Why beauty brands should rethink their targeting strategy through influencers

Delhi: According to an analysis by influencer-tech company KlugKlug, only about 12-15% of beauty influencers have more than 50% female audiences.

This means brands such as L'Oreal, Lakme, and others in the league are mainly reaching men for female-centric products with their traditional set of influencers.

KlugKlug’s analysis states that in the case of L'Oreal, out of over 4000 female profiles that tagged L'Oreal, only 1390 of them had at least 50% female followers. Further cleaning for hygiene (fake or inactive accounts) revealed that 80% of the money spent by them was wasted, as only 814 profiles out of the remaining 1390 profiles, i.e., 19.4% of them, had good, real followers.

Kalyan Kumar, Co-Founder of KlugKlug, told BuzzInContent.com that marketers are shocked when he shares this data with them. “Many of them have been unaware. If Chief Digital Officers and CMOs were aware of this problem and knew how to optimise their influencer marketing spends, they would have done so,” he said.

After analysing 1.4 million female profiles on Instagram in India, KlugKlug found that only 6 out of 100 female influencers have more than 50% female audience base.

“We help brands work with this set of 6% female followers to help curb the spillage of marketing monies. Brands like Purplle, Kapiva, and RPSG Group use our tech to target better and optimise influencer marketing spending,” said Kumar.

But wouldn’t a beauty influencer have more female following?

Kumar answered, “Unless the beauty influencers are pure-play makeup specialists and review beauty products by brands, beauty influencers too have more male following as they do not just produce beauty content but also lifestyle and fashion. Such influencers drive cool and men are attracted to cool content.”

On top of it, Instagram in general still has a more male audience base than females, he added.

Earlier, technology that provides such deep targeting wasn’t available, but now it is, with us, said Kumar.

Globally, this technology is available with Traackr and HypeAuditor. In India, it’s only KlugKlug who has such deep targeting tools for influencer marketing, exclaimed Kumar.

“While a few others have picked up the narrative, their database is small and most of them focus on influencer management,” he added.

KlugKlug has replaced Traackr in India for Samsung when it comes to influencer tech because global brands want Indian intel, and the platform has that, asserted Kumar.