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We’ve seen first-hand through our clients just how fast the world of creator marketing changes. It’s a non-negotiable: brands have to keep up. That’s why we decided to host a webinar, The Changing Face of Influencer: How to Navigate Your Creator Strategy in 2024.
So, we asked some of our favourite influencer marketing experts and creators to share their intel. Here are three trends that they’re seeing success from and will be focusing on in 2024.
The influencer experts all agreed size isn’t everything; working with nano (1-10k followers) and micro (10-100k followers) influencers can help brands tap into niche, engaged communities. The key is finding creators who make quality content, are authentic and who speak the same language as your audience. They might not have blown up yet, but you never know what could happen – look at Tube Girl and her overnight success.
By supporting smaller creators in their growth, there’s huge potential to create strong, long-term partnerships with someone who could become the ultimate brand advocate. As Alex Saker, Head of Consumer PR & Content, Experian puts it, “If you can take a creator on that journey, they’re going to stick with you in the long term”.
“It's not always going to be the right decision to work with a nano or micro influencer, but at the same time, it could be the best thing you do for your business.”
We asked our experts how they’re using AI and how they see it evolving in the world of influencer. What came up is how it’s giving creators time back for creativity – by making processes like editing pictures or videos and generating descriptions, much quicker. It can also be a great platform to bounce ideas off for content ideation – but all agreed there should always be a human touch, over 100% AI-generated content.
We didn’t just talk AI for influencers, though. Yannick Michael Weinberger, Agency Creator Intelligence Exec EMEA at Creator IQ, explained how his team is “massively looking into AI”, building a tool to help influencer marketers find the right talent and work smarter.
Creator Laura Dove flagged that she’s careful to not over-use AI, to protect her all-important authenticity. This is a good lesson: using it to work smarter is one thing, but AI shouldn’t be used to mislead our communities by creating fake content.
“As someone who's spent the last decade building trust with my audience, I'm hoping I can maintain that, and use AI to my benefit – which I do in editing – but in terms of creating things that aren't real, I'm going to pass.”
Something we’ve noticed in recent trends (Call me CRAZY, Me and the devil), is that people prefer to see real, imperfect, relatable content over a heavily curated, perfect ‘reality’. And as authenticity rules on social, this is only going to continue. What better way to build community, after all, than showing you make mistakes, too?
Isobel Perl, Founder, Perl Cosmetics, shared a great example of this, where she turned to her TikTok audience for opinions on how to solve a packaging problem. The post went viral – her audience loved being involved in the decision-making process, making them feel a part of the Perl Cosmetics team. If your brand can – in the words of our MD of Digital, Social and Influencer, Kinda – “crowd-source its product development” or offer its audience a chance to have their say, we say go for it.
“The best way we've communicated good advice is by encouraging the creators we work with to share mistakes they've made and how they learned from that mistake.”
And this is just the half of it. We covered so much more in our wonderful conversation, from the importance of strategy and longer-term partnerships to the power of the LinkedInfluencer, talent diversity and personality-driven content. To catch the whole conversation full of useful learnings, watch it on-demand here.
No matter if you’re a seasoned influencer marketer or have just started to dabble, getting up to speed with the latest (and future) trends makes sense. So does applying future thinking to the strategies you’re building for 2024.
That’s where Brands2Life can help. We want to guide businesses towards mastering the art of influencer marketing, giving them the confidence to spot creators and trends that can lead to real business impact.
To chat about working together to create a top-notch influencer strategy, get in touch with Kinda at [email protected].
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