You live in a day and age where social media has become the norm.
Nowadays, it has become increasingly difficult for brands to win the attention of audiences. Businesses, big or small, have invaded the online spaces and created a lot of noise, especially on social media. As a result, many good products/services have been pushed back and the ones with low quality have eventually changed the perception of the audience. As a result, nobody trusts no more.
It has created a skeptical image of brands who do want to indulge themselves in self-promotion.
Henceforth, businesses and brands who have invested a fortune in creating remarkable products/services are seeking more innovative and interactive ways to give their brands an exposure.
The quest for brands to put their products in front of the audience who can trust them has led them to appreciate the power of the influencers. It has become the best alternative option for many marketers.
7 Influencer Marketing Trends You Must Follow
What influencer marketing strategies are working? What are brands doing to reach out to these influencers? How they are honing up their marketing skills and running robust marketing campaigns?
These are some of the questions which come to our mind when we think about influencer marketing. But, seldom do we focus on the trends which are developing in the influencer marketing landscape.
Here are some interesting influencer marketing trends that one must follow to make the most out of influencer marketing.
Introduction to Confluence Marketing
The term confluence is derived from two terminologies, content and influence. It’s all about creating content that can influence other people. Many modern-day brands are creating website pages with engaging dynamic elements, complete flowcharts, embedded images, data-backed tables and more. Good content has a strong potential to convert a person and help them transition from a particular brand to your very own. When good content can instill the perfect element of trust within your audience, it becomes easy for businesses to sell their audiences any kind of product they want.
Brands that are planning to invest more and more in confluence marketing will drive the future. Those who will rely on hard-selling promotion tactics are not going to be effective, the power of storytelling, soft-selling tactics, proof of achievements, and similar strategies will make you the king in industry.
Microinfluencing Will Keep Getting Popular
Due to the fraudulent schemes of influencers, many brands have invested a good amount of budget in influencer marketing by investing them in all the wrong places. But since 2018, many brands have shifted their influencer marketing strategy towards micro-influencing and found it a good source of investment. Micro-influencers are such influencers who neither have high-tiered followers nor low-tiered followers. They neither have millions of fake followers and nor do they have sufficiently low followers of around 4k-5k max. They are somewhere in between 15k followers up to 50k.
Such are the individuals who can help brands to build themselves the perfect brand image. Not only are their followers loyal to them but they will also trust in their judgment. So it is up to you how you convince these influencers to help you work alongside marketing your product/service or brand.
Metrics Will Become Highly Significant
With influencer marketing on the rise, more and more marketers are looking for ways to measure the ROI by tracking the right influencer marketing metrics. As the platform has improved its API, influencers and agencies are now capable of seeing important engagement metrics such as (likes, saves and private shares on posts from Instagram) and these aren’t even visible to the general audience. It can help influencers and agencies to redefine audience interest and audience reach.
Measuring the right metrics is important to evaluate the success of the influencer marketing program. Those who have such data can optimize their marketing efforts and drive top-quality engagement.
Taking the Reverse Marketing Approach
The future companies are going to take a different, more innovative approach when it comes to marketing. This new approach of marketing will be termed as reverse marketing. This is a fairly different concept where marketing teams introduce such strategies that allow customers to seek the brand rather than marketing teams themselves search up customers for their respective businesses. Again, the type of content which you send out through your channels is what becomes a deciding factor. A lot of proofs and a lot of interesting things that you’ve achieved will do the trick for you.
Influencers are personal branding specialists. They have mastered the art of communication and have never relied on the direct pitch. Finding the influencers who have a command can help brands work on their reverse marketing approach. It is a great trend that will dramatically rise in the coming days.
Experts will Introduce Powerful E-Learning Programs
Future organizations have planned to invest a large sum of their budgets in initiating different e-learning programs. The idea is to train and educate the employees so they can work on their productivity and work coherently with some of the latest technologies and market trends. Also, these e-learning programs can become a major platform through which different influencers and thought leaders can educate other marketing professionals. In this way, they will establish a strong image.
After all, influencers become influencers because they are doing something right. When they will educate the right things to the audience, it will help individuals to become social influencers too.
Deeper Connections Will Form through Value-Driven Content
This year, influencers have changed the way they used to interact with their respective audiences. They have taken a step back from the regular perfectly curated postings to getting more real with their followers. They have vested their time and effort in curating content themselves which share their own life experiences. It also helps in creating a deeper connection and a much stronger relationship with the audience. This value-driven content approach allows followers to take a glimpse into their lives. Now more than ever, people are tired of following those with a large fan following base.
People want to see the authentic self of others, and when influencers provide an authentic self in content, it shows the real-life personality of that person which engages the audience more than ever.
New Social Platforms & Creator Tools will Emerge
People will get more sharing power than ever with the new social media platforms and creator tools. One of the very noticeable platforms that I can suggest right now is TikTok which is very rapidly growing. Nichole Ciotti predicts that TikTok will become the platform that will drastically trend in 2020. At one of the occasions, she presented her thoughts by saying:
“The natural virality their interface affords is going to enable brands to multiply their marketing efforts for the same dollars, especially with micro-influencers who produce amazing content, which has a high potential to get picked up by TikTok’s algorithm and go viral.”
With the removal of the Instagram likes option, more new platforms will emerge to help brands with measuring performance metrics and do a whole lot more in the new era.
The Era of Influencer Marketing is Evolving
If there’s one thing that has created quite the norm, it is the ever growing era of influencer marketing. So what if Instagram is removing the “like” feature, it won’t ever going to make Influencers any less effective. And while people may claim that influencers have less command on social media, Maddie Raedts the founder of influencer marketing company IMA doesn’t hold a similar perception in any way.
“People are looking for unique feeds – less polished, but much more real, interesting, and artistic. This makes you stand out from the tough-to-beat algorithms these days. Follow real & cool people who have an interesting story to tell, a passion to share and a specific talent which they have or their own”
What are you planning to do if you ever get the chance to do some influencer marketing?
Share with us what you have learned and would like to see added in the following article.
