The cost of influence

KARACHI:

Rapid digitalisation and rise of social media platforms over the past few years have opened doors to countless opportunities and several new professions. One phenomenon that has gained traction in Pakistan over the past decade is influencer marketing.

The term influencer refers to a person having a massive following on a social media platform coupled with modest engagement on content posted by them. There are many categories of influencers such as bloggers, vloggers, tech influencers, YouTubers, Instagram models and life style influencers. Lately, many companies have started promoting their products by hiring influencers because the combination of huge following and high post engagements usually lead to an uptick in sales for businesses. This is known as influencer marketing.

To gain better insights on how companies hire and pay influencers, The Express Tribune reached out to prominent experts on this topic.

Divided by tiers

Aneel Butt, who formerly worked with a public relations (PR) agency in Lahore, said that there are a lot of factors that are taken into account prior to hiring an influencer for a business. “First of all, the following of the favoured influencer is examined and then their reach considered,” he said. “We also have to know the amount of their post engagement.”

Earlier, businesses only depended on the following of an influencer therefore a blogger with one million followers was considered better and costlier than someone with 500,000 followers. However, with introduction of new tools by social media platforms such as post engagement and outreach, this has changed. Now, PR agencies make a list of influencers and categorise them in three tiers.

The rate of a tier 1 influencer is over Rs100,000 per campaign and it can be as high as Rs200,000, he pointed out. “There are three factors that are taken into account before classifying them into a tier and they are content, amount of followers and post engagements,” Butt said. “If the following of an influencer is substantial, post engagement is huge and content is good, then they are classified under tier 1.”

He added that public relations agencies check the quality of content of potential influencers.

A tier 2 influencer has low following but good content and payments to such individuals vary from Rs60,000 to Rs80,000 per campaign. Finally, tier 3 influencers are paid Rs10,000-25,000 per campaign as they are beginners in the field with attractive and eye catching content. “Brands have now moved beyond the following of an influencer and they focus more on content creation,” Butt told The Express Tribune.

From pastime to profession

Butt shared that once an influencer is hired, they are supposed to create a post to market the product of the company. One week after the post is uploaded, the PR agency or the company demands the figures from them which include engagement of the post and its total reach, he noted.

He disclosed that these were the two main components which helped the company decide whether to retain a particular influencer in the next campaign or not. He stressed that this profession depended on performance and it was no longer an easy job.

“Earlier, people made a lot of money from it just because they had a high following but now this field has evolved and turned highly data driven,” he said. He clarified that majority of Pakistanis hold the view that only lifestyle influencers drive the growths of businesses and earn exorbitant amounts which was not true.

Alongside lifestyle influencers, there are tech bloggers who are earning lucratively from this profession, ads and through Youtube channels. “Apart from influencers, we have a handful of prominent Youtubers and vloggers who are making good money from content creation,” he said. He held firm view that some tech influencers and prominent vloggers of Pakistan were earning way more than lifestyle influencers on a yearly basis.

The future of PR

Butt remarked that companies allot a fixed amount of money for influencer marketing and the PR agency has to create a combo from tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 influencers to design their campaign.

“We use are all kinds of influencers in the combo. We give chance to some new and emerging influencers while also keeping veteran bloggers and vloggers on board,” he said. “It also depends on the budget of the client. If the budget is high, then a large amount of prominent people from the influencer industry would be a part of the campaign.”

In case the budget is low, then the PR firm has to create a mix of bloggers from all three tiers and such a campaign will have more influencers from tier 3 classification as compared to tier 1. PR agencies create a combo of bloggers to present a suitable package to the client as per their budget, Butt detailed.

 

Mobile-dominated market

 

The official elaborated that Pakistanis tend to think that FMCGs were heavily involved in influencer marketing however it was a misconception.

“In Pakistan, guerilla influencer marketing was most widely used by mobile phone companies and there is a reason for that,” he said. “Smartphone companies launch a new model every two or three months hence they have to launch a fresh campaign every 1-1.5 months.”

On the other hand, FMCGs usually hold one campaign a year to revive a product hence it is not possible for them to surpass the mobile phone industry in influencer marketing.

On average, five to six phones are introduced by each mobile phone company in any given year and they make a new campaign each time a new device hits the market.

Even those smartphone companies which occupy a small share in the overall market hire influencers for the purpose of marketing, he said.

What companies have to say

Priceoye.pk CEO Adnan Shaffi said there are four major platforms of influencer marketing in Pakistan ie Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and TikTok. He added that his company hired influencers from all platforms except TikTok. Twitter’s influencer segment is almost non-existent in Pakistan, he said.

“To hire an influencer, we check the amount of real followers of that individual,” he said. “One big problem in Pakistan is that many influencers have fake followings. It might be a trend globally but I cannot be certain.” He added that after following, post engagements of the influencers were examined.

Sometimes, an influencer’s following is huge however post engagement is quite low and this is known as dead following. “After gauging these two things, we make a final decision on which influencer to work with and how to run the campaign,” he said. “Once the campaign is finalised, we reach out to influencers.”

Talking about payments, he said there were three ways to pay influencers. Detailing the first method, he said that brands do not pay anything in monetary terms however they send merchandise or goodies to the influencer to create content with it. Under this method, the influencer gets to keep the merchandise while the brand gains from its marketing.

“The second mode is quite rare in Pakistan and under this method, companies pay cash to influencers,” he said. “An influencer decides a package and his income is decided on per post basis.”

There are different rates for posting content on stories and on pictures on Facebook and Instagram and these influencers ask for a fixed amount of money regardless of the impact of the campaign on the sales of the company.

Talking about third way, he said it was affiliate marketing but was at a nascent stage in Pakistan.

