4 Emerging Influencer Marketing Trends To Leverage On In 2022
Updated on: 28 January 2022
Over the past few years, we have seen the rise of influencer marketing and all its benefits to businesses. At the same time, we also witnessed the controversies and disadvantages that potentially tag along.
If you’re unsure how influencer marketing works, let us explain it a little more in detail. It is a marketing strategy that employs the help of a social media influencer (a person who has a large following of more than 10,000 followers) to post and promote a brand’s products or services. Typically, the influencer gets paid in cash or sponsored by the brand to receive free products or services.
Of course, brands should not pick any random influencer to market their products or services. The influencer in question should be relevant to your products or services, and their values should align with your company’s. A misalignment would almost certainly cause friction in the deal, and you would not want the fallout to impact your business negatively.
When the pandemic hit, it was uncertain how it would impact creators and brands who work under the influencer marketing framework. But two years in, the influencer marketing industry is more significant than ever, with brands allocating more of their digital marketing budget to influencers.
Emerging trends
While trends in influencer marketing come and go, there are some emerging ones that businesses should jump on while they are still relevant. Here are some of them:
1. Popularity of platforms is shifting
Instagram remains the top choice and preferred platform for influencer marketing campaigns, but statistics show that the number of brands using the platform has fallen from 80% in 2020 to 67% in 2021.
On the other hand, the biggest platforms to emerge and gain traction rapidly are Tiktok and Twitch.
Tiktok has seen the biggest growth since the start of the pandemic and is the most downloaded social media app in 2020. By the end of 2021, it has recorded over 1 billion monthly active users. With such a massive user base, you can imagine the kind of reach you will get from marketing on the platform, especially if it’s through influencers with large followings.
Twitch is another up-and-coming platform for influencer marketing. The live streaming platform has been gaining traction in the past few years, with a massive growth between 2020 and 2021. As live streaming becomes more popular, there are opportunities for businesses and brands to leverage on the popular live streamers to market their products and services.
2. Videos are the way to go
If you haven’t realised it, the rising stars of social media platforms are mainly dealing with video content. With the rise of short-form videos popularised by Tiktok, consumers nowadays crave bite-sized information conveyed via short videos.
With so much video content being uploaded every second, consumers no longer have the attention span to stay on a video that is not engaging or compelling. This is also why more companies are hiring content creators and videographers to up their social media game.
3. Making influencers out of employees
Being the face of the company, employees are walking advertisements of your brand, especially if you’re in the fashion industry.
In recent years, major brands such as Nike and Adidas have been leveraging on their employees’ dedication, interests, and passion in the brand to market their products. This creates the kind of authenticity that customers demand nowadays. After all, who better to market your brand and products than your own employees?
With that said, you wouldn’t want to overdo it and make your customers think that you’re hard-selling or patronising them.
4. Rise of micro and nano influencers
Speaking of authenticity, the rise of micro and nano influencers is something worth looking into. Surveys have shown that micro and nano influencers often have higher engagement rates than regular influencers.
This is because micro and nano influencers tend to focus more on specific interests and are more conscientious about paid collaborations. They will only align themselves with brands and products they really believe in, making them valuable opinion leaders and more trustworthy in their various communities.
With such authenticity, the campaigns are more likely to turn into positive lead generation for the brands.
What’s next
We predict that this year will be another dominant year for influencer marketing. Partnerships between creators, brands, and influencers will grow stronger and perhaps even take over the entire marketing funnel.
With many social media platforms racing to build better tools for creators and influencers, it is indeed exciting to see how the space will develop from here. On top of running email campaigns to increase customer loyalty, having effective influencer marketing campaigns allow you to extend your reach and reel in more leads.
Start capitalising on these influencer and social media marketing trends and leverage on them to bring your business to greater heights in 2022.