2019 Influencer Marketing Trends for Brands and Agencies

Influencer Marketing In 2019

We’re now well into the 2019 and Influencer Marketing doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. With a huge amount of growth for the industry in the last couple of years, there comes the obvious criticisms from old media, but in 2019, the world of influencer marketing and social will continue to grow, extensively.

So, what will 2019 have in store?

Deeper Than Engagement. Who Has Real Influence?

First and foremost, brands will become more demanding and rightly so. The days of vanity metrics will disappear, it’ll no longer be about a popularity contest for the most views or most amount of followers. These won’t be accepted as hard metrics for the performance of influencer marketing. There needs to be context and we as an agency go deeper than engagement to understand what’s really being delivered by influencers.

Brilliant, we got millions of views on a piece of content….but who saw it? Are they our potential customers? Are they the right demographic? Did they click through to the website? Did they download the App? How is this activity going to impact our bottom line as a business? Did we sell anything?

These and so many more questions, clients will want answered and this will force innovation, forcing agencies to be more inventive and creative with messaging, call-to-actions to deliver the results. Most importantly, we’ll find the influencers that really perform and have real influence, we’ll look to build long-lasting brand relationships with these influencers and brands.

Industry Growth

The influencer industry will continue to grow. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of advertisers plan to increase their influencer marketing spend this year, according to a recent survey by the World Federation of Advertisers. Reading the figures, these budgets are being pulled from somewhere, as marketing spend as a whole is being cut! Six years of marketing budget growth has come to end as Brexit and economic uncertainty causes business to cool marketing spend in the final quarter of 2018, according to the IPA’s Bellwether Report.

There’s only one place these budgets can be coming from and that’s the marketing budget of traditional media, TV, paid and so on being cut…..to be redeployed across social and influencer marketing, signalling brands feel they are a more effective route for brands to reach and market to their audience.

With marketing cuts, this will force brands and agencies to be looking for new and innovative methods to reach their consumers. Never has marketing spend been so important to utilise than in 2019.

Not Just A Box Ticking Exercise.

For many brands, influencer marketing had become a box ticking exercise, whereas now in 2019 it’ll become the integral part of how brands share their message. What the most effective and memorable influencer campaigns have in common is that they’re not just using influencers as an audience rental opportunity or another media spend avenue, that’s been bolted onto a campaign with a bit of leftover budget to tick the influencer marketing box.

The best campaigns have actually been allowed to be shaped, in part, by the influencers, with the messaging and insights they help develop being integrated across all the marketing mix. Influencer Marketing will no longer be just a bolt on, it’s a part of the mix that can no longer be ignored.

If you’d like to see how influencers can fit into your 2019 marketing strategy, contact us at tellmemore@sociallypowerful.com

Our Influencer marketing agency and Social agency are located worldwide, with our agency network based in the USA, UK, UAE and China.

If you want to receive our industry insights, visit our Influencer Marketing & Social Media blogs here.

@ Socially Powerful

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