Looking for the best influencer marketing trends for the next 2022? If so, then it is not strange, because this knowledge can significantly increase your sales.
In 2020, the influencer market reached $9.7 billion, and around 2022, it is forecasted to hit $15 billion. Influencer marketing is competing with Facebook advertising, bringing more results at lower costs.
So, what are those trends that can make or break your influencer marketing in 2022? Let's start with the basics and dive deeper.
What Are Influencers?
Simply stated, a digital influencer is someone who has built a strong audience base that loves their content in an industry they are part of. It could be fashion, business, mindset, sports, music, or any other industry out there.
Why Use Influencer Marketing?
Influencers represent themselves as experts, which impacts others' buying decisions. According to many psychologists, followers base their decisions on influencers' opinions due to the following factors:
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Cultural accordance. We are all social creatures programmed to form close bonds with members of our communities. This relationship is best described by the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" — that is, there is a strong expectation to be like others. For followers who consider the influencers they follow as part of their communities, many feel obligated to keep up with their activities.
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Control and power. Every person has a survival instinct that makes them want a basic level of control and power. This is explained by the fact that, while we are in control of a situation, it seems to us that we are surviving. When people subscribe to influencers, they control their favorites completely in this way, which makes them feel powerful and authoritative.
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Personal ties. Many influencers know how to create a trusting atmosphere with their followers through intimate photos or videos that give viewers a glimpse of the influencer’s real life. Such actions often make subscribers feel a personal connection.
Therefore, it is not surprising that millions of subscribers empathize with bloggers.
But what are the benefits for brands from such relationships?
The Benefits of Influencer Marketing
Brands and companies involve influencers in their marketing campaigns with the following goals in mind:
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To improve brand awareness. This is especially important when you are just starting a company, launching a new product, or entering a new market. Traditional methods of promotion (print advertising, direct email, etc.) in such cases do not always work well or just take more time. Influence marketing will help you expose your product or service to a large fan base and find your first customers. Working with several influencers gives you more exposure, which results in increased authority and credibility.
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To reach a targeted audience. What brands love about influencers is that their audiences are usually niched and defined. It makes it easier for you to drive relevant traffic to your channels, by choosing to work with influencers who have a suitable audience.
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To make advertisements more natural. With a creative and accurate approach, ads don't stick out like a sore thumb or cause rejection and negative reactions, like a regular ad on some website or on YouTube, interrupting an interesting video. Moreover, ads from influencers look like friendly advice to their followers. And many followers like to imitate their idols by wearing the same clothes, drinking from the same water bottles, and so on.
Influence marketers can be suitable for any business, but before selecting the right one, it is better to become familiar with the current trends.
Influencer Marketing Trends Worth Paying Attention to in 2022
You should stay aware of the following trends if you want to maximize the outcome of your campaign.
Short-Form Videos
With the emergence of TikTok and Instagram Reels, as well as YouTube Shorts, we are seeing an increase in short-form video content (up to two minutes and 30 seconds). People's attention continues to grow for short videos, and that shouldn't change anytime soon.
Micro- and Nano-Influencers Matter
Nano- and micro-influencers are becoming the focus of many brands since they have higher engagement rates. Micro-influencers are specialized in one field, which gathers followers passionate about that field (e.g, workouts, fashion, design, etc). Unlike celebrities, who can be actors or musicians and share products unrelated to their fields, micro-influencers have niched audiences, making them closer and trustworthy to their audience.
Personalized and Quality Content
People trust authentic content more than sophisticated ads. A short video of a mom influencer wearing a pair of socks with her baby may be more engaging than a snapshot of the product’s commercials. So, personalization increases the trust and results of an influencer-based marketing campaign. Brands ship products to influences, and they create quality content that is personalized and builds trust.
Live Streaming
Influencers are using live streaming to connect with their audiences at a deeper level. It stimulates real-life interaction because fans ask questions in real-time and see the influencer’s instant reaction. Amazon has tried letting sellers stream on the platform, and the results were astounding, proving the effect live streams have on sales.
Building Ongoing Partnerships
Brands have started building long-term relationships with influencers because they have understood how hard it is to make sales with a single sponsored post. They know that influencers have to use several pieces of content over a period of time to bring solid sales results. Therefore, collaborations emphasize the use of content packages and ongoing partnerships.
Exploring New Platforms and Tools
Influencers are bringing brands to new platforms as their audiences skyrocket there. Take TikTok, for example. Investing in influencer marketing on a TikTok influencer could give you tremendous ROI since it's easy to get massive reach when a platform is new. So, start reaching out to them for your next campaign.
