The influencer marketing space has grown a lot within a relatively short timespan and eCommerce businesses have had to learn quickly how to adjust to an ever-evolving market.

It all started with consumer expectations kept getting higher. Confronted with soaring demand for peak convenience and next-level customer experiences, the eCommerce channel grew at an unprecedented rate, an effect that was compounded by retail brands’ desperation to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Influencer marketing was very much driven by the same shift; expectations changed and brand loyalty and the old ways of shopping began to phase out. Soon consumers stopped wanting to hear from brands, demonstrating less and less interest in traditional advertising. This was when smart brands (often digital-first, eCommerce brands) began to land on the power of influencer marketing as a way to achieve the peer-to-peer effect at scale.

Today, influencer marketing is no longer a nice-to-have as a tack-on to your wider marketing strategy. Instead, influencer marketing departments are leading the charge for a new age of consumer relationships, growing in number of employees and budget allocation within many eCommerce companies. And with 35.3% of marketers believing that influencer marketing is the most effective digital marketing channel, we can only expect that to continue. In fact, if you consider the ballooning value of the industry as a whole, which has more than doubled in size since 2019, the power of the channel becomes quickly apparent.

However, the evolution is still in process and consumer expectations continue to shift. While influencer marketing may have started out with traditional gifting programmes or affiliate links, eCommerce brands today have to engage much more deeply and strategically with the channel if they want to stand out, leading to a preference for always-on and data-driven activations.

What are the new trends in social media?

Right now, one of the biggest trends we see is the shift away from mega and celebrity creators towards smaller accounts, in particular micro-influencers which make up 90% of the influencer landscape. This may come as a surprise to anyone still tethered to the early days of the channel where Kim K was our patron saint and the bulk of the content we were exposed to was centred around very aspirational, luxury lifestyles.

In our own research carried out in 2022, we surveyed over 1,000 consumers and found that the qualities they’re looking for nowadays are mainly ‘enjoyable’, ‘informative’ and ‘authentic’. ‘Aspirational’, on the other hand, was actually the quality they prioritised the least when looking for influencer content.

Further to that, we found that 33% of consumers actually don’t care in the slightest what size following an influencer has, and a further 35% actively prefer to follow smaller accounts. Yet this is an area in which we still see a lot of brands getting it wrong, with the majority still putting the bulk of their budget into mega-influencers.

This disconnect presents smart eCommerce brands with a valuable opportunity for two reasons. Firstly, worrying about securing the budget necessary to recruit these celebrity creators to post a TikTok collaboration with your brand won’t be an issue, since the more affordable influencers (the micro ones) are where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck. Secondly, since the majority of eCommerce brands’ product ranges are based on much more everyday needs (and everyday bugets), micro-influencers are much better suited to make genuine product or service recommendations that will relay believable preference to your target audience. Again: authenticity over aspiration. And this is something that should extend to the content influencers publish on your behalf. Make sure you’re giving the influencers enough freedom to promote your products in a way that feels authentic to them and viewers will respond much more positively than if you force something hyper edited or salesy into their feed.

Content formats and how to master them

There have been several shifts in the types of content and brands can rely on in recent years, foremost among them is the switch to video-first strategies. Video is simply not optional anymore. With TikTok becoming the most frequently downloaded app, other apps have raced to replicate their success and jump on the video-bandwagon as well. Of course, there has certainly been some backlash against this move, particularly within Instagram. However, like it or not, it’s not going anywhere, so brands need to find a way to make it work for them.

This is another area where influencers really come into their own because video on social media is not necessarily easy and consumer preferences can change on a dime. However, it is an influencer’s job to adapt to this, to follow trends and re-skill where necessary. Therefore by working with influencers, brands benefit from what is effectively a uniquely specialised consultant, allowing them to focus on other channels and tactics.

The only caveat – and this is critical for eCommerce brands to bear in mind – is that relevance is still key. Not every video trend is going to be for your brand and that’s ok; not every creator is going to be the right fit for you, which is also ok. Jumping on the biggest influencer with the highest viewer counts is not the way to ensure success. Brand fit is integral to building influencer partnerships that consumers can believe in. And without that belief, your influencer content is only going to add to the vast swathes of disingenuous ad material that consumers have already rejected.

Future social media trends

As mentioned, that thirst for authenticity is only going to increase, and this is a trend that we can already see playing out in the rocket-like expansion of TikTok. Now, it’s easy to believe that TikTok’s success is down to its video-first strategy, that younger consumers were simply primed to respond to video better than they do static content. However, while there’s certainly a chance that that played a part in its success, what brands really need to consider is what the style of video in play communicates, and that is something much more casual, much more personable, and much more real than what we are perhaps used to seeing succeed on social media.

Younger consumers grew up in an age where photoshop and editing had reached frankly unforgivable levels. TikTok is part of the backlash against that, a rejection of perfect flat lays and glossy highlight reels. Today’s younger consumers want to go behind the scenes, they want to get into the nitty gritty, to know the people they follow, warts and all.

