What are your expectations for influencer marketing in the coming year, 2018?
Do you think influencer marketing is going to get any better or become a forgotten marketing strategy?
I know what you’re thinking, It’s been more than a “mere” buzzword in 2017. 2018 is definitely going to be better. What do you think?
Here’s the interesting part, a recent survey conducted in 2015 by Tomoson, laid emphasis on how influencer marketing can be highly profitable for brands who decide to leverage the strategy. And In 2017, it became one of the most profitable and popular marketing strategies.
No wonder 39% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2018.
More so, as you prepare your marketing strategy for the new year, it’s essential to know what the future holds for influencer marketing.
To stay on top of your game, here are the top 20 influencer marketing trends that you should know to do better marketing in 2018.
1. Influencer marketing will be incorporated into the customer journey in 2018
Mapping the right content to different stages of the buyer’s journey is critical to your marketing campaign success.
Unfortunately, the use of influencers to amplify content in different stages of the buyer’s journey has been under-utilized.
More and more an influencer’s post. are discovering the importance of using influencers in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Even in 2018, more marketers are going love the practice.
But how can you use influencers throughout your customer journey?
There are 4 stages a typical buyer need to pass through before making a purchase right? Here is how you can sneakily run your entire customer journey with an influencer.
i). Awareness: In the awareness stage, you want your customers to get to know about your business. You don’t want to go ahead of yourself and start selling to people who don’t know you at all. Right?
For example, Gloria Ferrer wanted to increase her brand’s visibility. She wanted more people to know about her brand and what she does.
Guess what she did?
She knew the easiest way to get the kind of exposure she wanted was to use social media and blog influencers.
Finally, she started the campaign. The influencer shared a personal story about hosting a summer outdoor party and then included how they used Gloria’s wine for the party.
Yes, she got an awesome result. It was a massive exposure for her — 44 million social media impressions. Plus 2,400 clicks to the context link.
At this stage, the influencer could offer to give his followers free guides that’ll be extremely useful to them or even offer to get them into a contest but a registration is required to win a price.
The price could be the product itself. So they’ll be directed to the landing page to submit their names and email addresses.
ii). Discovery: At the discovery stage, you want to get the influencer to talk about how people can use your product and the value they will get from it.
So your target audience who came in contact with your brand and are interested will become more educated about your offering.
iii). Evaluation: At this stage, the influencer wants to prove your product is the best out there. So he shares case studies of people who have used your products with great results.
iv). Decision: And finally, he nudges his audience to buy your products. The influencer shares links to your product or service page. And encourage his followers to buy.
That sounds like an interesting journey, right?
2018 will see the height of it.
2. From tactical campaigns to always-on strategy
In 2018, influencer marketing is going to be more of a long-term strategy than a one-off tactics.
Basically, when an influencer tweets about your business, share a testimonial or shares your content, it’s a short-term tactic.
That means the results will also be limited. If you want to see significant results and a higher ROI on your influencer marketing campaign, you should consider building a relationship with an influencer instead which will also lead to building and enhancing your relationship with your customers.
Take Metallica guitarist, Kirk Hammett for example, he’s done a lot for Ernie Ball from videos to stunt. He’s even done videos for them that went viral. Funny enough, he’s used Ernie Ball guitar for over 30years playing songs that his fans love.
One of the reasons it’s been this way is that he loves guitar and appreciates the company he’s partnering with. Imagine you’re Kirk’s fan and you enjoy playing guitar.
When do you want to buy a guitar string or want to recommend a best buy for a friend, which one which one will you recommend? Metallic, right?
Yes, that’s the point. The fans of Kirk automatically are the fans of metallic. And perceive his use of metallic as authentic.
That’s a great deal of a genuine brand to customer relationship there. That’s what every business needs to grow. Building long-term relationships with influencers is the way forward for any forward-thinking brand.
So it’s important you work with an influencer that loves to work with your brand and allow them to use their creative freedom instead of being overly restrictive.
A recent study shows that most influencers will love to work with a brand more than once if they are given creative freedom.
3. Rapid growth in the influencer marketing technology and solutions
“Currently, with influencer marketing technology, there isn’t one solution that comprehensively covers all areas. From discovery to engagement to tracking and reporting, there are many different solutions, but they don’t always fit together,” said Marketing technologist, Travis Wright on MarTech
That has changed with the introduction of Juulr.com.
4. Influencers are the new brands – monetizing through eCommerce
It’s no news social media influencers are the new celebrities. They’ve to build outstanding personal brands online. Many influencers are also going to expand their influence into their own business.
It could be a bit difficult for some influencers to get started as they might not have enough resources to get started. However, platforms like Shopify and Amazon are offering new services to support these new influencers so they can grow their business.
Influencers will be able to post photos from sponsoring brands with the Amazon Spark platform. It looks more like an Instagram feed. Which makes it even more interesting to use.
More so, the Shopify VIP also provide the needed e-commerce infrastructure for influencers.
With these platforms, influencers will be able to start and grow multi-channel stores, be guided by a dedicated agent, and also have access to useful applications that can help them promote their brands and sell sponsored products across different channels.
