2019 is already knocking on the door – new year, new trends. At the end of the year, we asked the Serviceplan Group experts about their personal trends for 2019. What’s coming next alongside influencer marketing, new work and sustainability? The communication professionals give their verdict here. Happy reading!
Influencer marketing is (finally) starting to take off: the measurement of the contribution made by bloggers, instagrammers and the like to advertising impact, as well as an efficiency analysis of their actions as part of an integrated communication complex are just as important as the creative, individual and target group-oriented implementation of a brand message. Slowly but surely, high-quality advertising is emerging from the hype surrounding influencers.
More and more companies and brands are interested in working with bloggers, vloggers and social media stars, big and small. In doing so, they seek to achieve authentic marketing of their products and services, increased engagement with their brand or the achievement of a new target group that is difficult to access with traditional media.
All of this can and must be done by influencer marketing – however, for companies entering the field, measuring the impact on business-relevant goals such as increasing product or service awareness or selling remains a challenge. Therefore – to reduce complexity – often only the range (which is also equated with the number of followers on the respective channel) is used as the most important metric for measuring performance.
But where does this simplification come from? In my opinion, it comes from an attempt to put influencer marketing on the same level as traditional media bookings. We juggle CPCs, CPMs, and CPOs, forgetting that influencer marketing can be so much more: it is a matter of working with people who are enthusiastic about their brand and want to bring it closer to their followers – for a fee, of course; however, influencers provide their loyal, laboriously acquired fan base for the advertising activities of a company and create self-directed content for it, which is usually even provided to the brands for further use.
Precisely these elements should be thrown into the balance when making future evaluations of influencer marketing – and from these considerations comes the biggest short-term trend of this discipline: the professionalisation of influencer marketing with a focus on efficiency and impact measurement in comparison with other media formats and channels.
By leveraging tools from qualitative and quantitative advertising impact research, the use of equivalence studies and various technical platforms and tools that predict media-relevant KPIs, such as reach, impression, or engagement, based on the budget forecast, we are working on an integrated evaluation of influencer marketing projects. Only in this way the ‘influencer marketing’ trend can become a discipline that is indispensable to the advertising landscape of the future.
This article is part of the Trends 2019 series of the Serviceplan Group.
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