Call it being humble, too busy to care, or simply not knowing how – marketers must embrace their uniqueness and share their expertise with the world. Those who go through the effort to create a personal brand win big in the long run. If it makes things any easier, the conversations they inspire or the content they share doesn’t all have to be original, it just needs to bring value to the audience.
Marketing influencers become leaders in their space and their opinion has the power to influence brands to some extent. Their content reflects what many marketers in the industry are thinking, but not saying. Therefore, it’s important to keep an eye at what marketing influencers are saying as they are the ones spearheading change.
Why am I looking at marketing influencers specifically? Because I want to give them the recognition they deserve. Plus, I hope that any aspiring marketer reading this blog will meet up with some of the leading voices in the industry in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve recently compiled the ultimate guide to influencer marketing in Saudi Arabia which gives an overview of the current dynamics happening in the kingdom. In this article I’ll list the most prominent Saudi marketing influencers who have leveraged their social media presence to inspire and engage.
Top themes surrounding “influencer marketing” in Saudi Arabia during the past 13 months.
Meet your industry’s influencers now
What is influencer marketing?
By definition, influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that involves a community leader who endorses a product or service in exchange for an incentive, often monetarily. Marketing influencers are experts within their niche and are capable of commenting on several aspects of the industry like video marketing, advertising campaigns, or search engine optimization. The same tactics that marketers use to promote a brand can be leveraged to promote themselves.
Influencer marketing has evolved in recent years with the growth of social media platforms and the growth of new mediums that were once on the sidelines. For example, marketing influencers can focus on a platform like LinkedIn or Twitter to engage with like minded professionals from around the world (check out #MarketingTwitter), or even establish their own platform in the form of a newsletter or a podcast where they create original content about their experiences and lessons learned.
The top influencers who have used #MarketingTwitter during the past 13 months.
Discover who are the influencers around your brand
What role do marketing influencers play in Saudi Arabia?
Marketing influencers play a significant role in shedding light on emerging trends in the industry and introducing the audience to new developments. In Saudi Arabia, a country where Arabic is the dominant language, marketing influencers are localizing global marketing content for the audience. In fact, there’s a huge gap in the market for Arabic content specifically when it comes to marketing.
The key roles that marketing influencers play are as follow:
- Educational role: Bringing global studies and research to their audience, in an effort to raise awareness of the latest trends and industry shifts.
- Inspirational role: Marketing is an exciting career and offers tremendous opportunities for growth and learning. Influencers sometimes give outsiders a view into the daily life of a marketer and what it takes to become an expert. The inspirational element becomes even more important knowing that Arab society considers marketing as a secondary career compared to being an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer.
- Social role: Marketing influencers create a community of like minded professionals who learn from and support each other.
- Entertainment role: Whether it’s memes or a TikTok, marketers love engaging with content that resonates with their daily struggles and funny moments.
Find out what makes influencers click
What does it take to be a marketing influencer?
Marketing influencers come in all shapes and sizes. It’s not only about the number of followers or engagement, it’s (in my opinion) how much value an influencer adds to the conversation. To become a marketing influencer first you need to be a marketer who knows the ins and outs of the industry.
With that in mind, here are key things that will help differentiate you from the crowd:
- Become a subject matter expert: Don’t pretend to know everything, highlight your expertise and your openness for learning new things.
- Engage your community: Communicate as you would with a friend. Listen, ask, and provide value in any form.
- Be genuine, authentic, and generally a nice person: This one sounds like a no-brainer, however some influencers tend to become egotistical and driven by vanity metrics such as number of followers. It’s always important to remember that becoming an influencer is both a commitment and a responsibility – people follow you for a reason.
- Provide value: Understand what your audience is looking for and create the content that makes their time worth it.
- Post consistently: It goes without saying that you need to consistently post relevant and engaging content that stimulates conversation.
Marketing influencer in the limelight
With over 200K followers on Twitter, @mkt_chess has become one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent marketing influencers. The account has only been around since 2019, however it has been able to grow organically by providing quick and digestible content related to digital marketing in Arabic.
⏪ في المفهوم العام للتسويق: هو فنّ إيجاد العميل ، والمحافظة عليه..
⏪ أما "كوتلر" فيقول في تعريف موسّع للتسويق:
"التسويق علم وفن إيجاد العملاء ، وعلم وفن المحافظة عليهم ، وعلم وفن المزجّ ما بين الإبداع والاستراتيجية التسويقية لتحقيق توازن إبداعيّ وعصريّ يحقق الغاية والهدف"— شطرنج تسويق (@mkt_chess) June 26, 2022
The account has consistently provided followers in Saudi Arabia and the region with engaging, educational, and entertaining content. An interesting approach that the account owner adopts is continuously asking for the opinion of followers on ad campaigns or cool strategies. Plus, the account diversifies the types of media between videos, photos, text-only, or links.
Who are this year’s top marketing influencers in Saudi Arabia?
To identify Saudi Arabia’s marketing influencers I used Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform. First, I identified the most used keywords that a marketing influencer would use like “marketing”, “social media”, or “engagement rates” in Arabic and English. Second, I created a project with a query that collects all tweets mentioning any of the above keywords.
I’ve focused on Twitter specifically, because it’s the most popular social media in the kingdom, with 40.5% of internet users saying they’re on the platform.
Once the tweets are automatically collected, I’ve gone through the results to ensure that there isn’t any noise or inaccurate results (which there wasn’t by the way). The list of marketing influencers is ranked based on engagement numbers.
Here are the results of the analysis, the ranking was based on the number of engagements each account had during the time period January - July 2022.
Saudi Arabia’s top 10 marketing influencers on Twitter in 2022
See which influencers are talking about your brand
Bonus: Saudi Instagram and TikTok Influencers who should be on your radar
To make things easier for marketing professionals who are reading this, I’ve collated a list of over 700 Instagram influencers from the MENA region. The Excel sheet allows you to filter through and identify the influencers based on country, topic focus, and size of followership.
Even more, I’ve also identified and collected a list of top 100 TikTok influencers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Conclusion
Becoming a marketing influencer requires you to voice your opinion and become a leader in your niche. Each of the top 10 marketing influencers in Saudi Arabia have risen to the challenge and continue to provide their audiences with knowledge and entertainment. However, it is important to remember that each influencer has their own unique way to engage their target audience and grow in the long term.
For marketers reading this, now is the time to either freshen up your social media presence or at least work with influencers that will propel your brand forward. The choice is yours.
