It is an established fact by now that Influencer Marketing programs generate great results for brands. Often, they get 10X higher engagement than the brand posts, and therefore, Influencers are now an essential part of the Marketing budget. However, often we get questions from CMOs on how Influencers only support the branding part of Marketing and not necessarily the Performance side of it. We disagree. Apart from getting the brand’s visibility and engagement, influencers do help in generating revenues and leads to brands.
To simplify, we at Team Pumpkin, follow the following process to ensure that any Influencer marketing program gives your brand the right kind of visibility, engagement, and sales.
One campaign cannot lead to multiple results. If you are chasing visibility, do not focus on leads. If sales are your objective, do not count traffic. One influencer campaign can at max have two major goals.
The influencer must not only be the domain expert in your product but also a suitable TG. A high-end fashion influencer will not and should not promote a department store fashion brand. Influencers bring in a lot of credibility to the brand at no point in time, the association should look forced. This is one of the key components of any performance-based campaign
If the influencer directly tries to sell your brand, chances are, followers will know it’s a paid campaign. Instead, make them do something creatively associated with the brand. We once got the influencers to talk generally about the problems faced by them at a bank and subsequently led them to talk about how our client bank helped them resolve their issues. For one fashion brand, we got a few influencers to attend the biggest Music Fest in India to promote their latest music collection. The response we got, led us to believe that storytelling works way better than direct selling.
Always have influencers promote links with UTM parameters, so later we can track the entire performance. Once they promote UTM led links, we can capture TG, Time spent on site, Popular products and so much more analytics to clearly calculate the ROIs.
One or two posts help in generating traffic but those associations are always questioned. We always suggest brands to have long term associations with influencers, so the entire cycle is credible and complete.
Just like media spends, the ROIs on influencers can be fluctuating, but in the long term, it promises great results for your brand. Do share your experiences with Influencer Marketing and how do you use them for better ROIs.
Team Pumpkin has been running various successful Influencer Marketing programs for brands like Axis Bank, fbb, Pizza Hut, Big Bazaar, and many others. To get a quick understanding of how you can use Influencer Marketing for your brand, write to rightclick@teampumpkin.com