Marketing influencers: Merging creator economy with marketing, one reel at a time

Dhruv Sachdeva, Founder, Humour Me, the branded entertainment boutique, decided to spice up the marketing world about two months ago when he started creating content in the advertising and marketing domain. From a modest 2.5K followers on his personal Instagram page, he now has an army of 37.5K followers. His aim now is to reach a whopping 1-1.5 lakh followers in the advertising and marketing realm in the coming year.

Just like several other agency founders who are quite vocal on social media about their work, he started off this journey because he too wanted to show the great work his agency does.

Dhruv Sachdeva

Sachdeva said, “We have been doing such extraordinary work, but we never essentially market ourselves. With the goal of marketing Humour Me, I started creating Reels for Instagram just the way I would have regular conversations with clients and in pitches. I understand the content creation game well and know how to create high-value snackable content. Also, the minute your personal brand grows and garners a large organic following on social media, it becomes a mark of trust for marketers.”

Recently, the creator economy has given birth to many marketing and advertising content creators, be it Dhruv Sachdeva, Aarti Samant (The Sorted Girl), Varun Duggirala,  Harshil Karia, Pranita Bajoria (Mad Ad Woman), Karthik Srinivasan.

Most of them use their content creation skills to grow their personal brands and businesses, while some also do brand collaborations directly on their social media pages. 

Varun Duggirala

Unlike other marketing influencers, Varun Duggirala, Founder, Plot Device Entertainment and  former co-founder of The Glitch, started his content creation journey in 2018 when he sold his digital advertising agency to WPP and started podcasting, beginning with “Advertising is dead” and ending with creating 200 episodes of it. He loves having conversations and calls it one of his core purposes in life.

Duggirala believes that today's audience wants two things: entertainment that they find relatable or information that they'll find valuable.

Talking about a video of his that went viral sometime back, he said, “I shared a video of a technique that I use when nervous or anxious before a meeting and my leg starts to shake. So, I made a video about how you can stop that leg from shaking and calm your nervousness down. That video got a couple million views.”

He also emphasised that one very important thing that has worked for him very well is keeping content very real and not overtly produced.

Pranita Bajoria

Pranita Bajoria (Mad Ad Woman), Founder of Red in the White, started her journey with content creation just to get ideas out of her brain. She said, “I was working for an agency and wasn't getting creative satisfaction. I had ideas and wanted them to see the light of day. Therefore, I started putting them out, and then the community kept growing to the point where people actually wanted to learn from what I was doing.”

Being a content creator has proven to be a very good source of validation for everyone coming in at Red in the White, said Bajoria. “It becomes a good point of reference point.  Brands get a clear idea of what kind of person are they getting in business with and it also becomes easier for them to have the level of trust with us,” she added.

Harshil Karia

Similarly, most of the content that Harshil Karia, Co-Founder, Schbang, posts is around the ventures he runs- Schbang and Level Supermind. “Creating content around my ventures helps add credibility and opens doors faster,” said Karia.

He doesn’t keep much track of his Instagram’s engagement rate. He shared that his major followers are aspiring agency entrepreneurs, new creatives and people who have a lot of focus on self-growth and improvement.

Aarti Samant

Aarti Samant (The Sorted Girl), Co-Founder of Sorted Digital and former Future Group digital marketer and L&K Saatchi & Saatchi employee, took content creation seriously only 5-6 months ago. She now has close to 40K followers on Instagram. Before that, having launched Sorted Digital during the Covid-19 lockdown along with her co-founders Apurv Singh and Pawan Sarda, she was ‘literally forced’ to create Reels to keep up the engagement level high for the digital marketing learning platform on Instagram.

Decoding different brands’ marketing strategies is one of the key ingredients of the secret sauce for Samant’s content to go viral. Not only do they go viral, but such content also helps her garner business and leads along with new followers.

For example:

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Aarti Samant | Digital & Brand Marketing Consultant (@thesortedgirl)

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Aarti Samant | Digital & Brand Marketing Consultant (@thesortedgirl)

After creating a Reel a day in her initial days of content creation journey, Samant now advocates for quality over quantity.

She added, “Now I ensure that my audience’s experience of my Reels is worth their time. Therefore, I am really fixated on the fact that content and context have to be king and queen.”

For Sachdeva, creating content with the utmost honesty works. “The goal is to say the truth to people that nobody else will say it? If you join the dots, people would also believe that the ones who are honest in their content, would do the same for the brand work they create,” he said.

Challenges of being a marketing influencer

For Duggirala, the biggest challenge in content creation is to constantly figure out where the audience will go next and content distribution across platforms. He said, “I started off in audio only with podcasting. I transitioned to creating short-form content on Instagram. LinkedIn requires a very different mindset than YouTube, for which one needs to have a very television-like mindset. If you understand distribution, there's so much you can learn with consumers about businesses, about how business can evolve, and about how commerce happens, and that's been the big learning from those challenges.”

