Brand managers should never control the creativity of influencers: Praanesh Bhuvaneswar

Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO, TeraReach, shares key insights on influencer marketing.

According to statistics by Influencer Orchestration Network (ION) 86 percent of the most-viewed beauty videos on YouTube were made by influencers and 71 percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference.

Influencer Marketing has never been more important!

"The most organic form of marketing right now is word of mouth,” shares Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO, TeraReach

When you look at the social media space, as brand marketers it is extremely difficult to reach out on a one to one level, so what brands do is to target the key influencers in a particular space and use them to drive the message. This is known as influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is right now at a very nascent stage as there is a lot of catching up to do in the Indian market.

“When the term influencer marketing was framed, the key metrics which people were running after is reach. At least in the western countries, people have now moved forward to finding brand attribution metrics and trying to understand, how close I am to understanding a particular influencer,”opines Bhuvaneswar.

Over the years, there has been a change in how brands approach influencer marketing. While e-commerce players were the pioneers of influencer marketing, travel as an industry is now inching towards influencer marketing.

“They try to control the creativity of the influencer, which should never be done. When you are working with a creative influencer, give them the liberty because an influencer knows, what his audience likes and what they don’t,” says Bhuvaneswar, while shedding light on the mistakes Indian marketers tend to make.

However, the Indian Influencer Marketing industry is graduating fast. Brands now know that it is very difficult to find out, whether an influence is going to make sense or not. Thus, the larger brands are now trying to understand, what an influencer potentially speaks about and what are they getting out of it.They are making an attempt to build brand advocates who can reach out the masses. Brands are exploring more innovative ways, rather than getting things done the usual way.

As consumers stir farther away from ads, influencer marketing is the best bet for brands.

For further insights, you can see Praanesh’s complete session below.

Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO, TeraReach,shared his thoughts at #SMLive organised by Social Samosa.