5. The rise of B2B influencer marketing
It’s a no-brainer. Influencer marketing is not a new concept. But In the coming year, it’s going to be more important than ever. Brands will continue to partner with B2B influencers and more platforms like Juulr that allows B2B marketers to identify micro- and macro-influencers will be uncovered.
But unlike B2C influencer marketing where you expect to see short-term sales rolling during the campaign, for example, a recent study by Bloglovin in November 2016, on the power of influencers show that an influencer’s sponsored post can get 45% of women to follow a brand, and 54% of women bought from a brand after seeing something in an influencer’s post.
You should not expect the same result in B2B influencer marketing, as the B2B buying cycle is pretty longer than that of B2C cycle.
Planning for a long-term result is the best you can do for yourself in your B2B influencer marketing campaign.
It might also interest you to know that social influencers create 6 times more traffic and twice the number of conversions for brand content compared to more traditional efforts.
6. There will more influencers used in every company’s basic marketing strategy.
More and more brands are beginning to appreciate the power of influencer marketing. It’s likely that each time brands launch marketing campaigns, they’ll make influencer marketing as an integral part of their campaign. Yes, that’s because it works.
Therefore, it will be rare for a brand to launch a marketing campaign without involving at least a single micro or macro social media influencer.
7. More brands will demand a long-term partnership with social media influencers
According to a YouTube influencer with over 15 million followers, Lauren Riihimaki, known as LaurDIY “Instead of working on a bunch of smaller campaigns with a lot of influencers, brands are starting to see the value in aligning with a few really great creators that they can trust and that reflect their views.”
For example, Dominic “D-trix” Sandoval, one of the most popular dancers on YouTube who introduced the “Add A Dancer” series in 2014.
Mountain Dew saw the success of the series and immediately tapped D-trix who is a genuine fan of Mountain Dew Kickstart to integrate their product into the latest version of the series, in summer 2015.
D-trix was allowed to flex his creative muscles in the four branded episodes that he integrated Mountain Dew Kickstart into. And at the end of the 4 months, they recorded 3.8million views, 160k likes, and 7k comments on the four videos. I think that was phenomenal.
But they wouldn’t have achieved more if D-trix was contracted to do one video. The 4 videos made D-trix become a legitimate brand ambassador.
8. There will be no need for content distribution machine
The good thing that’s coming to Influencer marketing in 2018 and beyond is that influencers starting out will have no need for distribution machines like record labels or publishing houses to distribute their content.
Well, this is particularly for celebrities who have also become social media influencers.
More talents will discover platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and other channels to create a cult following. This will lead to having more influencers. The most interesting part is that you’ll see agencies near you who are social media influencers agencies.
And that leads us to the next trend.
9. Competition with mainstream media
The truth is that social media influencers have changed the shape of the mainstream media as a whole. They are diverting the attention of businesses to themselves.
What can you say of a single YouTube channel that commands a comparable audience like the traditional television media channels. Influencers are basically their own media channel today.
Yes, seeing people flock to most of them like as Logan Paul, you’ll only have to appreciate the celebrity they’ve become. Influencers are not just people who dominate online, there are also coming to dominate the offline market too.
It’s only going to get more interesting as people are loving influencers more than traditional celebrities. I believe this is because their fans got access to them easily and they believe that the influencer listens to them.
A recent study by Google shows that 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers trust an influencer opinion than traditional celebrities.
A lot is going on and in the future, mainstream media channels might go extinct.
10. Businesses will increase their influencer marketing budget
Oh, yeah. I guess you knew this one will make my list, right? Yeah. Businesses are increasing their budget for influencer marketing. Tell me who wouldn’t invest more in a marketing strategy that produces more than 700% ROI?
Data from a recent study shows that 37% of marketers surveyed are now dedicating the budget for influencer marketing.
The same study revealed that for the next 12 months, 67% of marketers say they’re going to increase their marketing budget.
11. Value of services is going to increase
Because of the higher demand for influencer marketing services, influencers are going to increase their value of service. Well, that doesn’t mean that their pricing will increase outrightly.
No. Influencers will start looking for meaningful partnerships. They’ll likely not take gigs that doesn’t interest them anymore. It’s definitely not all about the money. When they begin to be overly “salesy,” their followers will likely begin to unfollow them.
Yes. A recent study shows that the greater percentage of people who unfollow an influencer do so because of their too many promotional messages.
So there’ll also be a likelihood that consumers will require more high-quality content from social media influencers, more personal connection, and engagement.
12. KPI and ROI measuring is vital
About 53% of marketers complained that measuring the performance of their influencer marketing campaign is one of their top challenges.
The truth is, there is no need to increase your marketing budget or even invest in a strategy that you can’t measure the effectiveness of.
Juulr is one of the few do-it-all platforms that are currently in place to track your campaign effectiveness.
But the most important thing is knowing your campaign goals and KPI (key performance indicator). You should define them before starting your campaign.
According to a case study, Coachella Music and Festival brands were able to reach tens of millions of people through and influencer and they increased engagement by monitoring the total number of comments, likes, total audience, and hashtags.
