Written by Tom Cornish, Global Business Development Director
Influencer marketing has been on the rise in recent years, with more and more businesses turning to social media influencers to promote their products and services. Promising new opportunities continue to appear alongside this steady growth and transformation. So, as we approach 2023, we look ahead to explore future opportunities for marketers to seize.
Here are the top 9 influencer marketing trends we expect to see next year:
- Creator content will be used in more places: Brands can repurpose content across social, digital, and retail platforms and measure its effectiveness across channels. They will start to recognize that working with influencers is the best way to reach and engage audiences and will become central to their content strategies. – IP and usage rights will become a key challenge for brands.
- Leaning into to the ‘content graph’ era: We fully expect to see brands working with influencers based on their ability to tell powerful stories, in a genuine way, rather than just their fame. Moreover, the advent of content graphs, more sophisticated formats, and the growing role of influencer content as a performance driver across the media plan, will mean engaging content will be seen by audiences outside of an influencer’s organic reach.
- Sophistication of social commerce: The value of social commerce has grown considerably over the last few years, with many people now preferring to shop from home using their phones. Next year we will see new tech and improvements to the user experience, and we should also expect influencers to be the most innovative, earliest adopters of these new capabilities.
- Creator Commerce will take off: Linked to this, Creator Commerce will take off and we’ll see bigger brands using it to sell their products and services, particularly in western markets. The growing popularity of live shopping in APAC will find its way around the world next year, though perhaps not exactly in its current form.
- Challenging TikTok: New legislation is already making it harder for TikTok to operate in some markets, and other channels are constantly finding ways to replicate their more successful formats. While TikTok will remain the hottest new channel, in 2023, it won’t be plain sailing!
- Procurement is coming: As businesses gradually take influencer marketing more seriously and invest more into the channel, scrutiny around processes and pricing will increase. This means more difficult questions to answer for agencies, vendors and even client marketing and communications teams. Expect to have to provide more data and more detail than ever before.
- AI will begin to transform content production: We’re already seeing AI being used to create fashion design and even children’s books; it’s giving influencers short cuts to creative skills which would normally take years to develop. For agile entrepreneurial influencers, AI will be a gateway to expressing themselves in new ways, in more media. This could pose a threat to traditionally specialist content creators, illustrators, and designers.
- Exploring live video: Another big trend coming out of APAC markets is the growing success of live video. Streaming is of course already an established medium but expect to see a much wider range of influencers getting involved in live video next year. Commerce is going to play a big role in this, as will the growing availability and usage of live formats in general, across the key platforms.
- Tightening your niche: The growing importance of content quality and expertise will mean influencers will be incentivized to specialize rather than generalize. This trend seems to move back and forth, but next year, we expect specialization will be back with a bang. Expect to see more influencers focusing on their personal brand in a way that makes them more relevant to a smaller number of prospective businesses, rather than the other way around.