So for brands, this is going to mean letting go of a bit of creative control. E-tailers will need to get comfortable with loosening those reigns. Because if you are too prescriptive, if you force influencers to run content that doesn’t align with their own personal brand, their audience will punish them and you for it.

Niche, niche, niche…

Another trend we can expect to see more of in the year to come is influencers niching down even more. Creators’ tendency to occupy interest-based niches has always been a bit of a super power of the channel, providing organic, next-level targeting without doing all the work. However, there’s still room to take this further, and to capitalise on this we expect to see fewer fashion influencers and more sustainable fashion influencers or budget fashion influencers or size-specific fashion influencers. Because this is what the algorithms support, and is what’s going to give brands even more refined targeting opportunities. The flipside is that brands may need to invest a bit more to reach the same variety of audiences, if that’s what your product needs.

Prefer to listen? Tune into our podcast where Sanna and Holly take a peek ahead at what trends we’ll be seeing more of in 2023.

Branding versus performance

The frequently asked question of whether to focus on branding or performance is actually a bit of a red herring as it puts brand and performance in juxtaposition to each other when really they should be working in tandem. Without a brand that people care about, your performance activities aren’t going to give you any kind of sustainable returns. But at the same time brands need to get those conversions, right?

Therefore, it’s important for brands to recognise that both are important and to align their strategy so that one supports the other.

On the one hand, branding should be a round-the-clock activity within influencer marketing and outside of it; you should always be looking for opportunities to build your brand. Performance influencer marketing on the other, should be deployed more strategically. Identify key points in your sales calendar, whether that’s a big product launch or Black Friday, and use performance activations to capitalise on those headline moments.

What about delivery?

So how should you adapt your strategy for the different objectives? If branding is telling a story, then your performance tactics is the big reveal at the end. With that in mind, when it comes to branding, time is really important. You need to convince your audience to care, to invest in your narrative, to see themselves in the story. To this end, e-tailers can use smaller influencers to build up awareness and preference over time, allowing the creators to tell their own story in which your product or service takes a starring role, and giving your audience time to immerse themselves in the plot.

For performance on the other hand, this is the opportunity for brands to go big or go home, and is a space in which mega and celebrity influencers really come into their own.

For strictly performance-based tactics, you’ll most likely need to incentivise your offer in some way because it’s going to be much more salesy than brand activities. Think discount codes, think competitions – but try to be creative with them. In the end, it’s about finding ways to spin old approaches to performance influencer marketing. That’s what’s going to make you stand out.

Measuring returns from the channel

Make time to review how you’re measuring your returns from the channel. A lot of brands still get stuck on last click measurement, but that’s just not how people really interact with the online world anymore.

Imagine being on your way to work and you see a product in your feed. It’s being recommended by an influencer you trust. You want to make this purchase.

However, you’re probably not going to call up work and say that you’ll be late because you have to click through right this second to buy something online. You’re also probably not going to leave your Instagram open on that post all day – there’s a lot of scrolling to fit in between now and the end of work! Instead, you’ll open your browser, search for the item, and come back to it later.

Now, you as the customer in this instance were driven through the funnel by a branding activity, by an influencer’s compelling narrative. However, when it comes to attribution, this often won’t be accurately accounted for as too many brands still rely on last-click measurement. So to correctly deduce the efficacy of your influencer marketing, and in turn, to understand how valuable it is and therefore what investment it merits, brands must be much smarter about how they measure their channels, adopting a holistic rather than myopic approach.

Takeaways to win at influencer marketing in the eComm space

Firstly, don’t rest on your laurels. To call back to the beginning of this post: think evolution always. Consumers are in a constant state of flux and it’s only by moving with them that brands will be able to stay relevant. Use influencers to help you with this, trust in their knowledge and their expertise to guide you in the right direction.

Another major one, is that one single ad isn’t going to do anything for you anymore. Sure, if you are lucky and your video goes viral, you might get a great day for orders. However, the reality is that in an environment as competitive as the eComm one, your brand needs a much more sustainable strategy; taking a long-term approach to the channel, making sure you’re covering a wealth of tactics and accounts, is the only way to do that.

Thirdly, to have any hope of real success in influencer marketing, you need a way to make data-driven decisions easier. Faced with turbulent economies and restricted consumer spending, brands may have to make do with smaller teams and lower budgets. Therefore, every single dollar invested needs to count in a real and measurable way, and the work required needs to be streamlined and efficient. By investing in an influencer platform and/or by working with an agency that has one, you’ll get the shortcuts that will help you make the smartest decisions for the least amount of energy.

Finally, since now you know you’re in the channel for the long haul and you’re making sure your influencer marketing is driven by data, you now have the runway to stay on the lookout for optimisation opportunities. This channel moves so fast and you might not even be doing anything wrong, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more things you could be doing right. So play with it, try new things, track your results and make sure you’re refining your strategy all the time.