A Look into 2020 Influencer Marketing

2019 showed tremendous growth for the Influencer Marketing industry with IGTV finally taking off, Branded Content, Hidden Likes, and the birth of Nano Influencers. If the past year was any indication for future growth, influencer marketing shows no signs of slowing down.   For 2020, here are some things to pay attention to when working with influencers:

Nano Influencers: We classify nano influencers as someone with 1K-10K followers on Instagram. These are the fresh players on the field that are new to brand collabs and are looking to build their portfolios. They create high-quality content and have a highly engaged audience. If you do not have a budget to pay influencers, this is the group you’d want to target as more and more Micro-Influencers (10K-50K) are requesting monetary compensation.

Long-term Relationships:  Influencers are no longer wanting to just dip their toes into one-off collaborations but instead are thinking about exclusive and long-term partnerships with brands. If consumers see influencers they trust posting about products (organic and paid,) it re-enforces an authentic affinity for the brand and that the influencer themselves can be a trusted source for reliable recommendations.

More IG Stories & Video content: Since video was first introduced to Instagram, viewing rates have continued to climb with 60% more views in 2018 than the previous year. Reports also show video ads are 5x more engaging than standard banners (source.) We predict that IGTV will continue to see growth in 2020, especially as monetization options such as product tagging and in-app checkout roll out to support influencers.

A Shifting Focus: Last year Instagram rolled out removing like counts and the trend is here to stay as the company continues to slowly remove likes from users globally. As Instagram moves towards creating meaningful conversation, marketing will have to shift from vanity metrics (i.e. visible data such as follower and like counts) to content quality and community engagement.

Building an Influencer Team: Brand trust is key and the good news is – it’s not as complicated as you may think. After you’ve run your influencer campaign(s), take a deeper dive into the results and analytics each influencer contributed. For instance, choose your top performers based on their engagement, content quality, and how informative and captivating their captions were and continue to invite them to future campaigns to build rapport.