To start off, the numbers don’t lie. According to Business Insider, 68% of companies with 100 or more people will use influencer marketing in some way in 2021, up from 62% last year. In fact, experts suggest that the pandemic may have aided the need for influencer marketing after folks could no longer visit brick and mortar shops with ease.
"Social commerce in particular has made influencers very powerful," said Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform Influence Central, to Business Insider.
"Then there are the new platforms, like Clubhouse or TikTok. They haven't figured out their ad strategy yet, so brands are realizing that influencers are their best conduits for reaching those audiences."
So it sounds like influencer marketing isn’t dying, but there is an undeniable shift happening. Increasingly, social media users are gravitating towards authenticity and people they see as trustworthy. For some, that means unfollowing the Kylie Jenners of the influencer landscape and following more micro and nano influencers - nano influencers are defined as those with less than 10,000 followers, while micro influencers have less than 100,000.
But why are those folks inherently more trustworthy than those with larger followings? Well, it has to do with the topics of conversation, among other things. Discussions of mental health, identity, and political leanings are more accessible when they’re coming from people who appear to live lives similar to, well, us! We can more easily see ourselves in micro and nano influencers because they lead lives that are more low-key and face issues that we all do. Increasingly, influencers with large followings and high net worths are seen as disconnected.
Looking at influencer trends in 2021, Forbes had some insightful predictions from January that appear to be coming true. Two of them are especially striking: the language shift from “influencer” to “content creator” and the skyrocketing of short form video content driven from the popularity of Tik Tok.
Danielle Wiley, a member of Forbes Agency Council, writes: “It's safe to assume that this type of video will continue to appeal in 2021, given the production challenges of creating traditional-length video content, the need for on-trend and time-sensitive messaging and, of course, our ever-dwindling attention spans.”
And, of course, we all heard the news from Head of Instagram’s Adam Mosseri that the app would no longer be considered a photo sharing platform, instead moving towards video and a more organic algorithm.
So what’s the lesson here? Influencer marketing is here to stay, but it will continue to change with trends and evolve as social conditions ebb and flow. Influencer marketing has come so far since its early days and as we see more authentic versions of this necessary tool appear in our feeds, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that, like other forms of marketing, it’s not on its way out anytime soon.
