The coronavirus pandemic is impacting many businesses and the spillover effect is being felt by the advertising industry. With companies cutting down marketing spends, the ad industry is looking at a sharp decline.
However, there is a segment in the advertising space that is getting more attention from brands.
Influencer marketing is seeing more brands steering towards it in the COVID-19 times. And there are a couple of reasons behind the rise in attention.
First, ad production is on halt as Association of Advertising Producers (ASAP), that represents 75 producer members who do approximately 90 percent of the advertising work in India, on March 15 decided to cancel all shoots from March 19-31 due to the outbreak.
In this case, brands looking to create content for awareness are moving towards influencer marketing. Influencers have the potential to create content from their homes and along with the content comes their reach on platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
Talking to Moneycontrol, Prashant Sharma, CMO, NoFiltr, a company that connects brands with influencers, said, “While many influencers have straight up said that we won’t travel outside our houses to create content, top influencers in the industry have setups in their homes to create quality content.”
“The major interest amid brands are for influencers that are heavily based on Tiktok and this includes influencers like Nagma, Manav and Awez Darbar,” he added.
Nagma Mirajkar has 13.1 million followers on TikTok, Awez Darbar has 23.2 million followers, and Mr.mnv aka Manav has 6.3 million followers.
The reach of the influencers is enough to tell that they not only help brands grow awareness and consideration but also help them in driving sales. And this is need of the hour for some brands especially those focusing on sanitising and immunity boosting products, said Sharma.
“On our platform (NoFiltr), 70 percent of the new business that is coming in is from FMCG brands. People are not travelling so brands are restraining from outdoor advertising and that has pushed brands more towards digital as people are home and spending more time online. Influencer marketing hence becomes a major part,” he added.
Same is the case for Buzzoka, an influencer marketing platform.
“With ad productions on halt, brands have been pushed to work more with content creators and influencers in order to ensure that the brand message is creatively translated to its target audience. We have witnessed an increase of 25 percent to 30 percent over the last few weeks and going by the current scenario, these numbers are expected to go up in the next 15-20 days, said Ashutosh Harbola, CEO and Co-founder, Buzzoka.
“Influencer marketing is coming handy for brands to reach out to their target audience. Even brands are seeing it as an opportunity to cater to a more involved audience at this time,” he added.
And when it comes to platform, in the current situation it looks like TikTok is taking the lead in the influencer marketing space.
“Tiktok influencers are more capable of making content on their own. It usually takes half an hour to make the video. For Instagram, it takes around a day. We see a reduction in Instagram content and brands are looking for more TikTok content,” said Sharma.
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