Having a full-time agency to run and consistently creating content on a regular basis is the biggest challenge for Bajoria. “There have been days when I don’t want to show up or have the energy to do so, but I still have to do it for my audience,” she said.

The biggest challenge for Samant is to figure out what kind of content her audience likes and maintain consistency. As per her, initially, it's all about quantity, experimenting with content formats, and keeping a close eye on the feedback the audience gives. “It takes a good amount of time to filter out the content pieces that are winning versus the content pieces that get lukewarm responses. Another challenge certainly is consistency, because creating content on an everyday basis definitely takes a considerable amount of time. If one wants to hire help, then he or she needs to dedicate one or two days to create content in batches and ensure delivering it to the video editors on time.”

Managing content ideas and creative blocks

Samant gets all her content ideas from her communities and vouches by keeping her eyes and ears open all the time for viral-worthy content ideas.

She said, “I keep a close watch on the DMs and comments sections. Sometimes we have the urge to create content around massive and fundamental topics in marketing. But the problems that our community has are sometimes very simple and legitimate to ask about. These questions provide me with insights to create content.”

Duggirala is a collector of ideas. Whenever he faces creative block, he goes back to the ideas he’s jotted down in notes. He said, “I constantly consume, collect, and refine information, adding my own perspective to it. When I face creative blocks, I just have to go back to something that I have saved and noted down. It helps evade any creative blocks. What interested you six months ago could become interesting to someone today.”

Bajoria gets her ideas from the personal consultations she does and the content she consumes work-related. When Praniti faces creative blocks, she ensures to do something which is not professional work related. “For example, like caring for my cats or taking care of my house.”

Unlike most of the content creators, Sachdeva’s reels are really impromptu. He doesn’t plan his content strategy in advance. “Every couple of weeks, I'll sit down and knock off 10 content pieces in one shot. I have a very strong production department within the agency. My own cinematographer shoots the videos, and then my editing team puts them together. I just sit and improvise my way through 7–10 topics.”

He suggested that there could be all kind of content creators, but if someone is creating video content, he/she has to have a gift of gab. “Anyone can learn the tips and tricks of content creation, but you can't change the raw material. It’s really important to connect with the person watching your content,” added Sachdeva.

Sachdeva emphasised that a video's initial 3 seconds crucially determine whether the audience will engage with the content. The key factors include the presenter's ability to captivate attention, deliver an impactful message, and resonate with high-value and uniqueness.

He further suggested that when it comes to content creation, he plays on the cusp of marketing and creator economy. “I marry both marketing and creator economy creating high value content for a very discerning and very smart audience. In one of the videos, I became a creator guru when I broke down how virality works. That video went viral and got over 4.2 million views organically around 1.5 lakh shares. The Reel was also featured on Instagram Discovery pages.”

Sachdeva’s ‘How do Reels go viral’ video:

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Dhruv Sachdeva (@dhrvsachdeva)

How do marketing influencers monetise?

Content has opened several doors of business opportunities for Duggirala. During his days at Glitch and being an entrepreneur first, he looked at content creation as a distribution channel which gave him a chance to spend more time with probable clients. Later on, it also led him to become an angel investor in many startups. Now Duggirala also does a bunch of brand deals across Instagram and LinkedIn and to some extent on YouTube as well. He also hosts conversations for large corporates and mentorship of several startups. 

Bajoria prefers doing brand collaborations in the informative and educational content zones. “Therefore, it's either a tool that will really help my audience or because I'm in advertising, I also get brand collaborations where I have to talk about campaigns. But I do keep it in mind to associate with brands that can genuinely impact and benefit my audience.”

Sachdeva does get many queries for brand collaborations because of the high income and smart cohort of the audience that follows him, but he has refrained from any such paid partnerships because, as per him, “it dilutes my purpose as a business person."

He continued, “I'm not a creator who monetise my own content. I will do brand collaborations but in a more strategic way. Brands now ask me if I can do something for them that resembles something I did for another brand. Such conversations are more interesting than brand collabs on Instagram,” said Sachdeva.”

Schbang’s Karia does get brand partnership queries but hasn’t entertained one yet as it’s not a priority for him. His intention is to share his company’s journey, and anyone who wants to get inspired can follow him. 

Driven by the engaging brand content she produces, Samant has embarked on collaborations with individuals and brands for Stories and Reels. Simultaneously, she has initiated one-on-one mentoring sessions, attracting enthusiasts who discover her through Reels and Stories. Despite her success, Samant underscores the absence of direct monetisation opportunities on the platform, urging for improvements in this aspect.