HOW TO DO INFLUENCER MARKETING IN KENYA; THE RIGHT WAY

Influencer marketing is a marketing technique whereby a business or company uses creators with a substantial amount of following on social media to push their brand or product line. If implemented correctly, influencer marketing may boost brand awareness, and promote lead generation for your business.

There are several types of influencers:

1. Nano influencers - 5,000 to 10,000 followers

2. Micro influencers - 10,000 to 100,000 followers

3. Macro influencers - 100,000+ followers

The Dos And Donts Of Influencer Marketing in Kenya

I usually advise my clients that influencer marketing should mainly be reserved for creating brand awareness. What you do after the influencer marketing campaign is what creates lead generation— for instance, responding to feedback from prospective clients, or community management. Are you a new company entering the market? Are you launching a new product line? These are some of the instances where influencer marketing might be appropriate. 

Once you have figured out when to do influencer marketing. The next thing is figuring out which platform to use. Facebook, X(formerly Twitter), Instagram, Tiktok or Youtube. You can have your pick. However, it should be important to consider your line of business. If you are a cosmetics or fashion company, then perhaps a photo-based platform like Instagram would be more appropriate. If you are a publisher or a news network, then X might be the platform for you due to its emphasis on text and long threads. You also need to understand the metrics that matter in these different platforms, because it will help you in determining the Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) for your online campaign. Moreover, on YouTube the total watch time matters because it shows whether the viewers are interested in the content. On X, you could look at the total reach, and also detailed expands of the post. Reach alone might not be sufficient in determining the level of engagement. If a user just scrolls through the post, that counts as a view. But did the user click on the post and read it? Did the user retweet or share the post? 

Another metric that largely goes ignored, is the talkability or mentions generated by the campaign. Most PR companies or agencies do not provide detailed tabulations of the users who mentioned the company or product being pushed during the campaign. Others subcontract independent data mining companies to provide this information, thereby increasing your campaign spend. But at Sansa Digital, we provide all these metrics in-house. We also indicate whether the mentions were positive or negative by doing a sentiment analysis. This will go a long way in showing whether the campaign was successful. It's also an instrumental tool in times of crisis. 

Previously, there was a key emphasis on macro influencers. Think of these as your local musician or actor, with almost a million followers on Instagram. But more recently there has been a paradigm shift towards micro and even nano influencers due to several factors. Nano influencers are much more attached to their followers. Mostly these are niche accounts, like the mechanic who talks about mods as he goes about his daily duties. So they are much more informed and have a greater sway over their audience due to their credibility. The industry also realised that influencer marketing alone rarely bolsters lead generation. So why splash more than Ksh 200,000, to secure that artist as an influencer? When they probably don't know much about the product they are pushing, leading to lower believability and credibility. And ultimately this might affect the results of the campaign.

When looking for an influencer you also need to take their niche into account. For example, if you are a makeup company. It would be advisable to go for the influencer who posts makeup content. Or are you a mobile company? Then it would be prudent to go for the tech reviewer who posts tech content on YouTube.

In the grand scheme of things, influencer marketing can be a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal, if you leverage it correctly. If you take all the factors discussed into account, influencer marketing will increase traffic to your landing page, and generate sales.