Believe it or not, we are stepping into the first few weeks of 2019.

Do you feel like your influencer marketing strategy is ready for the new year? This is the best time to review what worked well in 2018 and how to improve your strategy for what’s ahead.

Predicting trends is always fun, and by following up closely with industry trends, you can better equip yourself and take advantage of new opportunities in 2019. Like many other segments in the marketing industry, the changes in influencer marketing are driven by a combination of sophisticated marketing technology advancement and ever-evolving consumer needs and wants.

we predicted 5 influencer marketing trends. They were:

Looking back, we saw most of these social media trends came to pass in 2018. The market is moving into a more mature stage in both B2C and B2C Influencer Marketing; and we believe it will continue to gain momentum in 2019.

So what’s next for influencer marketing in 2019?

Here are 5 key influencer marketing trends for 2019 that businesses should be looking at:

#1 The Rise of Live Video

Live video is not new to the Influencer community. Many top influencers turn to live streaming on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to grow their audience and earn a living talking about what they are passionate about.

Live video has been around for some time, but it’s rising popularity across different social media outlets has made it a key opportunity for marketers in 2019. A live video allows marketers to engage with their audience in real time while boosting authenticity and humanising your interactions.

#2 The Rise of Influencer Relationship Management (IRM)

In 2018, we saw influencer marketing campaigns shift from tactical to relational. We believe that in 2019, more brands will jump on the bandwagon and tap into influencer marketing to expand their footprint in branded and sponsored content.

“The Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) market is projected to grow to $5-10 billion by 2020.”

~ Adweek

Brands have managed customer journeys using CRM like Salesforce, SugarCRM and Pipedrive for many years. Now, thanks to the rise of social media marketing, there is now Influencer Relationship management (IRM) platforms for marketers to manage their influencers. It enables you to identify, interact, hire and track influencers for your campaign.

Brands now realise that they need to set clear marketing goals for an influencer campaign. As campaigns progress, they will examine how successful their influencers are at meeting their campaign goals.

An end-to-end IRM solution would help in measuring the campaign performance and encourage brands to place a greater focus on driving clicks, comments and shares. Ultimately, genuine engagement will lead to higher revenue for the brands and advertisers.

#3 The Rise of AI in Influencer Marketing

Generally, when it comes to campaign activation, brands (those who have not used any IRM solutions yet) connect with influencers manually on social media via private messages or send them outreach emails to begin the recruitment process. There are plenty of limitations to this manual approach.

Firstly, identifying the right influencers for your brand can be a daunting task. Secondly, it is time-consuming, tedious and labor-intensive. However, with the advancement of marketing technology in this area, this problem can be resolved through AI.

Using AI and machine learning solutions will allow you to shorten this marketing cycle – from identifying to measuring the results. Finding the right influencers to match your brands in terms of relevancy, resonation and reach (the 3Rs of Influencer Marketing) doesn’t mean you need to hire a team of interns to sift through every piece of content from thousands of influencers online.

In short,
AI helps to make influencer marketing more scalable and ROI-focused by:

1. Identifying the perfect set of Influencers for your brand
2. Predicting the success of your campaign or ROI
3. Sieving out fake influencers (with fake followers)
4. Recommending content format/direction

Using predictive analysis algorithms, you can easily predict your campaign outcome by specifying the desired influencer and content mix. It can help you make the most out of your Influencer generated traffic and drive more ROI.

#4 The Rise of Emerging Platforms such as TikTok and Twitch

New social apps such as TikTok and Twitch defined social media for younger generations in recent years.

TikTok (owned by Bytedance) is a short video sharing platform loved by over 500 million monthly active users in over 150 countries since its launch in 2016. In Asia, some say that more than 50% of teens know or have used the app. Similar to musical.ly (acquired by TikTok), it is predominantly popular among young generations in most of the markets.

Somewhere between Vine and Instagram, TikTok allows users to record short (15-second) videos of them dancing, lip-synching and playing with filters.

TikTok offers high potential for rapidly spreading viral videos thanks to its user base. This would be a perfect platform if you’re looking to target younger generations, mainly teens. Similar to Instagram influencers, We expect that the influencers of TikTok will become the stars of tomorrow.

Apart from TikTok, in terms of the entertainment industry, we see fast growth in Twitch.

Majority of Twitch users are male age between 18-34 years old. By executing influencer marketing campaigns on Twitch, brands gain access to a highly targeted demographic.

Twitch is a live-streaming video platform. Its primary focus is on video game live streaming. More than 15 million users spend an average of nearly two hours a day watching Twitch live streams. The sheer amount of time users dedicated to the platform makes it an excellent avenue for advertising.

As Bloomberg pointed out,

“The average Twitch user has stopped paying for cable TV and employs technology to block advertising across the internet. But hundreds of thousands of these hard-to-reach viewers tune in daily to watch top video game streamers, such as Ninja, Twitch’s biggest star.”

#5 The Rise of Virtual Influencers and Nano Influencers

The trend of using virtual characters is not new, we can trace it all the way to 1920s, with characters like Mickey Mouse and a more recent success story in early 2000s, with a series of comic superhero such as Marvel.

Whether you have noticed them on your feed yet or not, the so-called “virtual influencers” like Shudu and Miquela are becoming the next big thing on social media. Virtual influencers are likely to increase in the future, with more brands wanting to explore creating a character that can carry out their brands stories. As the creative team behind the virtual influencers has total control over the content created for the brands, using virtual influencers can be a lot less risky, as the content can be designed to perfectly match a given brief.

Likewise, marketing with nano-influencers will become a very important part of the influencer mix in the future.

Nano influencers are generally referring to everyday consumers that are active on social media and have 1,000 to 5,000 followers. Since they are engaging their community about what they love, they are trusted by their friends while creating valuable content for brands. They are typically less commercial and may not have the vast reach of macro-influencers or mega-influencers, but they have great influence among their followers.

Mega or Macro influencers are accustomed to the process of working with brands, from contract negotiations, branded content reviews and content publication. Nano-influencers may require some hand-holding in these areas.

The bottom line is that nano-influencers are significantly less expensive to work with. Many nano influencers are happy to promote your brand in exchange for free products that they love, gift cards, or invitations to special events.

Conclusion

Many predict that 2019 is going to be a year which would focus more on return on investment (ROI) and actual sales performance or conversion for Influencer Marketing.

This is only the beginning of Influencer marketing in e-commerce.

What are you seeing as the biggest trends for influencer marketing next year? Are you also planning to incorporate influencer marketing into your 2019 marketing plan?

We would love to know how you do it. Share with us in the comments.