Weekly Shorts: Top Indian brands on Instagram; tips to enhance influencer marketing strategies

The proliferation of platforms and formats like short-videos have changed the influencer marketing game for marketers, brands and creators. In this fast-evolving space, keep up with the big trends and hot topics that matter in Storyboard18’s Weekly Shorts in collaboration with affable.ai, an end to end AI-powered influencer marketing platform. Track how creators, communities and brands are engaging with users and disrupting marketing to get a sharp and fast insight into present and future trends.

Working in the influencer marketing space as a client success manager, I have a front-seat view of how the creator economy has evolved over the past years and how it has helped numerous brands and agencies connect with their target consumers.

Influencer marketing, now a must have: Influencer marketing has become very common amongst brands and agencies these days. They’ve realized if influencer marketing is not part of your growth strategy, you are missing out on a massive fraction of the pie since the world now lives on social media.

A number of D2C brands are capitalizing on the power of influencer marketing through an affiliate model - using trackable discount codes and affiliate links to track sales driven by influencers.

We work with a lot of D2C clients in the USA and APAC regions, who have begun to realize that finding the right influencer and running campaigns at scale can be easily managed using automated platforms. So I believe, adding a data-driven approach to the concept has truly emerged this year.

Use a data-driven approach to nail your target audience: Five years ago, it was easier to reach out to creators, given that influencer marketing was not as widespread as it is now. Back then, marketers selected influencers based on their follower count as they thought creators with more followers, say 100,000, meant they were reaching more people.

Today people are more educated and informed. Now when marketers choose creators, they go a step further and analyze suspicious followers because they don't want to invest money and receive incompetent output. They have realized that metrics beyond the follower count like engagement rates, audience demographics, content distribution, etc., play a major role in identifying the right creator. Marketers want to know as much detailed information about influencers as the demographic of people interacting with the influencer's post.

To get their hands on detailed insights, marketers rely on influencer management platforms. It is not only a good source of data but also backs up the effectiveness of an influencer campaign rather than telling how many followers a creator has.

Nurture relationships, drive efficient results: One of the biggest myths brands and agencies believe about influencer marketing is that it is like a magic potion for sales and delivers results effortlessly. But in reality, influencer marketing is an arduous journey. Building and nurturing relationships with influencers takes a lot of time and doesn't happen in one week. Brands need a lot of communication, effort, education, and consistency when it comes to running effective influencer campaigns.

If you've adopted influencer marketing and it's in the first stage, it may not seem like it's moving the needle much. But do not despair; it does take a lot of time and effort because I'm sure the leading brands weren't super successful when they first dove into influencer marketing.

Brands who want to see better results can approach influencer marketing through trial and error to understand what works for them. They can start by figuring out the unique selling proposition (USP) of the brand and communicate it to the influencers to convey the right brand message to customers. Having a clear campaign objective and finding the right influencers makes the whole outcome more efficient.

Top brands of India, their Instagram handles and the total number of posts made by them:

(Note: This data belongs to last week)

Charak Pharma (charakpharma) - 39

Amazon Fashion India (amazonfashionin) - 24

moha: Nature's Perfect Formula (themohalife) - 24

Amazon India (amazondotin) - 15

Vedistry (vedistryindia) - 15

AppaBook (appabookofficial) - 14

Maybelline New York (maybelline) - 12

Plum Goodness (plumgoodness) - 12

CAREPOP (carepop_crew) - 11

CHAMBOR (chamborgeneva) - 10

This week’s Influencer Marketing Short is written by Debra Tong, Client Success Manager, affable.ai, based on data from the platform.

affable.ai is an end to end AI-powered influencer marketing platform. Used by over 5000 marketers and agencies manage, collaborate and analyze their influencer marketing strategy, at scale, with speed. affable.ai and Storyboard18 are collaborating to get you weekly insights into the disruptive world of influencer marketing.