Mumbai: Until recently, the concept of brand endorsements and the way brands reach their target audience has recreated the social media landscape. A newer concept of influencer marketing has emerged in the era of the creator economy. Considering the explosion of social media and creator tools in the market, the creator economy has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $6.5 billion in 2019 further crossing $9.7 billion in 2020.

Given the accelerated transformation of the advertising economy to the creator economy, it has become necessary for brands to develop relationships with influential personalities and promote their products and ideas. Creator economy is centered on creators becoming influencers, someone with 10,000 to 1 million followers or micro-influencers with 500 to 10,000 followers. Brands partner with influencers on a smaller scale to generate authenticity in brand promotion instead of focusing on sponsored ads or paying hefty to branded influencers for their stardom.

Influencers vs Micro-influencers

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Influencer marketing is at its peak. It has gone beyond the brands partnering with people with thousands and millions of followers and promoting their product to their audience. Having said that customers are more likely to purchase from a brand they can connect with. That’s where influencer marketing comes into the picture as an effective tool for word-of-mouth marketing and increasing social media authenticity. Hence, brands pay macro influencers to create and publish content based on their products or sponsor their events, as large-scale outreach programs.

Micro-influencers, on the contrary, have fewer followers and are extremely valuable for brands looking to increase their awareness within a particular niche. With the surge in the popularity of micro-influencers, younger generations are coming forward with their charismatic appeal and niche expertise, leading the brands to capitalize on the youth marketing techniques. For instance, go-to Gen Z fashion brand – Urbanic created a 150+ community of best-dressed campus students aka creators, who created some fabulous content and engaged in a variety of brand collaborations, drove meet & greets to drive brand sales, digital visibility and grow community size.

Collaborating with the right influencers

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Influencers are appreciated for their real content. They are considered to be more authentic and community oriented than a brand or a celebrity promoting a product. Known for being more engaging with the TG, the influencers typically get more time to connect with their follower base. This helps in creating a loyal audience for the brand. Instead of having followers with varied interests, demographics or geographics, these influencers tend to be more specialized and niche specific.

In the fast-paced creator economy, influencer marketing offers several benefits to brands. As social media algorithms continue to change, brands struggle to reach their audience in broader terms. According to the facts – influencers with more than 5,000 followers are usually responsible for 70 per cent of all reach in the influencer landscape. Hence, a smaller follower base of micro-influencers can actually create engagement for the brand by making the content appear right in front of the eyes of the target audience. Furthermore, it becomes more cost-effective to collaborate with micro-influencers as brands can share free product samples or coupons with micro-influencers.

Strong community building

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Social media connects people on a global level. However, a community is built with like-minded people who have common ideas and thoughts to share. Though micro-influencers do not have instant name recognition, their narrower reach and specific content build a strong community of followers for brand endorsements. Even with a smaller reach, micro-influencers have higher credibility than some high-profile endorsements. This helps brands to create connections with the targeted audience with local interests that can have a huge impact on the brand’s marketing front.

Brands experiencing growth

Onboarding the right influencers and empowering them to create real content is always followed by long-term relationships that further depend on the success metrics of the campaign. However, brands still find it challenging to evaluate the results of a micro-influencer marketing campaign. Differentiating between real influencers and people who buy inorganic followers that can offer no guarantee of engagement or success remains the biggest concern of the brands. Those looking to experience growth and engagement need to explore different marketing perspectives and tools such as followers, profiles, quality of comments, profile visits and even previous experience of influencers as brand endorsers to evaluate results. They can prove to be important numbers to quantify success metrics and can work as great ROI predictors for brands as well as micro-influencers.

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The author is Sociowash co-founder Pranav Agarwal