Influencer marketing trends 2020: Statistics + report
ZINE’s annual influencer marketing report surveyed 1000 influencers and 100 brands to understand the true state of the influencer marketing industry in 2020.
With experts predicting that influencer marketing will be a $15 billion dollar industry by 2022, there’s never been a better time to evaluate success, identify bottlenecks and prepare for the extreme growth in the coming years.
Our report highlighted core trends across the industry we should be aware of in 2020:
- Influencers and brands struggle to set fair pricing due to lack of industry-wide benchmarks.
- When it comes to choosing which influencers to work with and measuring success – the quality of content is a top priority.
- Across the board, brands plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets and further integrate influencer marketing within their overarching marketing strategies.
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Pricing
Our data revealed that influencers struggle to know how much to charge brands, and brands often feel that influencer fees are ‘quite high’.
In its infancy, influencer marketing fee negotiation usually involved looking at the number of followers an influencer had. In short, the more followers an influencer had, the more they could charge.
Now, pricing for influencer marketing depends on a range of factors such as audience data, brand affinity, quality of content, usage rights, competitors clauses or celebrity status.
These additional pricing factors show how far the industry has developed however, without proper benchmarks, it causes confusion for brands and influencers.
When asked about the majority of influencer posts, 49.3% of brands stated they were high.
Instagram remains the most popular channel for running influencer campaigns. However, in regards to pricing of Instagram story vs feed-posts, a majority of brands agreed that sponsored story posts should be cheaper than on-feed posts.
Before making a decision about which influencer to work with, brands consider the following.
This is compared to when measuring the success of an influencer campaign where brands measure.
Content
A common trend we noticed from our survey was a focus on the quality of content an influencer creates. Influencers feel that the quality of content should be an important deciding factor for brands shortlisting influencers to work with on a campaign. Brands, look to work with influencers who create quality content for two reasons:
- Influencer content often performs better than content created by the brand itself.
- If you work with an influencer who creates quality content, you can repurpose it on other channels and extend its lifespan.
Adding paid spend behind influencer content is becoming ubiquitous for social marketing campaigns. Social media content no longer achieves the same organic results it used to – social networks are quickly becoming play-to-pay.
The introduction of paid media budgets for influencer content helps negate the idea that an influencer needs to have a large audience in order to be a worthwhile partner. It’s now less important to consider follower numbers. When you add paid spend to influencer content, you get to define the size and demographics of the audience based on your budget.
We were pleased to see that a majority of brands repurpose their influencer content across a range of other channels.
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Integration
Influencer marketing is becoming integrated across the entirety of the funnel. This trend correlates with the fact that 58% of brands plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2020.
In the past, brands used influencer marketing purely for brand awareness, however, brands are quickly realising that influencer content can be used throughout the entire marketing funnel, from brand awareness to sales enablement – it’s no longer a fad.
Brands found success running all types of campaigns from gifting, paid to long-term ambassadorships.
