Influencer Marketing Hub, in collaboration with CreatorIQ, runs a yearly survey and the results are out. In this solo episode, I'm reviewing the highlights of this report with you and giving you my thoughts on how the results will impact you.

4,000 brands, marketing agencies, and industry professionals were surveyed in regards to their perspective on influencer marketing. The makeup was broken down into: - 34% were brands - 31% work at marketing agencies that work with influencers - 4% were PR agencies - the rest were industry professionals

Of those surveyed, the most popular vertical represented is Fashion & Beauty (24%), followed by Travel & Lifestyle (13%), Health & Fitness (12%), Gaming (7%), Sports (5%), and Family, Parenting & Home (5%).

Growth

The Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $9.7B in 2020. This means that the growth in influencer marketing over the current year, 2019 to 2020, has seen the estimated market size increase from $6.6 billion in 2019 to $9.7 billion in 2020. We are fast approaching a market size of $10 billion.

More than 380 new influencer marketing-focused agencies and platforms were established in 2019. These were created in response to making this process easier - so more apps and companies have come on board to help with this partnership and relationship.

Regulation

Only 14% of influencer posts sampled were fully compliant with FTC guidelines. If influencers don't improve their performance soon, there is a real danger that the FTC and CMA will start prosecuting rather than just warning and educating. However, it is an improvement on last year’s results, with only an 11% compliance rate.

Platforms and Engagement

Tik Tok is the MOST downloaded app in the apple store at 33 million downloads.

Micro and nano influencers have better engagement rates than influencers with 100k followers. This is particularly evident on Instagram, where nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers have seven times the engagement rate than mega-influencers with greater than 100,000 followers (7.2% vs. 1.1%). This pattern shows at every follower-number level in between these extremes.

300% more micro-influencers were utilized by large firms than in 2016

Almost 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram as part of the marketing mix.

Here are some excerpts from the report on the topic of engagement:

The shift from "celebrities" to influencers

The ratio of mega-influencers (with 1 million+ followers) to micro-influencers (with fewer than 100,000 followers) rose from 1:3 in 2016 to 1:10 in 2019. In other words, there are now 10 micro-influencers for every mega-influencer, compared with 3 micro-influencers per celebrity in 2016.

Working with Influencers

84% of respondents said that they upped their content. That means they are hiring more and more influencers to create that content.

91% of our survey respondents believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing.

2/3 of respondents are looking to INCREASE their spend on influencer marketing in 2020. This is further proof that influencer marketing remains successful and shows no sign of slowing down. After a few years of robust growth in influencer marketing, you might have anticipated the movement of marketing budgets to "the next big thing." However, that hasn't happened yet – brands and marketers can still see the effectiveness of influencer marketing and are not yet searching for something new.

65% of our respondents measure the ROI from their influencer campaigns. The most common measure of influencer marketing success is now conversions/sales.

Influencer fraud is of increasing concern to respondents. More than 2/3 of respondents have experienced influencer fraud

Finding the Right Influencers

Finding influencers is the greatest challenge for those who run campaigns in-house.

Audience relationship is the most important factor when looking at influencers: 53% said that audience relationship is #1, the second most important factor is content production at 27%.

When evaluating influencers to use in campaigns, 41% of the survey respondents rated engagement or clicks as being their most important criterion compared with 26% who opted for content type/category or 25% who consider views/reach/impressions to be the most important.

More than half of survey respondents have worked with 10 or fewer influencers and a further 27% had worked with 10-50 influencers and 12% with 50-100 influencers.

Survey respondents spend more on micro-influencers today than they do on celebrities Respondents spent 47% of their influencer budget on micro-influencers (compared to just 23% for celebrity influencers).

What does this mean for you?

Bottom Line: This is an exciting study, and as an influencer you are in the right spot. These statistics should further encourage you in pursuing your career as a content creator. The marketing world is taking notice and is spending much more time, resources and money on influencer marketing. What does that mean? There are more and more opportunities for YOU, the influencer.

How do you take advantage of this? Continue to create good content, be clear on who you are serving and bring your best self to camera (if on YouTube).

Check out the show notes

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The Future of Being An Influencer (2020 Stats you need to know NOW)

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