2020 Influencer Marketing Trends
There are various forms of marketing right now and the one to use for different businesses and organizations depends on what they hope to achieve, their target market and how fast they want to pass the message of their brand across.
Influencer marketing is a kind of social media marketing that involves the endorsement of a product, services, or brand by celebrities or individuals who have huge followership on the internet or on their social media accounts. These celebrities have to be viewed as experts within a particular niche and companies and organizations can leverage on the followership and trust that these celebrities have built over time.
In influencer marketing the campaigns generated are as a result of the collaborations that exists between influencers and brands. Influencer marketing gives brands the opportunity to connect with the 21st century customers and clients across a target area.
According to a survey carried out by Linqia, one of the leading influencer marketing companies, they reported that influencer marketing grew tremendously in 2020. They survey also shows that more agencies and brands will engage and embrace the idea of influencer marketing even more and as a result of this forecast, they arrived at a conclusion that 40 percent of companies will be working with more than six influencer marketers, and out of this, 20 percent of the brands and companies will even allocate up to a quarter or half of their yearly budgets towards influencer marketing campaigns.
One major factor that enables influencer marketing to thrive is transparency and this is why most of the marketers go the extra mile to ensure that these influencer marketers have real followers and have built trust and relationship with their followers over a period of time.
The space of influencer marketing has now reached an advance level where brands are now increasing their budgets for influencer marketing campaigns. They are also migrating from celebrity influencers to authentic micro and macro influencers so that they can ensure that they provide quality contents on proven channels such as Instagram and other social medial platforms. It is now an integral part of marketing that brands now rank it above product sales in measuring success.
Other discoveries from the survey are as follows:
- Marketers are more comfortable to go with nano influencers (those with less than 5K followers) over celebrity influencers.
- The most selected influencers by marketers are those with 5 – 100K followers and influencers in this category are referred to as Micro influencers. They have a popularity growth of 78%.
- Instagram is the number one preferred platform for influencer marketing because of the number of respondents using it which stands at about 97%.
- Despite the much buzz and attention that Tik Tok is amassing, only 16% of marketers are planning to use this platform in 2020.
- The level of engagement is the most important parameter to measure performance for marketers, while brand awareness and impressions follows in number two and three respectively.
- 885 of marketers have the plan of using influencer marketing campaigns across all social media platforms, website, display channels, and email among others.
- One major challenge for marketers is how they can evaluate the ROI of marketing efforts by influencers as 46% of marketers see this challenge as the number one issue they face on a daily.
- About half of the marketers are not up to date on the new guidelines as stipulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding disclosure rules and sponsorship.
- Tall screens are regarded as the most important tool ahead of Instagram stories as the second most important social media platform ahead of Facebook and YouTube that came third and fourth respectively.
With influencer marketing, the audience and reach in which marketers can project their product and services to knows no bound. This is because virtually everyone today are on the one social media platform or the other following all sorts of celebrities and brand influencers depending on their area of interest.
The relevance of influencer marketing will only surge in the year 2020 as it is now the new modern trend and any marketer that wants to stay in business should take the advantage to leverage on the potency of influencer marketing.
