According to the survey conducted by Linqia last year, almost 86 percent of business people and marketers use influencer marketing. And, 94 percent of these people found the strategy effective.
As a result, more marketers are optimizing their influencer marketing efforts this year. Thus, adding their budgets to incorporate influences as strategic pieces of their entire marketing strategy.
Suffice to say; many digital marketers and practitioners right now like SEO Gold Coast right are looking for ways to connect with the audience in a manner that expand product awareness, build brand visibility and strike the curiosity of consumers toward the goods or services.
The continuous efforts of researchers to highlight the benefits of social media marketing to the purchasing behaviors of consumers paid off. Marketers finally acknowledge that social media platforms are more than just nice-to-have kinds of stuff.
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Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned player in the influencer marketing arena, here are the top five trends that you need to watch out in 2017:
Expansion of Budgets
Increasing budgets for marketing campaigns is inevitable, especially with the use of influencers. Almost 50 percent of marketers plan to increase their marketing budgets this year while only 4 percent plan to cut it down.
Last 2016, research shows that marketers spend $25,000 – $50,000 for every influencer marketing campaign which is expected to double and reach $50,000 – $100,000 per campaign this year.
Programs Will Hold Responsibility For Driving Results
Almost 78 percent of marketers reveal that their top priority in 2017 is to determine the return on investments (ROI) of influencer marketing.
However, 61 percent still use audience reach as the yardstick of the success of their campaigns. It can be falsified easily through hiring ‘fake followers’.
Most marketers right now start to hold their campaigns or programs accountable for generating real results. These results are attainable by tracking the consumer’s journey and examining how their behaviors through following bottom-of-the-funnel strategies like sign-ups, conversions, and purchases.
In 2016, 50 percent of the marketers report that cost-per-engagement (CPE) and cost-per-click (CPC) are the most efficient tools in driving results. Only 17 percent believes that flat rate or pay-per-cost is useful despite being the most popular form of influencer compensation.
Concerning the increasing trend in accountability, the pricing models for performance-based influencer will continue to gain traction in 2017.
Brands Will See a Massive Shift in Trust
Influencer marketing works well because of the authentic and original stories that influencers tell about the brand’s services or products. Rigid contents have the potential to minimize the efficiency of the stories because it strips the authenticity and appeal of contents that make the influencers popular.
This year, there will be shifts in trust among brands. These changes will increase the reliance to the influencers when it comes to endorsing the products or services in their ways while still following the brand’s guidelines. It also loosens up the reigns for approval among the audience.
For the brands who aren’t standing on highly regulated industries, it’s paramount to actuate rather than control the idea of influencers. Briefings for programs should rely less on the inclusion of verbatim descriptions and trust more on the influencers capability to produce creative content.
At the end of the day, its messaging and variety of contents that reinforces the brand’s opportunity to reuse and re-purpose the performing contents across paid earned and owned channels.
Story Narratives Will Evolve
Take heed; influencers are superb in storytelling. Influencers are good in drawing and maintaining highly-engaged audiences due to their aptness to capture the interests of the audience.
Influencer marketing is most efficient if the programs allow the narrative of the story to evolve which allows forging a stronger brand association and allows higher engagement. Both of which transitions to bottom-of-the-funnel actions.
More brands will use sophisticated and powerful technologies to determine which contents, generated by influencers, gets the most approval from consumers. The skill to identify the best-performing contents encourages brands to earmark similar audience using an efficient story narrative.
Analysts and experts alike predict that there will be an influx of performance-based pricing models and influencers will harvest more trust from different brands. There will be a strategic shift to story narratives and long term attribution windows. Most of these shifts will level with the evolutions of materializing channel as it continues to prove it’s worth.
The Power of Attribution Will Intensify
As influencer marketing becomes accountable, brands will use different perspectives to see how this strategy can nurture the prospects into customers. Also, it can produce deeper loyalty over time.
It’s unusual for consumers to sign up or make a purchase for something during the first product introduction. The process begins with awareness and progress through validation, research, and discovery before becoming a sale or conversion.
As an outcome, 2017 will see more brands shifting their expectations from immediate ROI to more likely results that last for a longer period. And because it’s unlikely to generate a sell right away from a single influencer campaign, brands will invest in multi-flight and pilot programs.
Takeaway
Social media platforms play a significant role in the buyer’s journey. Nonetheless, it’s not the channels themselves that influence purchasing decisions, it’s the personal storytelling and peer-to-peer contents that affect sales. Even more, it’s proof that influencers and customers alike are the driving force behind the success of the brand.
