market. It is more like celebrity endorsements but limited to a particular niche.

Influencer Marketing — The Indian Scenario:

Coming to the Indian scenario, it’s entirely different. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, it doesn’t matter which niche/audience you have, as long as you have 1000s of followers/fans, and you charge less compared to others. As simple as that!

So, what’s wrong with it?

Everything is bad in it! Let’s take a look at it one by one. To make things easy, I’m considering the social media butterflies on Twitter & Instagram. Here it goes -

• Huge Followers: Just because someone has 10,000s of followers, doesn’t mean he/she’s influential. They could have gained fans either by running giveaways or by some other means
• Following to Followers Ratio: As most of the social media influencers use other ways to gain followers, most of them have a higher following-to-followers ratio, which PRs don’t care about. If you want to know more about this, you should read this article about Twitter Parasites published on TheNextWeb
• Poor Engagement: Though they have a huge audience base, the engagement on their posts is very poor. But, as 99% of the influencer marketing campaigns are paid, their paid posts receive massive engagement as there’ll be 1000s of people [like them] engaging with it to make the post [promotion] popular
• Audience Interests: It’s tough to gain a particular niche/audience unless you make all the posts relevant. This is what many B2B companies follow. They specifically make posts to target the appropriate audience and turn them, into followers. You can read my guide to know more. Anyhow, here’s a screenshot of my audience [followers] interests on Twitter.

Twitter Audience Interests

• As you know, I’m a technology blogger, and almost all my Twitter followers are very much interested in technology and related to it. Likewise, each social media influencer has a unique audience base, but as already said, irrespective of which audience set you’ve, the Indian marketing consulting firms care about the followers’ number and the pay-per-post.

The Outcomes -

A brand expects a hashtag to be trending, but they do expect it to be promoted to its target audience. In general, this is what a brand expects when it outsources the promotion work to a marketing firm. But, identifying influencers for the campaign is where everything’s going wrong. It may be a PR mistake or a misleading blogger/influencer; the ultimate impact would be on the brand’s image. The recent #LeEcoCheatingIndians trend is the best example.

This will not only impact the brand’s image but also affect the consumers’ trust in the influencers.

So, what can be done to fix it?

Simple!

• Brands should invest more time in finding influencers themselves, than giving it to some marketing agency whose aim would be making the trend popular at a lower cost than they quoted
• There are many tools available now to find influencers, and using such tools could solve the issue of finding the right influencer
• Forums and Facebook Groups are the best way to find a niche audience, and the admin/moderator for the forum/group could also be considered an influencer
• Investing money into influencer marketing should be limited, and it shouldn’t be outsourced to some marketing agency unless they have a proven record
• Even if it’s outsourced to a marketing agency, examining the influencers list could fix many problems. Brands should check the Following to Followers ratio, Engagement, post reach, etc.
• Finally, the pay per post. This shouldn’t be the primary objective of an influencer, as his post is impacting a consumer to make a purchase

The above points may not make influencer marketing successful, but it would at least show the right way to target the potential audience, then throwing it on fake followers. Before you leave, you should read my theory on Twitter influencer marketing.

“Nothing can be changed unless a brand changes its way of marketing.”

So, the next time you find some person’s profile calling themselves an influencer, do check if they fit your criteria or not.

Note: This article was first published on my blog dated July 16, 2017, and republished here.