3 Ways Influencer Marketing Will Further Mature in 2020

Influencer marketing is no longer in its infancy and has instead reached its somewhat awkward and gangly teen years. Like social media marketing before it, marketers know intuitively that it deserves a dedicated place in the ever-changing marketing mix, but how much of marketing budgets to invest and ways to execute are still emerging.

However, influencers and audiences themselves are providing clues to where this fast-growing form of marketing is going next. From the death of the near-perfect and glossy traditional Instagram aesthetic to a return to the real, influencer marketing in 2020 is poised to become not only an integrated part of the broader marketing mix, but an increasingly trusted one.

Influence gets real or gets lost

In the world of influencers and influence, it’s hard to tell what’s real from what’s staged. Either way, if an influencer doesn’t come off as authentic to audiences, it can seriously damage their personal brand and the brands they partner with. In 2020, influencer trust will no longer be just nice to have.

In a recent influencer marketing survey of 18-34-year-old consumers, only 18% indicated that a huge influencer following was something they looked for in an influencer, but 34% expressed being able to relate to an influencer as a top priority.

Chipotle demonstrated a grasp of this cultural shift by harnessing the momentum first generated by an actual employee who posted a video of himself performing what the brand now calls the #ChipotleLidFlip. The employee’s video ended up being their most liked video on Instagram. To extend the popularity of what the employee started, the brand then partnered with known YouTube personality David Dobrik who translated the phenomenon onto Tik Tok. Sometimes the best way to show authenticity is to work from the inside out and accelerate momentum…[Read More]