Today’s marketeer has many instruments in their toolkit. Some like Print and Display are like hammers –
broad-based heavy investment tools with seemingly endless appetites to consume budgets and keep growing the brand’s audience while others like Paid Social and Search are more targeted in their approach but offer diminishing returns on investments once you hit a certain threshold. This is especially true if your brand operates in a niche segment that appeals to a smaller, affluent subset of the market.
Luxury Escapes, a curator of luxury resort deals and one of India’s fastest-growing online travel firms, faces such a challenge constantly and the magic key that it has leveraged time and time again, to get the best of both worlds, is ‘Influencer Marketing’. While the word ‘influencer’ has been oft-abused in recent
times, a good influencer continues to be the best way for a brand to reach a certain cohort of audience authentically and achieve a predetermined desired set of objectives that could range anywhere along the sales funnel from awareness all the way through to conversion.
The key to making the magic happen is selecting the right influencers for the right campaigns and having
an execution plan in place to prevent any communication gaps. This could mean choosing someone with
5K followers on LinkedIn as opposed to 500K followers on Instagram. Or analysing their engagement levels to assess the authenticity of their following. Saloni Mahajan Narang, PR & Marketing Consultant for Luxury Escapes has this to say – “As a consultant, we want to ensure we recommend the best practices with the fastest ROI as today, all campaigns have a short life, due to the over exposure on social media. Having tried all mediums, the Influencer Campaigns have by-far worked the best with the fastest ROI, Most cost-effective as well as fulfilling in terms of communicating the message.”
In the last few years, Luxury Escapes has executed a variety of influencer campaigns ranging from a grand soiree in Udaipur attended by dozens of Influencers in addition to HRH Mr. Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar to grow top of mind awareness of the brand; all the way to a Lucky Draw digital campaign recently where they partnered with influencers across the country to drive sales during the campaign period.
“We’ve worked with a single influencer on a short and sharp targeted campaign as well as big-bang extravaganzas involving multiple activations across mediums where the influencer is one of many activities running simultaneously. What’s critical is to know exactly what the objective of the campaign is, who you’re trying to target, and accordingly choose the right influencer for the job and give them a proper brief,” says Arun Ashok, Regional Head, Luxury Escapes India & Middle East.
