2017 was the year of influencer marketing – love it or hate it – it was impossible to avoid.
What used to be an escape from commercialism became yet another platform for bombarding consumers with advertising, this time in the form of #sponsored posts.
Arguably, social media is now more overtly commercial than conventional avenues like television and print, which still need to tell a good story to remain viable.
So, what does this year have in store?
Stricter regulations
Previously an unregulated industry, expect to see the social media advertising game tighten up in the form of stringent guidelines. Brands and influencers will need to be more transparent and disclose their partnerships, whether paid through product or fees. To avoid any legal troubles, ensure all collaborations are divulged – it’s as simple as hashtagging #ad #partnership #sponsored – and this should be on all posts not just one of the four paid posts. If you want to avoid the negative connotations associated with an #ad, use a less overt hashtag like #BRANDNAMEpartner.
Do Instagram stories have value?
Instagram stories have officially taken over Snapchat but how do they rank in terms of brand value? Studies show that measuring the performance of Instagram stories isn’t a priority for businesses — yet. Currently, only 24 per cent of brands rank story engagement as a measure of success.
Engagement is king
It’s all about quality not quantity this year. It makes sense – businesses are now aligning with influencers based on their ‘influence’, not necessarily their number of followers. Engagement rates are crucial with 79 per cent of brands ranking it as the most important factor when evaluating influencers.
With this in mind, the rise of the micro-influencer continues to boom. Increasingly more businesses are seeing the value in partnering with Instagram influencers who have a smaller but highly-engaged following. In New Zealand, a micro-influencer generally has a following between 1,000 and 20,000.
Cracking the algorithm
Just like its sister site, Instagram’s ever-evolving advertising algorithm will continue to boggle brands. The policies are in place to keep users safe and somewhat protected from advertising. Recently, Facebook announced it would be downgrading posts from publishers, in favour of showing more relevant content from users’ personal connections. Reach and traffic is expected to significantly drop, which is likely to see brands’ adapt their marketing strategies.
ROI
Now the excitement and novelty of the influencer realm has died down, brands will actually start measuring the return on investment their partnerships are generating. They will want to see a direct link between paid posts and sales, particularly e-commerce. Experts are predicting more influencer partnerships with specific calls-to-action like unique referral codes and shoppable Instagram posts. There are already a multitude of tools that can help brands to measure profitability of influencer relationships.
Food for thought: The comeback of print?
With ‘influencing’ now being considered a career (a highly searched one at that, according to Google), the influencer industry is becoming oversaturated and with that the quality decreasing. On one hand brands with all size budgets can now find an influencer to suit but on the flipside, consumers are becoming savvier. They’re no longer blind to promotion and now quicker to unfollow and call out inauthentic influencers, which can reflect poorly on brands. The key for brands will be in finding ambassadors that are real and possess a loyal following.
So we will see a shift back towards print? There’s something to be said for the power of print. It’s highly engaging in a way that social media isn’t – people buy a magazine to actually read it, unlike Facebook and Instagram which users can scroll through mindlessly – it’s a shallower level of immersion. Often people juggle Instagram with watching TV, whereas print requires reader’s full attention. It also tells a story and has the backing of experts and in turn is more trustworthy. Both mediums serve a purpose and audiences engage with them in entirely different ways.
