Santa Claus is one of the first influencers for marketing products and continues to be the favorite. Influencer marketing dating back to nearly a century now is only going strong along with social media and other types of marketing. From 1920 only a few brands in the market were shaping product-centered marketing.
Consumers emotionally make purchase decisions by involving personas like Santa Claus and the tiger offering Kellogg's like breakfast. These famous personalities though were not known as influences at that time, made consumers sympathize with the brand.
Influencer Marketing Evolution & Statistics:
In between years, it was the famous film personalities, sportspersons, and others to make the consumers buy properties with their emotional attachment. And over time, 93% of the marketers worldwide started using social media influencer marketing.
Experts now predict that influencer marketing will reach 10 billion USD in 2021. It is because 74% of marketers use influencers for promoting content and launching products, and 34% of them believe it to be successful.
The rapid rise of social media in the past decade apart from bringing in many marketing changes has also changed the influencer marketing. The social changes enabled developing niche markets. Also, customers are not anymore the traditional run of the mill consumer, but have their preferences.
Social media now leads not only to value-centered marketing, but an era of participation where anyone can create content online on many platforms.
Influencer Marketing Recent Hiccups:
Online media is also now with information overload, and technical and media developments led to the invention of ad-blockers. It has now changed the consumer-centered marketing to value-centered marketing and is changing the marketing strategies from push to pull. Hence, influencer marketing suffered a few hiccups in recent years due to many reasons including:
1. Fake followers
2. Clueless influencers
3. Influencers without influence
4. Influencer posts lacking transparency
Top 5 Trends For Influencer Marketing In 2020
Now in 2020, influencer marketing is, as usual, evolving into new trends to not only overcome the challenges but to grow in strength, not only this year but also for the future. The following are the top 5 trends for influencer marketing in 2020.
1. Celebrities No More The Favorites Of Influencer Campaigns:
For many influencers, marketing immediately brings in celebrities who endorse products and services at exorbitant cost. Recently this illusion of spending hundreds of dollars for a single Instagram post by stars is now waning out. It is due to several complaints of not getting much return on such expensive celebrity endorsements.
Nowadays, marketing agencies are rushing to curate personalities without any particular skills except having an appealing look on camera. It has brought new dawn among the people that the first requirement to become influencers is to increase the capabilities to influence the decision of others.
It has paved the way for even ordinary people with the appropriate content in specialist niches to become famous influencers in a short time.
Many marketing agencies now understand the value of their influencer marketing campaigns coming from a genuine enthusiast in the product niche, who could align the audience perfectly with the target market.
2. Video & Audio Content To Dominate Influencer Marketing:
Rise of video content in 2020 is to continue its journey further and fast in 2021 also. Even many celebrity influencers with high followers accept the fact that video is first now, tomorrow and always.
Video content will continue to dominate in 2020 also. The change of utilizing engaging visuals and podcasts has established itself as the royalty of content marketing now.
It is no wonder statistics confirm that 72% of consumers confirm that they prefer to learn about a product or service better with video content than text. With more than 700,000 podcasts ads, the audio content is also reaching dizzying heights nowadays. Influencers use video or podcasts in many ways including among others:
* User-generated content for product reviews.
* Video demonstrations for complex technical products
* Q&A sessions
* Interviews with C suite members of each team
These could be game-changing trends for influencer marketing in 2020.
3. Long-Term Influencer Relationships Will Be The New Norm:
Until now, a contract basis is how the marketing agencies used them from campaign to campaign. In 2020, this will change to long-term influencer relationships and could be the norm for the future of influencer marketing.
Only if an influencer has a long-term relationship with the brand, the consumers may have the faith to buy those products and services. It is because of changing times and the information era which is available at fingertips. Only a long-term relationship will increase the authenticity of the brand influenced by the celebrity and others.
4. Stricter Regulations To Streamline Influencer Marketing:
To face the challenge of influencers deliberately misleading consumers with fudged statistics for cheating brands, the regulations now will sure help. Worldwide many regulating agencies have strictly asked the influencers to disclose when they have a relationship with the brand.
Also, there is strict surveillance now to ensure that the influencers are open about all their commercial arrangements. Now the influencer marketing agencies and the brands take advantage of all these new regulations as new features to streamline the influencer marketing industry.
5. Employees & Customers To Become Influencers:
Satisfied customers spreading the experience with the products will bring in the word of mouth effect, and this has made them the new brand ambassadors of the brands. Also, the employees of companies endorsing the authenticity of the product and simply explaining its sophisticated features may reach the target audience fast and easy.
Hence, the new trend of using employees and customers as influencers will be the fast-growing trend of influencer marketing in 2020.
Irrespective of the challenges, influencer marketing, will go strong to new heights in 2020.
