New Marketing Trend Everyone Should Try in 2018
It’s not a secret anymore that buyers do online research before they go shopping. Gathering information from online resources is a routine job for most consumers, and ad blockers are used every day. Since 2010, global monthly active ad blocking software users increased by almost 9 times from 21M to 236M in 2017 for desktop browsers, and from 145M to 380M since 2015 to 2017 for mobile browsers [1].
AdBlock usage grew 30% globally in 2016. At the same time, nearly 60% of consumers take a look at the blog or Instagram post using their smartphone or tablet while shopping in-store. Good time for leaders of opinions — or social media influencers.
Influencer marketing is still young enough, but its growth is dramatically fast. In 2015 there were on average 3900 searches of “influencer marketing” per month in Google Search, but in 2017 numbers grew up to 21 000 [2].
There are many different social media platforms that companies can use for their brand awareness. Instagram is one of them, for example, has more than 700 million users today, and more of that 80% of micro-influencers use Instagram to post original content, and 59% of them think it is the most effective social media platform to engage their target audience.
Source: Bloglovin
The advertiser spend with influencers on Instagram at over $1 billion per year, and these numbers will grow. [3] But is it true that influencer marketing can be expensive? We’d say — it depends. If you want to run a campaign with a celebrity — be ready to plan $550 000 in your budget — and this is only for one post. This is how much celebrities can charge. Yes, they have millions of followers, but wait… The studies show that people do not tend to trust celebrities as much as we can assume. Only 3% of consumers would consider buying a product in-store if it was endorsed by a celebrity. At the same time 97% of micro-influencers charge less than just $500 per branded Instagram post. Some of them can accept product gifting, which makes your expenditures close to zero.
There’s one more thing in defense of micro-influencers: those with less than 1,000 followers on average receive likes on their posts 8% of the time, but those with 10 million+ followers — only 1.6% of the time. [4] This is the first thing company should consider while choosing social media campaign.
Instagram is full of many micro-influencers that can work on a campaign for less cost, but there’s no need to rush and contract with the very first person with 15K followers. Choosing the right hero is the second crucial thing professional marketer must take into consideration. 49% of influencers they’ve interviewed said the brand must understand their interests and only approach them with relevant opportunities that are a fit for their audience. [5] That is why we pay a lot of attention to help customers choose the right vertical.
How useful is to spend money for influencers? Well, even the ROI depends on the particular campaign and product, on average influencers can give $6.85 in earned media for every $1.00 of paid media. We have a case when we helped to run a campaign for an eyewear company, where one of the influencers alone got $50 000 + in sales in 1 month. Another campaign with led to 5x increase in the company’s website traffic.
Sometimes it can be hard to calculate ROI based on the brand awareness increase, and still, many companies consider engagement rate as the main measurement.
Source: Linqua
Now there’s still some time left to correct your marketing strategy for 2018. Especially because the Instagram estimated influencer market growth in 2018 is 42% and brand-sponsored influencer post growth is almost 100%. As we say in MuseFind, always grow upwards and onwards. How will your brand keep up with influencer marketing in 2018?
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Find and talk to real influencers, say ‘Hi’ with confidence, organize your followup, and reach more consumers.
- https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
- https://influencermarketinghub.com/the-rise-of-influencer-marketing/
- http://mediakix.com/2017/03/instagram-influencer-marketing-industry-size-how-big/#gs.cuUF7co
- http://markerly.com/blog/instagram-marketing-does-influencer-size-matter/
- http://corp.crowdtap.com/press-release/2015-11-04
