Video & Useful Content As Influencer Marketing Trends

In the last few years, there has been a big rise in businesses utilizing influencers’ audiences to market their products or services. This type of marketing has itself had ups and downs. However, influencer marketing is an incredibly effective tactic that businesses can take advantage of, and it’s intrinsically linked with social media.

Influencers Using Video

One of the biggest trends in the past year has been video production, and businesses that aren’t utilizing this trend are missing out on reaching big audiences. Unfortunately, while the amount of video content online is growing with each passing day, many brands have started to pull their advertising budget out of YouTube because they don’t have control over where and when their ads are going to be shown to audiences.

This lack of control has switched from traditional video ads that interrupt the videos on the platform to brands pursuing individual influencers who are going to talk about the brand’s products during the video itself. Additionally, the type of video content that these influencer marketers can make ranges from unboxing videos and exclusive reviews to product teaser campaigns, and all of them serve to create the initial buzz before the product is released for the public.

More Transparency

With the FTC cracking down on the relationships between influencers and brands and asking everyone to be more clear in disclosing the working relationships, many brands and platforms have started to put a lot more effort into disclosing any sort of paid sponsorships and partnerships.

However, there are certain ways that influencers share these sponsored and partnered posts that audiences can find off-putting, and the main goal here is for businesses to avoid those types of posts in order to keep a high level of trust with their consumers. One of the easiest ways for influencers to do this is simply putting the hashtags “sponsored,” “ad,” or the name of the brand in their post.

Businesses should be extra cautious and check the posts that the influencers have shared to make sure that they are all adhering according to the FTC guidelines.

Useful Content

Finally, everyone is already aware that consumers are tired of traditional advertising tactics that only clog up magazines, TV, billboards, and the internet in the past decade. This is why businesses have to choose the influencers they want to work with carefully because these influencers have to have the right balance of both commissioned and non-commissioned content.

If the content skews too much in either direction, the trust factor between that influencer and the audience is going to fade, along with the number of followers, and with it, the influence that the person in question had.

If certain content looks too much like a promotion in the audience’s eyes, it’s going to be a lot less effective, especially with the younger generations. That’s why brands and influencers need to provide enough non-promotional and sale-sy content so that the audience doesn’t get put off when it comes across the calls to action.