Even a little bit of time spent on any social media platform of your choice will likely clarify one thing very quickly for you: influencer marketing is the in thing these days. A $13 billion industry in 2021, influencer marketing is predicted to reach a market size of $84.89 billion by 2028. Given its sheer scale, social media and influencer marketing simply cannot be ignored.
With the tectonic shifts in the landscape of social media, new platforms, new types of content, and new marketing channels for brands to explore keep rising and falling. This can be a tricky thing to navigate when the sands shift so quickly and without warning. Partnering with the right influencer marketing agency, however, can help you navigate these changes efficiently and inventively! Keep reading to learn more about the future of influencer marketing and the trends you should keep your eyes peeled for.
Off to the Moving Pictures!
Technology has progressed immensely in the last few years, including in terms of global internet speeds. With the rise of 5G now, users and platforms are both gravitating increasingly toward video content over pictures or text. Be it YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter – audio and video is where the party is.
Of course, photographs and text aren’t completely out of fashion, but the emphasis today lies greatly on short-form audio and video content – TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts etc. – you get the drift!
An experienced influencer marketing agency can help you shape your content strategy to choose the right form as well as the channel for your needs and target audience.
Ongoing Projects vs One Time Collabs – Which is Better?
Where one-time collaborations between brands and influencers were once all the rage, there’s been a palpable shift today toward long-term, ongoing marketing projects between influencers and brands. There are many reasons for this, the most important being: it takes time to build a relationship with your target audience and, consequently, to make a sale. A single sponsored post looks exactly like that: a single advertisement the influencer is being paid to make.
In order to capitalise on the individualised reach of influencers, marketing strategically executed over time allows followers to build an authentic relationship with the brand through the influencer, leading to significantly more conversions in the long run. While it might seem like a rather big commitment at first, a long-term collaboration will undoubtedly prove its worth in the long run – especially if you decide to work with an influencer marketing agency.
Window Shopping on Social Media
If you scroll through your Instagram or Facebook feed, it won’t be long before you run into a product or two – with the ability to shop for them built right into the platform! Known as live shopping, the process is pretty simple. You watch your favourite social media star talk about a product they loved, and all you need to do is swipe up to buy a shiny new one for yourself! Neat, right? An influencer marketing agency’s role in this context includes helping you navigate the technical know-how that goes into setting these mechanisms up.
Small and Steady Wins the Race
Influencers come in many shapes and forms: from superstars with millions of followers to micro and nano influencers with dedicated followers in the thousands. While you might think the best engagement is to be found with the uber-popular on social media, micro and nano influencers wield a great deal of, well, influence!
They are seen by users as authentic and personalised – a smaller follower reach combined with a specific niche allows these influencers to tailor their content and responsiveness to their audiences, which, in turn, boosts authentic engagement. An influencer marketing agency can be invaluable in helping you figure out the sweet spots you should be targeting as a business when it comes to influencers.
For brands, this is all great news: you can now stretch your marketing budget while working with influencers with real reach who are intimately connected to their audiences.
New Kids on the Block
The last few years saw the meteoric rise of TikTok, which, in turn, pushed many other platforms – YouTube and Instagram – to shift toward short-form audio/video content. With its skyrocketing popularity came a rush of brands and influencers creating sponsored posts and ads. Now, with the rumbling of Twitter, yet another tectonic shift in the social media space is set to take place, with many users hailing Mastodon as the Next Cool Hangout Spot Online.
We say this to illustrate an important point: social media platforms – and types of influencer content with them – will rise and fall, providing brands with exciting new channels and forms of content to leverage for their influencer marketing needs. With these constantly shifting trends, a good influencer marketing agency can act as a compass to help you navigate what is working today – and what might work tomorrow.
Performance Metrics are Valuable Currency
With the rise of long-term brand-influencer collaborations, the foundation of these collaborations is shifting toward metrics-focused deals and contracts – which you might find easier to navigate with the help of an influencer marketing agency by your side. By this, we mean when brands partner with influencers, they set their returns in terms of specific numbers of sales, clicks, or other engagement thresholds. In turn, influencers are increasingly moving away from one-time payments to a system of royalties as performance metrics are met. This, of course, means getting your hands dirty with a complex management system.
Hello and Welcome to my Niche
What do you like? From home décor to aesthetic study notes, from plants to mechanical keyboards, from fitness to workplace humour, there’s an extremely specific Instagram out there for everyone. Influencer marketing is no different – influencers continue to grow their presence and following in specific markets and interests, making them a very connected and sought out presence in those specific niches.
The Upshot
Social media trends can be mercurial – one day, all eyes are on one trend, and the next, everyone has looked away in search of the next big thing. If you’ve been on the internet, you’ve witnessed this yourself: Snapchat, Vine, and even Facebook! It can be time-consuming to spend hours on various social media platforms to figure out what everyone’s into these days, and even more challenging to predict where the next wave of change will come from and what it will look like.
This is where an influencer marketing agency like AdLift comes in – with their fingers on the pulse of the internet and its latest trends, and they can become a one-stop solution for your social media and influencer marketing needs. They’ll tell you everything you need to know and tailor your strategy to your brand in a way that allows you to capitalise on the formidable power of the internet with ease and efficiency.
