Knowledge and understanding of good, engaging content is still limited in influencer marketing: Neel Gogia of IPLIX Media

The faith of brands in influencer marketing has grown amid the Covid-19 pandemic for two obvious reasons: cost effectiveness and digital execution. Though a few influencers are having a good time, reports suggest more than 95% influencers foresee a dip in earnings in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Neel Gogia, Co-founder, IPLIX Media, has a slightly different view. Talking to BuzzInContent.com, Gogia said, “The cost of influencers has not been affected because of the pandemic. Influencers charge for creating content and integrating a brand in that piece of content. Since opportunities are still there and are just increasing with time, pricing has not been affected for most influencers. There was some impact on influencer marketing in April and May, but things are back on track now as digital is the most preferred medium for brands nowadays.”

April and May were slow but in June, IPLIX Media worked with more than 10 brands from different categories. “The pandemic forced new brands and genres to explore influencer marketing because of limited options and also the good ROI that it provides,” he added.

Gogia believes only influencer marketing can provide targeted reach, brand-recall, credibility, conversions and good content — all via one piece of content.

“Content creators have the ability to achieve various goals of a brand via their content and that’s why every brand wants to include influencer marketing in their plan. We can find content creators having audience from different niches and so it becomes easy for a brand to work with the right influencer to reach their target audience.”

The authenticity of influencers, however, has always been questioned. Talking about the future of influencer marketing, Gogia said it is just the beginning and it will grow rapidly.

The only change he feels can happen now is that good content creators who are genuinely adding value to their audience will shine.

“Right now, knowledge and understanding of what is good and engaging content is still limited. An influencer may have a good following that opens up various opportunities for them but various metrics such as authenticity, audience insight, compatibility and connection with audience are ignored. We can expect the ecosystem to be more structured, transparent and software-driven in future.”

There are millions of fake influencers across various social media platforms. In fact, a study said there were 16 million+ fake Indian influencers on Instagram in 2019.

And this number shows how important it is for a brand to work with the right influencer who can represent their brand in the right manner and get them the desired results.

To ensure brands have a customised strategy for the entire campaign, IPLIX shortlists the right influencers, which allows brands to not only get great reach but also helps create an impact via content.

The agency works with a handful of influencers in different categories as their talent management agency.

With focus to create right opportunities for them to catalyse the process of their growth, it believes it is important to connect with one’s talent and understand what they want to achieve from their content and then create an action plan that supports their vision.

In short, it analyses the vision of the influencer and their content before it on-boards them.

“I have seen various people defining talent management as a service to get brand deals. I would say brands will come if the content is good and reach is growing. Therefore we try and focus on these two things. We create monthly PR activities for our influencers, get on a call almost every day to understand their content trajectory and help them reach out to right brands, which can add value to their content. I can say now that 80% of the brand deals that our influencers get is in-house, which means brands reach out to them and we don’t have to worry regarding getting brands on board for them. For brands, it’s true that we have seen a huge rise in influencer marketing agencies in last one-two years, majorly because the ecosystem is growing and changing at a rapid pace,” he explained.

Its team is constantly analysing new influencers on a daily basis to have the right knowledge and ability to use strengths of every influencer for a brand’s objective.

Every brand has different objective and no set of influencers can be a perfect fit for every brand and thus, the agency constantly keeps adding new profiles to its network and helps brands in providing the right influencer who can meet their overall objective.

The agency charges a certain percentage to the brand while planning and executing the campaign. Similarly, it charges a talent management fees to the talent (creators) whom it exclusively manages.

Asked if there is a specific formula to decide the pricing of an influencer, Gogia said, “There’s no formula that decides the cost of an influencer. A lot of parameters are involved in calculating the right cost of an influencer, 40% being reach and rest is divided into engagement, brand-value, credibility, content genre, uniqueness and connection with the audience. One influencer with 200K+ following can charge more than an influencer having a reach of one million as well for a static post.”

The agency in the past has worked with brands, including Oyo, Storytel, realme, GWM, UpGrad, MyProtein, MamaEarth, Groww, UpStox, KFC and Taco Bell.

Its partnership with Oyo had started 15 months ago with one influencer as a pilot campaign. After the success of the pilot campaign, it had managed to work with more than 200 influencers for Oyo. From creating a rap song, promoting their sales to increasing their YouTube Page subscribers by 100%, it got over 1L+ signups and achieved a total reach of 16 million+ with the brand so far.

It had also helped Storytel to expand their presence on YouTube via working with over 20 YouTubers and connect them with right influencers who can provide them right results based on their target audience. It associated with realme India to help them work with content creators from the travel and entertainment category for their launch of realme Buds Air Neo.

And as far as future plans are concerned, the agency plans to expand its portfolio of working with diverse brands and help them plan successful influencer marketing strategies. Also, connect with the right influencers and help them out in growth of their channel.

“We are also planning to introduce social media management as one of our services well, since most brand pages have extremely low engagement. Work is already in progress and we are in touch with some of the companies for the same,” Gogia said.

The agency welcomes every brand who wants to understand how they should plan their influencer marketing campaign to achieve successful results and any influencer who feels they need the right talent management team to help them grow.

Apart from this, when asked Gogia if there was an impact of the ban of TikTok on the agency, he said since 90% of its business was done on YouTube and Instagram, there was no affect. 

However, he said influencers from TikTok have been definitely impacted but it’s a temporary phase.

He said, “Most of them has started building their audience on other platforms; it will take them few months before they can attract brands on these platforms as well. With the launch of Instagram Reels, it will help them to do this transition in a better manner. But this is good learning for every content creator to put out content on different platforms simultaneously and build the audience on different platforms.”