“Start a marketing agency that produces 30-minute Instagram or YouTube Live sessions where celebrities and influencers can market products for small businesses. Each influencer determines the price the business owner pays in which the marketing agency collects a 25% commission fee.”
One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is marketing or lack thereof. According to Wordstream, new small businesses should spend 12-20% of annual revenue on marketing. This is difficult because most new businesses put every little dollar they earn back into operations such as inventory and payroll to keep the business afloat.
The rise of social media has slightly helped relieve the marketing burden on small businesses. One piece of marketing that needs to be further explored is the use of influencers. I used to smirk at the concept of influencers, because the idea of someone having the power to influence my behavior because they have a large social media following never made too much sense to me. However, I have finally come around and grudgingly accepted the fact that influencers are indeed a critical component of marketing in today’s world and I was able to see first-hand how using influencers impacted demand.
I connected with an Ghanaian influencer, Wode Maya about a month ago and we were discussing the Diaspora Chronicles concept and how it aligned with some of the work he was doing. During our discussion, he goes…..let’s do this, about he start a quick YouTube live session and I could spend a few minutes discussing Diaspora Chronicles. He started the live session, his followers started joining the session live, I spent a few minutes talking about a few business ideas and magically over the next few days I received over 300% increase in website visits, subscribers and individuals reaching out to me to discuss their business.
During the live event, he asked anyone that had a business and wanted to pitch it should click on the link and he will give them a couple of minutes to talk about their business for free. This lasted over an hour as many individuals wanted to pitch their business and within a day, the video received over 15,000 views.
So this got me thinking, this is essentially QVC on social media. In China, Alibaba developed Taobao, which is QVC on social media using influencers. Last year Taobao sold $39 billion of goods on TaoBao Live stream. Africa needs something similar, we need an agency that has scheduled Instagram and YouTube Live sessions where influencers promote products like QVC. The live-streaming session will illustrate product features to consumers in a far more convincing way than how plain text and images do.
For example, Funke Akindele, who has over 11 million Instagram followers can schedule a 30-minute live session where she spends 2 minutes advertising each product. So if I sold chin-chin, Funke can promote my product during her live stream and viewers can click on the stream link to purchase my chin chin.
Business Idea
What it is:
Start a marketing agency that produces 30-minute Instagram or YouTube Live sessions where celebrities and influencers can market products for small businesses. Each influencer determines the price the business owner pays in which the marketing agency collects a 25% commission fee.
How it works:
- Business owner submits an order online to agency’s website, including a picture of the product, product description, and a link to the product website
- The agency reviews the order, recommends the right influencer to market the product based on the profile and size of followers. For example, if you are selling a makeup brand, then it makes sense to use an influencer with a followership demographic of women between ages 18-40 to pitch the makeup product.
- Once the ad session is determined, the entrepreneur pays a fee adding the product to the scheduled session
- Influencer sends a post to all their followers that they will be live streaming new cool products tomorrow at 6pm on Instagram Live
- On the scheduled day, the influencer goes through each product, demonstrates how it works and includes a link were viewers can click on the link to the product website to purchase
- The agency pays the influencer and retains 25% commission
Benefits of Creating this Agency
- Celebs and influencers can efficiently monetize their social media audience
- Celebs don’t have to respond to thousands of DMs and screen out illegitimate requests for advertising
- Business owners can gain access to influencers they usually don’t have access to
- Business owners can easily measure success (ROI of paid fee) because they can view how many more clicks or purchases they received as a result of the live session
Additional Revenue Opportunities for Agency
- Turn agency website into a site to advertise products
- Sell products on agency website and receive a commission on sales
- Perform consulting services for small businesses by providing them with sales data, click rates for similar products and influencer ROI
- Leverage relationship built with celebs to help them become brand ambassadors and charge a commission