It’s worth adding that many brands have started to combine email marketing campaigns with influencer marketing because emails are one of the best ways to communicate with influencers during campaigns. So, consider using email clients such as Mailbird to keep your inbox organized.
As a brand or affiliate marketer, you also may need to provide influencers with captions, scripts, and images they can use to advertise your product. In that case, you’ll need to manage the content and especially photos during the process. You can use photo management software to preserve and share high-quality promotional materials.
Stricter Guidelines for Influencers
The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and other monitoring authorities are constantly checking whether advertisement campaigns by influencers comply with the norms. Make sure you’re revealing the negative aspects (for instance, including potential side effects on medications) that lay behind product use and include the hashtags #sponsored and #ad in influencer marketing campaigns.
Performance-Based Offers
These new conditions sound fairer for brands who want to collaborate with influencers. With performance-based offers, influencers won’t receive compensation unless a number of clicks, views, or sales are reached by their promotion.
Now that you know where influencer marketing trends can take your brand, the next step is to find influencers.
Where Can You Find Influencers for Your Brand?
Finding influencers is not going to be that hard since they’re in search of brands to work with all the time.
Make sure you check out these social media contest ideas and involve them in your influencer marketing campaigns for more engagement and followers.
Search Using Hashtags
Influencers use hashtags for more exposure, as well as to identify themselves as influencers. To find them easily, search through Instagram, Facebook, or other social networks for big hashtags that identify a niche (such as #fashion, #food, #cars, etc.) or directly for hashtags that describe an influencer (such as #ad, #influencer, #sponsored, #advertisement, or #blogger).
Use Social Media
The help of social media monitoring and listening tools, such as Mention and Awario, is crucial to check mentions of your brand or industry. Use these tools hand-in-hand with manual search and marketing tools, and you’ll easily locate influencers for your products and services.
Google Alerts
By using a dedicated tool like Google Alerts, you tell Google to send you an email when new content is published on the web, based on keywords you choose. For example, if you want to find travel influencers, input keywords such as traveling, travel blogger, nomads, exploring [country name], etc.
Blogger Outreach Platforms
If you're searching for bloggers in a specific niche, finding them manually and working out a deal at a good rate might be time-consuming. Instead, you can take advantage of blogger outreach platforms. You'll find bloggers categorized by industry, with ranks.
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Pitchbox. Searching for a platform with bloggers ranked according to niche, engagement rate, content quality, and audience location? Pitchbox helps marketers with link building and influencer outreach. Use their SEO integrations to make analytics-based decisions.
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BuzzStream. BuzzStream has a tool called BuzzStream Discovery that offers you lists of bloggers to work with, together with contact methods and site analytics. They take care of establishing a partnership with bloggers that cover topics you are interested in. You simply search topics using keywords and get in return a list of bloggers writing about that certain topic.
Now, what if you're focused on growing your social media platforms instead? Simple: reach out to influencers using influencer marketing platforms.
Advertising and Influencing Platforms
In the same way, you can use the above platforms to find bloggers on the internet, you can use influencer marketing platforms to find, contact, and send briefs to influencers. Also, you can use them to automate your marketing campaigns.
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Publicfast. The name says it all! This platform helps marketers, PR, and social media agencies locate the influencers in their fields of interest and get their content published, fast. The platform comes with a variety of tools that help track campaigns and analyze their performance.
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Fourstarzz. Fourstarzz has the tools an influencer marketing platform must include, starting with the search functionality and then influencer metrics. It brings affordable rates for brands in different industries. Their database contains over 300,000 influencers, and you can filter them based on location, estimated price, and reach.
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BuzzSumo. Searching for dominating content in your niche? BuzzSumo doesn’t only help you find influencers within your industry but also helps you find what content is doing well, receiving more shares and engagement. Metrics are important when choosing influencers to partner up with.
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Grin. Containing over 100 million influencers across different platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Grin is an influencer marketing platform dealing mostly with the eCommerce market. For over 37 million of these influencers, you’re provided with email addresses as well.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has been effective for many brands and businesses, and it doesn’t seem to be going away soon. Implementing marketing techniques based on the latest trends will keep your brand floating in the vast ocean of advertising.
In 2022, it is necessary that you incorporate influencers in your marketing while following the trends. Methods like using short-form video content, becoming part of global or local causes, live streaming, and working with micro- and macro-influencers will boost your traffic and increase your ROI.
