Mad Influence, an Influencer Marketing Platform with a base of over 10,000 influencers across the country is working to get brands to use the power of ‘influencers’ to reach to their target audience.
At the helm of this young company is a young 23-year old entrepreneur, Gautam Madhavanwho is the Founder & CEO of Mad Influence.
MAD Influence has grown to include an impressive client list that includes Puma, Vivo Smart Phones, Club Factory and many more.
In a conversation with Medianews4u, Gautam talks about the evolution of influencer marketing and a lot more.
How has Influencer marketing evolved over the years? What have brands done to be a part of the evolution?
Influencer marketing in India is a very recent concept that’s not even three years old. We’ve been fortunate enough to start the business in the initial phase of this evolution.
Earlier nobody knew what Influencer marketing was. It was a struggle to find one good influencer marketing agency, but today almost everyone is an influencer or atleast an influencer strategist on their LinkedIn profiles.
The Influencer marketing trend for brands started from Instagram moved to YouTube and now has reached TikTok.TikTok is playing a very different ball game all together considering the mass audience reach and conversion rates it has. The budget spends on influencer marketing have also increased which is a good sign for the growth of this industry.
What have you as an agency created and conceptualized using influencer marketing? Are there any case studies that you would want to share with us?
We’ve innovated in our Influencer marketing journey in many ways.
Firstly, we have been the first ones to bring a celebrity to collaborate with influencers for their music promotion videos on TikTok, which now is a rage where you see many celebrities doing collaborations with influencers.
Secondly, we have been the first ones to integrate influencers in music videos of big music labels. We have integrated collaborations with music labels such as T-Series, Times Music and a few others.
We have run the one of the biggest media plans on TikTok till date which accounts to over 50 billion impressions in outreach for various brands combined. Our case studies include campaigns where UGC has crossed over 20,000 videos in 3 days in a single campaign.
What is the way forward for Influencer marketing? What is your influencer network range?
According to me, the future is going to be short form content – be it audio or video. Influencer marketing will come at a stage where judgement will be the number of conversions in sales per influencer than the number of impressions per influencer.
Our influencer base is huge and spread across the country. If you total the combined number of followers that our influencer base boasts of, the number would be easily over a 150 million mark.
How would you differentiate between an Influencer and a brand ambassador? And is a large following the only core thing you need to be considered as an Influencer?
An influencer is a person who is a good content creator. Not just a creator but someone with a great number of followers and good engagement.
Now a brand ambassador is an influencer who has a great face value, which makes ultimately makes that influencer a good brand ambassador.
I believe that just having followers doesn’t make you an influencer. At times I have seen more conversions through micro-influencers than a big influencer. A good influencer is one, who can create valuable content that their audience likes and would which would create multiple conversations among their followers and audiences.
Which are the most popular industries or categories for Influencer Marketing?
At the moment, the categories that are using influencer marketing are mainly lifestyle – which includes Fashion, Travel, Make-up, Food and Tech.
