9 Emerging Influencer Marketing Trends of 2021

According to Business Insider stats, the influencer marketing industry is about to hit the $15 billion mark by 2022. The rise of social commerce also suggests that the influencer marketing industry is not going back anytime soon! The global pandemic has also given rise to digital engagements with brands and influencers, helping them grow tremendously and making platforms more addictive to normal users.

But, soon, which trends are going to help the influencers and brands to gain more traction from their target audience and are going to disrupt the digital marketing space? Let’s find out!

Rise of micro-influencers

In the past, we have seen that only celebrities and big production houses used to promote brands and products on TV, radio and newspapers commercials. The times have changed, now even normal people with creativity and sufficient knowledge in any niche can become influencers.

And, the content distribution on the platforms have improved in a way, that smaller influencers also get good visibility in the market.

It’s not necessary to have thousands of followers and subscribers on your account to become an influencer! Yes, even someone with a lower fan following in terms of numbers might have better engagement rates than full-fledged influencers. And, brands are nowadays significantly considering these influencers with better engagement rates over quantity impressions only.

In many cases, the brand message does not get delivered with the high quantity follower counts, as the audience is more busy admiring the content of the influencer and not ready to consume the brand message in it. On the other hands, when a smaller influencer promotes such a brand, the audience would be more likely to engage with the brand better as they would consider it authentic.

Putting people first

The trend of putting out content which you wish to post online is vanishing away! Influencers can simply not create content which focuses on their own niche only. Platforms are designed to be user-centric. Thus, content that is designed to attract and get engagement from people would be more appealing.

Influencers have to make sure that they serve what people are looking for. People should love the content, then only the brand message would get integrated into it. If the influencers are simply pushing the brand message into their content, people would most probably leave it.

Thus, tailor-made content as per your niche and audience base is needed to be served every time!

Diversified audience — platforms and more

Most of the influencers have learnt to be omnipresent in the past couple of years. As I mentioned before, social platforms are designed to attract more and more users and keep them engaged with them. Influencers have to make sure that they do not end up skipping any major platforms.

Audiences are also spread across such platforms, right from short entertainment video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels to longer duration video channels; YouTube and even Facebook these days. Image sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest have their own separate audience. On top of that microblogging sites and even bigger content-oriented platforms are there to keep people engaged all the time.

Thus, new and existing influencers have to make sure that they serve the content across the platforms and make it relatable according to the audience they have there. Bits and pieces of their larger content can be reshared on other platforms to keep their engagement up and running.

Use of genuine content

You might have noticed that on festival seasons and sale seasons, many influencers end up posting the same content on every platform. Most of them do not even care about changing the brand messaging by implementing their own original niche idea in it.

That not only hinders the brand image, that also damages the authenticity of the influencer as well. Influencers have to make sure that they don’t end up sending out what their collaboration told them to send.

People follow influencers for the content they are serving, not for the ad collaborations they provide. So, for every influencer, providing a brand message wrapped into their content niche should be the only priority!

Community driven influencer marketing

It is a common saying that “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. The next-generation marketing and influencer marketing campaigns are not going to be centralized or going to come from single influencers only.

When a brand is looking forward to promoting their products or services into any new or existing market, they would probably go all-in with all the local influencers and marketers on their side. So, making communities for content distribution is a must. A brand would be able to put their campaigns live via these bunches of influencers and gain better engagement, impressions and ROI.

Many platforms also allow this facility with them! For example, blockchain-based influencer marketing platform Spreadd will launch the feature, where a single brand can put their campaign goals and multiple influencers would be able to work together on it and total impressions created by that entire community would give better results and ROI to that brand.

Performance marketing

One cannot simply deny the fact that insights and historical data in every campaign make a lot of sense for brand promotion. Most of the platforms come with their standard insights and analytics tools. But, most of them are limited to some of the stats like impressions, engagement rates, follower count and basic details about the followers.

Detailed insights about audience demographics, true engagement rate (without adding or removing fake counts), the authenticity of content, positive and negative effectiveness and more generally do not come on any platforms. Also, many platforms keep data limited to 90 days or a maximum of 180 days. Per campaign reporting and historical data becomes tough to keep track of over the period of time.

Thus, to improve influence in the audience and react to the historical trends like festival posting, branded campaigns and more; usage of data is very necessary.

Long-term relationships

Nobody wants to find new influencers and new brands every time they want to execute a new campaign. However, when people from both the ends break the transparency and personal commitments. That’s when relationships get affected.

Finding a new influencer who can properly show your brand story in their content every time is a hard process. A recurring process of running campaigns would do better, as the entire following audience would be able to see how the brand has a good relationship with the influencer and the influencers referring to them are actually using it!

When a platform provides historical data for all the campaigns the influencer has done, you would be able to track how good each of the campaigns was performed. And later the data, niche, audience and campaign timings can be identified to work more effectively with the influencer.

Understanding the market

While most of the small influencers work with local brands, they have to make sure that they do not end up limiting their reach to locals only. Basically, keeping up with the trends of the bigger market is also required. Even tier 2 and 3 city influencers have to make sure that they stay up to date with metro city trends and pricing.

For most of the influencers, local trends and content could be their competency. Though, brands dealing in national and international markets would come with their own agreements and generic audience target. To fulfil them, influencers have to make sure that they are aware of the market and how to deal with pricing and brand collaborations.

Studying the brands

When it comes to getting contracts and brand deals, sometimes influencers forget their own niche and the reason why they got started. Influencers working in various niches nowadays follow socially responsible behaviours, like featuring products which do not harm animals, vegan products, products which support other social causes and more.

Sometimes, they do not study the brands properly and end up into controversies for promoting something which harms their subscribers and followers. With proper research and insights, influencers should make sure that the brands they are dealing with are not going to disappoint their followers at any cost.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing and social media promotions are ever-changing fields. Any small trend comes or goes, entire communities, followers’ mindsets and other items get influenced by them. Thus, if you are an influencer or maybe managing one, make sure to take care of such points to grow without any boundaries.