The advent of influencer marketing has opened up a whole new industry for marketers, but in a fast-changing landscape how do you keep atop the latest trends and still plan ahead?

Social influencers are big business. In just a few short years brands have gone from dabbling in influencer marketing and inviting the odd Youtube “star” to an event to now plowing millions of dollars of budget spend into them.

Be they high level influencers like Kim Kardashian who sport followers in the hundreds of millions or a micro influencers with just a few thousand, polls and pundits are reporting huge engagement and product sales when influencers are deftly incorporated into launches and campaigns.

A report by Expertcity found that 82 per cent of consumers were “likely” to follow the recommendation of a micro influencer and that 40 per cent were driven to purchase after seeing one of their favourite influencers on a platform like Twitter or YouTube.

Influencers now run the gamut of every industry. Fashion and beauty have some of the most known but there are individuals garnering acute and engaged followings across design, gaming, gardening, cleaning, parenting, DIY and flower arranging alongside the more ‘lifestyle’ pursuits.

2020 hasn’t seen the industry lose any of its focus on the area. The global restrictions imposed due to COVID-19 has meant that collaborating and pitching influencers has become an easy way to make content for social media without the need for face-to-face interaction. But if you’re looking to get more out of your next campaign and plan into the new year, then heed these trends.

Influencer Ambassadors

Find influencers with the right morals

2020 has been a huge year for social activism and brands have discovered just how aligning with brands, movements and points of view can change how customers view them and their products. Choosing to align with an influencer is not an arbitrary act, it’s a purposeful acknowledgment of what they represent and put out into the world. 2021 will see brands looking closer at what influencers are saying and doing. Ask yourself, are our ideas aligned? Do we want to endorse the core of this person?

A few things to think about:

1. Are they a thought leader?

2. Are they a professional, do they have a tendency to say or do something erratic or controversial?

3. Are they clear and upfront about their partnerships?

4. Do they offer value to their readers beyond the delivery of content?

5. Do they stand for something moral, ethical?

6. Do they contribute to causes?

Build A Team

Collaboration

All too often brands find an influencer they like, seem to have an engaged and active following and show creative flair in what they make and deliver to their audiences. Then they pitch them an idea concocted in a boardroom and expect them to bring it to life. The best way to think about working with an influencer is to collaborate with them.

Have a broad stroke idea of what you are looking to achieve and ask them to work on the idea with you. Maybe you want to showcase a product, maybe a how-to, perhaps you’re just looking for a creator to deliver a bunch of content for you to use across your own brand channels. Write down what you require the content to do and then allow the creative the input to bring it to life. The best influencer marketing campaigns come out of collaboration because the end result feels more honest and genuine – or dare we say it, authentic.

Co Create 

Some of the most interesting campaigns to come out of lockdown involve the creation of, not just the promotion of, products. Asking partners to take an active role in the creation of something not only increases their investment in that project but betters the alignment between partner and brand. Often they will invest more time into the project because of this of and give more value back to you and the campaign.

Brand awareness or engagement

Brand awareness is often about eyeballs. Engagement is about interaction. It is hard to get one influencer to deliver on both so it is important to understand what you want to achieve from any given campaign. Brands are increasingly recognising that brand awareness is best achieved with larger followings but they get far more engagement from micro influencers with much smaller ones. Influencer platform Takumi released a report that stated almost 10 per cent engagement with 0-1000 followers. That number dropped to 4.5 per cent for 1000-4000 followers, 2.4 per cent for 4000-100,000 and 1.7 per cent for 100,000+. Stay clear of the one-size-fits-all approach.

Analytics

The Metrics

Early adopters of influencer marketing often lambasted the tech giants for not supplying robust metrics and analytical tools as part of their platform business account offering.

As a result third party applications began popping up to fill the gap. Now there are hundreds of them and each have varying price points and degrees of complexity and functionality. Understanding the metrics that you need to capture will help to find out which one works best for your brand.

Instagram is the primary platform for influencer marketing as it is so heavily directed by visuals. It does have its own Insights feature but here are a few tools brand managers should be aware in 2020 and 2021 for the platform.

• Hypeauditor

• Iconosquare

• Crowdfire

• Hootsuite

• INK361

• Keyhole

• Pixlee

There are also a few more platforms to look into that include other a more comprehensive overview of the other major social platforms like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

• CreatorIQ

• Dyzio

• Traackr

• CriticalMention

• SproutSocial

Seek Micro Influencers

Niche Influencers 

Honing in on a market or industry means you can tailor content to a specific group of people, which in turn means you can offer more value. Understanding the niche or niches your brands works within is an important step to working out which influencer meet your needs. The 10 most popular areas for segmentation are not surprising but each have their own leaders and stand out stars when it comes to influencing that particular topic.

1. Travel

2. Betty

3. Fashion

4. Health and Fitness

5. Lifestyle

6. Parenting

7. Business

8. Music

9. Photography

10. Food

Manage Your Campaigns

Agencies

Are you the best person to find, manage, report and oversee your campaign? Many marketers find that the best campaigns use the help of dedicated agencies who take the leg work and backbreaking pain out of putting the whole thing together. This does come with additional costs but for many teams that have seen some thinning in 2020, an agency enables brands with smaller marketing teams to still operate a larger capacities.

In Australia, there are a few agencies well versed in handling the day-to-day management of influencer campaigns, specialising in a range of fields to ensure validity and relevance. Some of our recommendations include.

• The Exposure Co.

• Moda Creative

• Tia

• Scrunch

• MaxConnectors

• Tribe

• Hoozu

• Contagious Agency

• FWRD

Legal

Legal Obligations

The Australian government and advertising standard agency is cracking down on influencer marketing techniques. Long considered the grey area of the ad market, it is now increasingly expected that brands to be open and transparent about who they pay to promote their products and services and for what. Understand the legal obligation you have whilst running influencer marketing campaigns and ensure you have contracts in place with all third parties that outlines who owns what copyright and any attribution license fees and terms.

You need to ensure you are covered should anything go wrong, much in the same way you have contracts drawn up with sub-contractors in any other aspect of your business. Speak to a media lawyer to understand the latest developments applicable to you.

We work with agencies and influencers to scale up their content production. Experts in producing video for social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter and TikTok we understand how to convert scrollers into customer. Reach out for a quote today.