Why are brands collaborating with regional influencers?
According to an influencer marketing agency WillStar Media, whenever the team designs creative campaigns for brands, they mostly prefer the regional influencers & local language content creators like Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, etc. And after hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns and their outstanding ROI, we observed these five things about exploring regional influencers.
Content Creators Boom
As digital literacy and language-enabled devices become more common all over India, more people started using social media to express their creativity while finding opportunities to monetize their reach.
Because of two reasons, hundreds of new content creators are gotten started visibly in the last three years. The first reason is the cheap internet data and mobile device penetration in most regional geographical areas of India. And that is why youtube content creators started booming all over the internet.
Google’s research shows that only 16% of Indians prefer to view videos in English, while 54% prefer Hindi.
And the second reason is covid situation & lockdown in India. Thousands of people became jobless and started living life in their hometowns & village areas. That is why new content creators get born by creating shorts from content all over the platforms.
If we only look at the numbers on YouTube, you might think that India has over 1,200 channels with one million subscribers. And two creators are crossing one million subscribers every day. Why is this important? Consider this in 2014, only 16 Indian content creators had more than 1 million subscribers.
Now, WillStar Media is working with 4000 influencers in all different categories all over the pan India. Of those creators, we have nearly 60% — 70% of content creators from small geographical areas of India. We are also doing a brand collaboration with them and getting superb ROI for brands.
And this is the reason marketers, agencies and brands are noticing these creators and using them for collaborations and marketing their products.
Fresh Audience
Content creators in India have access to a diverse and growing audience. In 2021, there will be over 1.2 billion mobile subscribers in India, and the smartphone market will also be expected to reach over 1 billion users by 2026. Further, cheap and fast data services will only increase the screen time spent by audiences — both rural and urban, driving demand for content.
You can see the screen time growth in the above graph and after 2016, it started overgrowing. This is the main reason brands are seeing this new regional & small geographic audience as potential consumers of their products.
Consumer’s Buying Decision
Consumer companies said brand endorsements and recommendations by YouTubers and local influencers have the potential to create a significant impact on the buying decision of consumers.
Why is this happening? The answer is quite simple. Whenever we talk about regional audiences, they always enjoy watching & reading the content in regional languages. Therefore regional content creators also started booming all over India. And all types of local audiences can get easily connected and relate with regional creators because of the language & the way of delivering content — This is human psychology.
This particular factor helps all types of creators to build trust and community with the audience. So, whenever any brand collaborates with these regional content creators and they promotes that product through their content and videos, the audience also takes as product suggestion or recommendation because of that trust. And it drives buying decisions for brands.
These days, whenever we create and run campaigns for brands, we get a better ROI from regional influencers rather than top content creators or tier 1 & tier 2 city content creators. And therefore, consumer brands are preferring the work with regional content creators.
Tapping New Market
Today in India, every tech & consumer brand focuses on increasing our share market and user base. That is why brands are using small geographic areas & villages to increase their user base. And the surprising fact is that these regional audiences are also using this tech product and exploring them.
And this is a great signal for any tech & consumer product company to explore these geographic areas as a new market for their products.
Cost Effective
We have reached a turning point in our industry where the time for startups & businesses to start seizing the opportunity with low startup costs. And partnering & collaborating with local & regional language influencers are also cost-effective for brands.
For example, If we talk about entertainment category influencers, whenever any brand collaborates with top content creators like Ashish Chanchalani, Carry Minati & Bhuvan Bam, they are getting a collaboration price between 50 Paise CPV To 1 Rupee CPV. But, whenever you collaborate with these regional language content creators, then they are getting a collaboration price between 5 Paise CPV to 50 Paise CPV.
Therefore whenever we design creative campaigns for brands, brands prefer regional influencers and local language content creators.
Conclusion
For several reasons, regional influencers make great brand ambassadors. They are highly engaged with their local communities and are likely to have a more significant reach than general market personalities.
There’s no denying the fact that regional influencers have the power to directly benefit businesses — if only brands can tap into that power. While catching the attention of a regional influencer is not as simple as snapping up a national one, with some time, research, and hiring the right influencer marketing agency, brands can effectively attain these regional sweethearts.