16 Jul Influencer Marketing in Dubai
Social Media revolutionized the way that companies are forced to deal with both their customers and the public at large. In a very similar way, the advent of Influencer Marketing has changed the way companies are using social media to generate awareness, shape perceptions and elicit brand engagement. The latest research into how brands are leveraging social media influencer marketing shows that, despite recent negative media coverage, this is one trend that continues to grow.
Why use Influencer Marketing?
There are a few reasons why companies should be turning to Influencer marketing as a powerful tool to achieve objectives that involve generating awareness and driving online traffic. A recent Adweek article draws attention to the growing importance of Influencer Marketing, providing a list of 10 reasons why Influencer Marketing is the next big thing. The article lays out the ways in which Influencer Marketing can be powerful, because of the social nature and essentially the ability of brands and companies to leverage the trust between Influencer and follower to communicate a message effectively. Of course the degree of success will depend to some degree on the congruence between the Influencer’s brand/message/persona and the companies that wish to utilize that Influencer. Sometimes this can go spectacularly wrong, like the recent Pepsi Ad fiasco!
How Important has Influencer Marketing become?
In yesterday’s world, if you asked a small business owner or a large conglomerate, “How important is word of mouth to your business?”, you would be hard pressed to find someone who would say no. In fact, word of mouth is a vital ingredient for success for businesses across almost every industry. Influencer Marketing has become the modern equivalent of word of mouth, not the same but an equivalent, it is similar in generating awareness, but where real world word-of-mouth has been shown to influence 20% to 50% of purchasing behaviour, Influencer Marketing helps engage potential consumers, generating awareness, conversion rates however will depend on multiple factors such as your product/message targeting, industry, brand positioning among others.
Influencer Marketing Strategies
One of the first steps of any Influencer Marketing strategies is to identify the kind of Influencer you are looking for, a crucial aspect of this determination will undoubtedly be the size of the influencer’s following, and the veracity of his/her followers. You certainly do not want to pay an influencer who has fake followers, but how would you find out if the influencer has fake followers or not? One of the symptoms would be the lack of any response or markedly poor conversion rate for the campaign, determining this beforehand is always a little hit and miss. There are some realities that can assist you in your decision making, these include:
- Expected Engagement Rate
Engagement rates are surprisingly similar across the major platforms, this is primarily due to the monetization strategies employed by the social media channels. Facebook owns Instagram and they have not been slow to introduce their monetization strategy to the platform, this prioritizes financial gain over user experience. What this means is that engagement rates have declined and continues to decline for both personal and business accounts, ostensibly this is due to the switch away from a chronological presentation of timeline, in reality it is about encouraging and eventually requiring businesses to allocate a budget to promoting posts on the platform in order for them to be seen beyond the 1% of their followers. For business accounts that we manage on Instagram for example, currently we see an engagement rate of between 1% – 2% for photos and 4% – 8% for Video content. Most Influencers on Instagram have switched their accounts to business accounts, ironically, this has seen many of them fall foul of the same measures that drive major brands to utilize them as a marketing tool.
- Fake Follower Check & Limitations
There are quite a few services and websites that claim to check whether followers are real or not, these are calculated in one of several methods, one examines the metadata and behaviour of the accounts to determine any automated activities, another uses the follower/following ratio as well as the number of media posted to determine the authenticity of accounts. On Instagram one of these services is called Follower Check, on Twitter there is a service called Twitter Audit, some services like Hootsuite have a bolt on module that carries out similar functions.
- CPC Reality
What is your CPC reality? Well, CPC denotes your Cost Per Click, this is a key metric that all digital marketers are keenly aware of, it is determined by a variety of factors and as you execute campaigns on PPC platforms you will become increasingly aware of your expected CPC. The alternative to conducting an influencer marketing campaign is to execute a digital marketing campaign, you can calculate the cost the same results would have cost. To give a real-world example, one of our clients gets a cost per click of around 0.86AED for campaigns that attempt to generate awareness with previously unconnected clients with a conversion rate of 4.85%. An influencer marketing campaign that elicits 200 visits to a landing page with the same conversion rate would be worth approximately 170AED. Naturally if this post was complemented by a blog post from a high authority blog (wondering what domain authority is? click here to find out why its so important) that would add significant value to your website/landing page’s search engine rankings, the value of an influencer marketing campaign would be greater than this.
How we use Influencer Marketing in Dubai?
At 10 Forward we have worked with some of the top influencers in the sports and fitness community in the UAE, this work has allowed us to foster and develop relationships with influencers across a very diverse range of industries, ranging from Luxury and Lifestyle to Sports and Fitness. One of the tools we would recommend for finding influencers is Iconosquare , which allows you to search for Instagram users by hashtags, interests, bio and filter by follower/following numbers, media posted and more! Analytics is crucial to monitor the ROI for any digital marketing campaigns, talk to us about our Analytics & Reporting services which we use to provide clients in 6 countries data which allows for.
Want to talk to us about putting together a Digital Marketing Campaign? Check our digital marketing campaign services or use the contact form below to get in touch with us!
