Letter 4 – “Influencer Marketing is going to remain an effective way of brand promotion”

Hello,

Today we will talk about influencer marketing in Russia. Many brands in Russia are currently using social influencers for promotion.

How do you choose the influencer?

It’s better if this is a person whose spheres of interest naturally include the product being promoted. For example, a blogger writing about tourism can advise his readers the equipment of a certain brand. In the same way, it’s better to promote online games on the game channel. It’s very important that your audience is laid-back. Your influencer must be either a professional in a certain sphere or a celebrity whose life interests many ordinary people. It’s important to make sure that the main audience of your leader does not involve people with well-developed critical thinking.

Besides, it is worth remembering that you can’t just promote any product or service through opinion leaders. It should look like a simple recommendation from a friend. For instance, in most blogs it’d be hard to offer the readers a specific mix for construction or a certain type of tires, though it might still be possible on some specialized YouTube channels.

Influencer Marketing is perfect for promoting products and services related to health and entertainment, for this is exactly what can be advised in an informal conversation with a friend: things like clothes, cosmetics, trips, restaurants and cafes, goods for kids, etc. approve layouts and paying video producers, then await the issue, and worry about the errors and miscalculations of staff or invited marketing specialists.

Besides, leads allow the specifying of the task at most through the use of certain constraints. You can choose a specific product that needs to be promoted, the most interesting region for business, the social status of the consumer and even the cost of the lead - in general, any parameter, allowing you to select the best consumer out of a huge audience.

Blogging in Russia

Russia has two major blogging platforms: LiveJournal for texts and YouTube for videos.

YouTube is the number one video hosting site in the world, and Russia is no exception. “LiveJournal” owes its popularity to a glorious past. It was the first social platform that Russians began to explore. Many used it as a social network, until the much more convenient and technologically advanced Vkontakte and Facebook appeared. However, these networks are poorly adapted to posting big texts, text search and arrangement. Also blogs on «LiveJournal» are popular because old-timers that became popular many years ago did not want to leave them. And there is significantly less trouble with the platform than with your own website on a separate domain.

Blogging and video blogging in Russia is very different. If video bloggers, as with other countries, mostly work with their own themes, bloggers on LiveJournal stand out not for their knowledge of a particular narrow topic, but writing skills, personal charisma, intelligence, the ability to create viral posts, and excite the readers. In other words, if YouTube has the advantage of revealing certain topics and meeting interests, “LiveJournal” is an area almost entirely owned by individuals endowed with charm. In both cases, of course, there are some exceptions.

To find bloggers who can present your product or service, it’s best to use the search on YouTube. Enter the name of the topic you want in the search box and select the filter “Channels”. Next, the use options “Sort by rating” and “Number of Views” – they will help you find the most popular bloggers working with the topic you are interested in.

Also, websites analyzing lookup statistics can also be helpful, for example, Topchannel.ru or Whatstat.ru, where information is presented more clearly than in video sharing. LiveJournal has its own rating based on views of blogs, number of comments and reposts. It is quite objective. Ratings of Russian-language blogs can be found at Livejournal.com. This value, referred to as social capital is used for web ranking. The calculation algorithm is kept secret in order to avoid ratings being artificially inflated by bloggers.

Best regards,
Vadim Tylik

P.S. RMAA Group specialists are ready to assist you in creating Digital Marketing strategy as well as adopting it to Russian market.