By using affiliate marketing, a business asks an influencer to create a story or post of the product with a website link. The bloggers stands to earn commission from every person who buys the product through that link.

He added that the budget of his company for influencer marketing was low because it used this mode of marketing for brand building rather than to increase sales.

Shaffi however agreed that there is always an uptick in sales of a firm when influencer marketing is used.

 

Return on investment

Talking about the advertising ecosystem before the digital age, YouTuber Mubeenul Haq of Bekaar Films told The Express Tribune that when a company pitched a TV commercial, it used to be unaware of its return on investment (ROI).

“At that time, we were given a specific number and told it was the viewership of that particular ad. There was no reliable way of knowing the actual viewership impact of an ad,” he said.

This all changed as the world entered the digital era, Mubeen stressed. “Nowadays, brands prefer integrated marketing through online content creators and influencers,” he said referring to the process of unifying all aspects of marketing communication, such as advertising, PR, and social media, to deliver a seamless marketing campaign.

He pointed out that the online aspect was especially attractive because advertisers can get direct feedback from precise analytics data pertaining to the campaign. “If we use a hashtag, the advertiser can find out how many times it has been shared. If we share a link, then they can determine how many users were rerouted to their website from it. If our content contains product placement for a mobile application, they can figure out how many times it was downloaded because of our content. This level of transparency is quite attractive for clients and that is why most brands are resorting to campaign on digital platforms now,” he added.

Influencer Junaid Akram echoed Mubeen in that trackability was the basic advantage of influencer marketing. “Companies spend millions and millions on TVCs (television commercials) which you can’t get any accurate data for. You have ratings meters, but how many can you install. You can’t have them in each and every household,” he said. “If you take print, sure you can figure out how many copies of a publication were sold but not how many actually took the time out to read. Even worse for bilboards, where you only have an estimate of how much traffic passes by it. But the analytics data you can gather via social media not only tells you how many users you reached, but what age group and region they belonged to, and even what their interests are.”

The rather organic nature of marketing through online content is another aspect that increases the appeal of content creators and influencers, Mubeen said. “Brands place their ads in the middle of the video in such a way that it appears to be a part of the script and does not look like an advertisement at all,” he shared. “There also the fact that a mere few, if any, traditional ads have gone viral in Pakistan. Contrast that with the many videos by online content creators that go viral all the time. If they reach a million views and feature any product placement, naturally the product gets that much reach as well.”

Mubeen also mentioned the relatively low cost on digital campaigns. “The world is moving from TVCs to DVCs (digital video commercials). The digital age has made things both easier and cheaper for advertisers,” he said. “Media buying in the old days could cost advertisers millions of rupees, but collaboration with content creators and influencers comes at a fraction of that cost.”

“Not only that, but the online content will stay online as long as the channel or platform that hosts it is up. So there’s the longevity factor as well,” he added. “This is why brands have started to pump millions of rupees in online campaigns.”

Untapped potential

Influencer Amtul Baweja of Patangeer argued that influencer marketing was far from its true potential in Pakistan. “Yes we have content creators and influencers who have a niche target audience and get the brand’s message delivered to their followers but the content in its essence is missing,” she said. “The brands dictate us content too much.”

She stressed that companies needed to understand that when they pay influencers, they are paying for a spot on their pages or in their content. “However many a time brands send entire scripts and exact dialogues which need to be spoken. This needs to change,” said Baweja.

Aneel Butt agreed that companies indeed tried to control the content of influencers however he contended that there were justified reasons behind that. According to him, every product of a brand has a few guidelines and it does not want those guidelines to be breached while marketing. “Lets say that a product’s colour scheme is blue and white, the company would want those two colours to appear in the content made for its campaign,” he said.

Secondly, he was of the opinion that there is little innovation in content creation field in Pakistan at the moment. “At times, companies ask influencers to come up with their own ideas but nearly 90 per cent of them fail to think of an innovative scheme for product campaign.”

He admitted that a handful of Pakistan influencers were without any doubt ‘champions of innovation’ in content and managed to introduce new ideas for every campaign. “Companies give a free hand to such bloggers and they manage to surpass expectations of the firm,” he said. But overall, he insisted that Pakistan had a long way to go in terms of innovation in content.

According to Junaid Akram, an important aspect that brands needed to understand is that they can’t just follow the numbers an influencer provides. “They have to ascertain what sort of conversion a particular influencer can offer,” he said.

“A lot of celebrities for instance are known to get paid likes rather than organic likes on their social media accounts. A lot of content creators and influencers have what appears to be a huge following but a major chunk is from another country, like India for example,” he pointed out. “So if you’re tapping an influencer to help you sell a local product, those numbers are essentially useless without conversion.”

PR in the limelight

 

Aneel Butt said that earlier, PR was not considered an important industry in Pakistan however since the outbreak of Covid-19 in the country in 2020, the PR segment offered communication solution to the industry. “Below the line and above the line advertising activities were suspended due to the lockdown therefore entire communication after March 2020 was done through influencer marketing and digital marketing,” he said. “It was PR firms who gave a voice to all companies for communication.”

He recalled that conventional marketing came to a complete standstill at that time.

Offices and malls were closed so billboards and advertising in shopping malls was halted by brands, he said. “At that point, the PR segment gave wings to all brands and lifted the marketing ecosystem of Pakistan,” he said.

He predicted a bright future of PR industry in Pakistan and cited that companies were now aware of the importance of PR. Earlier, many companies considered PR as an alternate but now they term it a necessity for advertising because they know its cost effective, he said.

“Even local brands that depended on self PR are now paying PR firms for marketing,” he said. “They want content oriented marketing and targeted solutio