Multinational companies have been investing more heavily in marketing analytics over the past few years. According to McKinsey, they have discovered that big data gives them a tremendous edge in developing more effective business strategies. However, most of the news stories about companies investing in big data surround around companies in the United States. There are actually a number of companies in emerging markets that are also looking for ways to leverage big data to improve the ROI of their marketing strategies.
Even some of the most knowledgeable marketing pundits are surprised to learn about the role of big data and marketing analytics in companies from northern Africa to the Middle East to the eastern most regions of Asia. The market for big data in India was worth $2 billion in 2017, but this figure is expected to reach $16 billion by 2025. One of the biggest roles analytics technology plays is with the execution of influencer marketing strategies. Influencer marketing is still a novel concept in many emerging markets, so brands in those regions must approach it from a carefully honed and empirically-based framework.
Analytics is helping these brands shape their strategies. Here are some things that need to be taken into consideration, according to an influencer marketing agency we spoke with.
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Analytics helps companies in emerging markets discover leading influencers
Finding the right influencers to be ambassadors to your brand message is one of the biggest challenges that you will face in any market. This is an even bigger challenge if you are trying to build a stronger presence in emerging markets. Here are some of the difficulties that brands must overcome before selecting an influencer:
- They must make sure that the voice of the influencer is compatible with the central message of their brand. Some influencers have a very large following, but their rhetoric or primary audience isn’t an ideal fit.
- You need to make sure that their following is large enough to improve your market reach. You must also make sure that their engagement levels offer the necessary support. The last thing that you want to do is to choose to work with an influencer that is not going to have enough engagement to carry the message of your brand. It takes time and money to build a relationship with your influencers and reap the rewards of your campaign.
Analytics technology will help you identify the right influencers. One of the main benefits is that you can use data mining technology to discover the social networking profiles of people that are likely to engage with your brand in a positive way. There are millions of people in emerging markets. Unfortunately, influencers tend to be more fragmented in those regions than they are in more developed economies.
One business owner that I know is appealing to customers in Spanish speaking Latin American countries. He says that he needs to work with different influencers in Columbia, Argentina, Chile and other countries that he intends to reach. When he was trying to reach influencers to promote his market in English speaking countries, such as the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, he discovered that the same influencer marketing strategy worked across all of those regions. Due to unique cultural perspectives, the same principle did not hold in Spanish speaking emerging markets.
This meant that he needed to find different influencers in every country that he was targeting. Data mining tools made this a lot easier. They also helped him identify country-specific variations of the keywords that would help him discover influencers in each of those regions.
Analytics is Defining Influencer Marketing in Emerging Markets
Emerging markets are tapping strategies that have played out very effectively in more developed economies. They have found that merging analytics and influencer marketing is a very effective way to boost their brand reach and strengthen their market share.