13. The year of integration
2018 is going to be the year of integration really. There are three types of influencers.
The mega-influencers (top celebrities), macro-influencers (millions of social media following), and micro-influencers (several thousands of social media followers). 2017 was the year of micro-influencers. Brands will focus on integrating different types of influencers to meet their marketing goal in 2018.
The important thing to note is that each of these group reaches a specific audience.
More so, besides integrating different influencers into their marketing mix, businesses will also leverage word-of-mouth strategies like referral programs, loyalty, and advocacy.
So in 2018, influencer marketing campaigns will be more than mere promotions. rather, it’ll focus on building an experience and also creating an emotional connection between you and your target customers.
14. Video marketing crucial for online audience
Some of the biggest social media influencers are on YouTube. And there’ll be even more video influencers in 2018. People are tired reading similar text everywhere.
They want to see videos. In preparation for that, businesses are taken it personally. Over 85% of businesses now have internal staff who are responsible for creating video content.
Videos have a higher conversion rate. Especially short videos. No wonder brands are making more shorter videos nowadays.
Data shows that video content can be 2X more effective in driving sales than text-based content. In 2018, start creating video content.
A certain software company wanted to promote their Sapphire Conference. The event normally attracts about 20,000 attendees. But they used YouTube influencers to advertise the conference and the result was awesome. They hard over 80,000 guests at the event.
15. “Fake” influencers with followers they bought
Well, as the popularity of influencer marketing keeps increasing, more people will continue looking for an easy way out. To be honest, it’s really hard to grow a social media account until up to 100k followers. I mean genuine followers.
So more people will purchase followers so that they can also be seen as influencers and also earn sponsorships. You should beware of those people. How will you know them?
Well, social media likes or followers that are bought are usual fake and has zero engagements. Before partnering with an influencer ensure you do proper research about them. Check their engagements. Be particular about the metrics that matters to you. Is it video views, post likes, or comments?
Whatever be the metric that matters to you, ensure you check them. By the way, don’t forget that likes can be bought also. Ensure you monitor them to see their engagements. Are their comments from real people?
Here is an example of a fake Instagram account. This one was created deliberately to proof that anyone can get into the game with everything fake.
All they needed was money to buy likes followers, comments, and content.
So be careful more of them are coming. The Juulr team filter this out using our own created software.
16. Instagram to surpass one billion users milestone
Instagram announced they’ve reached 800 million users in September 2017. They are one of the biggest and popular networks for influencers.
It’s not going to stop being one of the most popular soon, as the drivers are visual content — video and pictures. which consumers are crazy about right now.
By next year, Instagram will most likely surpass one billion even before the end of the year.
That means influencer marketing on Instagram will be worth more than $1 billion dollars at least. And it’ll keep growing.
17. Relationship between influencers and their fans will increase
Whatever you do, building a real relationship with influencers is key. That’s the way to build an authentic brand that people will trust.8It might interest you to know that consumers are becoming very smart nowadays. Yes, extremely smart. They will more likely know when an influencer is posting stuff just to get paid and when they are really authentic.
The best way to curb this is for brands to create ambassadorial relationships with influencers. That’s kind of a long-term contract.
When brands and the influencers have real and authentic relationships, the content they will create will be even more authentic.
Because it’ll be obvious to your audience that you really believe in the product and the brand, you’re not just another salesman.
18. Influencer marketing will help shorten the path to sales
What does it mean that someone saw a product as it was used and recommended by an influencer and they immediately got interested and proceeded to buying the product?
In fact, 49% of people say they rely on recommendations from influencers when making purchase decisions.
Influencer marketing is a great way to generate premium customers quickly.
One of the popular watch brand Daniel Wellington added Instagram into his marketing mix. They offered one free watch to each influencer. And a discount of 10 – 20% off to the audience who buys. As a result of the influencer marketing, Daniel Wellington, reached an annual revenue worth $220 million in a span of four years.
19. Engagements that generates revenue will be required
Is your influencer marketing campaign goal about engagements?
In 2018 it’s likely that more brands will focus on engagements. But not all engagements matter. It all depends on your goal.
And measuring engagement is as important as running the campaign itself. Here the engagements you’ll want to track when an influencer brings data for you to measure the success of your campaign.
i). Clicks: This measures the interest level of your target audience —are they having FOMO (fear of losing out)? They’ll be a rush. Is the headline compelling enough? These are factors that can influence your post clicks. However, you should have a balance of clicks, shares, and likes.
ii). Likes: Have it in mind that not 100% of your Influencer’s followers will see your content. But If more people are liking your content, it’ll create more buzz and will boost your content ranking on Facebook.
iii). Reactions: The recent added reaction feature takes it to a more emotional level. It allows people to express how they actually feel. Facebook gives greater weight to reactions as it was recently modified.
iv). Shares: Why will you share a content you read on Facebook? Because it’s freaking awesome. Right? If people can share your content to their friends, they can recommend your services, too.
Conclusion
2018 is going to be a great year for those who decide to integrate influencer marketing into their marketing mix.
What do you think?
If you didn’t leverage the power of influencer marketing in 2017, you don’t want to be left behind in 2018. Good things coming.
