Influencer Marketing Strategies for Brands in 2020

As we move into not just a new year, but a new decade, brands are more than ever looking to get strategic with their influencer marketing activities. If you are looking to help make your business more effective in 2020, you have to focus on changing how you market your business. Struggling to make these choices? We’ve got you covered.

There are some great influencer marketing strategies out there just waiting for you to put them to good use. Employing these strategies and tailoring them to your business goals could see a nice increase in social media fans, an increase in customers, and lead to new audiences discovering your brand.

1. Find your niche

Not every brand should use the same type of influencers. While large lifestyle and fashion brands often flock to mainstream influencers, there are many more widespread options out there for you to choose from.

How do you identify potential new audiences? Really look at who your current customer is. Deepdive into your Google Analytics audience data, check your Instagram audience demographics, and use this information to identify new opportunities. From there, it’s a short step to identifying several niche interests that your audience is or could potentially be interested in.

Select your influencers to match these interests. Once you have identified your influencer persona of choice, you can start the search for influencers who exist within your niche.

2. Bigger is not always better

A lot of brands today are heavily focussed on follower counts. They invest heavily in people with massive follower counts. This takes you away from the essence of influencer marketing and brings you into the territory of celebrity endorsements. As a general rule, the larger the follower count, the more generic and universal the audience becomes. Working with celebrity influencers will not necessarily provide the desired return on investment for your brand. Again, know your (potential) audience and work with influencers in this niche.

A lot of brands have already taken this tip to heart, and have compensated by working with smaller influencers instead, Micro influencers between 5-50k followers are extremely popular in the industry today. Working with these influencers allows brands to reach a specific audience and see a higher engagement rate. However, it’s important to consider that micro influencers are just that, small in following. They bring an engaged audience to the table but do not necessarily bring a better ROI in terms of the audience they reach. 

So what do we recommend? There’s a lot of influencers out there that are neither micro nor celebrity influencers. Influencers between 50k and 500k followers are usually professional content creators, are professionals when it branded collaborations and contractual agreements, and have the scale to offer a positive return on investment for your brand. 

Don’t focus your influencer marketing strategy on just one tier of influencers. Each tier will give you a different return. Do you want to gain valuable brand or product feedback from potential customers, then you should focus on brand engagement through micro influencers. Are you looking for high-quality content to reach a wide audience, that can also fill your own social channels, Mid-tier influencers are a great way to go. Do you want to create wide-spread brand awareness and build brand image? Then it’s a good rule of thumb to work with hero influencers. Do you want it all? Then a multi-tiered approach is the way to go.

3. Work with influencers who excel at storytelling

The best influencers are the ones who can spin a good story – and they are exactly who you want to start working with. If you want to make sure that you can make the most of influencer collaborations, start using more storytelling influencers. These influencers are able to keep their audience entertained, and form and maintain close connections with them. This will result in valuable engagement for your brand. Storytelling influencers are the kind of people that you can rely upon to help you tell a story that connects with your audience.

4. Focus on emotions 

Any influencer you work with should have the storytelling thing down to perfection. More importantly, though, they need to have the means and the ability to give you an easier way to double down and focus on your emotions. This will help you to boost storytelling and enhance engagement. 

It’s estimated that just 8% of customers don’t want to read a story-like ad. Instead of just being blunt and to the point, use your influencer army to tell stories about what your products/services can do.

5. Start using new media methods

Do you usually just stick to still images? That’s great, but why not think outside of the box and start making changes to your channel strategy? If you mostly focus on Facebook advertising in your own marketing, get influencers to extend your strategy. 

Influencers are powerful on a variety of channels. While Instagram currently hosts the majority of influencers, many are diversifying. Extend your influencer marketing strategies to include not only Instagram but also YouTube or podcasts.

Diversifying your channels will show you some outstanding results in the long-term, and improve the diversity of your audience.

6. Stop focusing entirely on reach

The last thing you should do in 2020 is hire an influencer purely on their number of followers alone. Followers do not equal people reached. Not all followers see an influencer’s post. Work with influencers who have a high engagement rate, and thus have a large active audience. It’s better to get someone with a fifth of the reach but five times the relevance to your audience. Regardless of the size of an influencer’s audience, it has to be 100% relevant to what you do. Keep that in mind.

7. Let go of control

The one thing that you have to get out of your mind is the desire to police and write every piece of sponsored content. You have hired this influencer because they have reach and respect within their audience. Maybe, just maybe, they know how to push and promote your products to their audience in a way that works?

The best thing you can do in 2020 is to just let your influencers work their magic. Trust that you’ve selected quality influencers that fit your brand. Let go of direct control and let influencers do the job you hired them to do. This is what they do for a living, after all!

8. Focus on measurable results, not salutations

We’ve already mentioned the importance of true reach over followers, but it goes beyond even that. Make sure you select influencers for the strength of their audience, not how well-known the influencer is. You want to get positive, brand-relevant engagement, and move consumers down through the sales funnel. 

This all starts with an influencer selection backed up with data.

Are you excited to start running your next influencer marketing campaign? Get in touch!
Interested in more influencer marketing insights? Why not take a look at our infographic on influencer marketing trends?