Influential Marketing- The Era of Digital Marketing.

The people who were born in the 90’s might remember this line very well, echoed by every mother at least a thousand times: “Stop staring at that idiot box!” Are we right or are we right??

There was a time when the trendiest marketing tool was the television and every marketer, every company in its sane mind, had spent a fortune on creating advertisements to showcase themselves. Fast forward a few years, in 2017, the size of the screen has shrunk to fit your palm, the companies have gotten smarter and the average customer has been made available 24/7 through various digital platforms. Today, the internet is the king. With social media platforms gaining outrageous popularity, a new breed of “internet celebrities” has emerged. Along with them, the emergence of “Influential Marketing” has also seen a boost.

The concept of influential marketing is so simple and straight-forward: use the network of famous celebrities to endorse your product/services and help you out with your marketing. Youtubers, bloggers, twitter celebs and so on… Today companies spend generously to endorse their products through these channels. They pay these celebs to bring up their products in their videos, skits and ads… A very popular trend nowadays is product cameos in movies. On a smaller scale, a business can promote itself under influential marketing through social media in a very effective way. Local celebs having huge number of followers can help create hype about the product/service. Even companies can equally be part of these campaigns. A bridal clothing brand, for example, in their own youtube ad, can promote a particular jeweler or a business coach may bring up names of particular institutes or organizations to promote them from time to time.

In 2017, many people achieved fame through social media and crossed more than 1 million followers:

Indian Comedy Sketch Groups, AIB and TVC became the first independent creator groups in India to cross 1 million followers on youtube.

Independent artists like Bhuvan Bam, Sanam Puri, Shirley Sethia have become topics of discussion amongst the youths and have huge fan following on various platforms.

These individuals and companies promote a number of brands in their videos and campaigns. Entering 2018, the concept of influential marketing has been a crowd-puller tactic for different companies and, till the time a new marketing strategy comes along, this will definitely be the way to go for brands and businesses.