Expert Talks About New Trends In Influencer Marketing In 2021!

ACCESSTRADE MY’s inaugural summit, the Performance Growth Summit 2020 was held on September 12 and successfully brought together digital and affiliate marketing experts across Asia. The summit proved to be a hit among digital marketers, content creators, and affiliate marketers in Malaysia.

In this Expert Talks series, we are going to highlight the major issues brought forward by the experts in PGS 2020.

Yuhwen Foong, CEO and Founder of SushiVid talked in detail about “What Are The Influencer Marketing Trends To Look Out For in 2021?”. 

Serving over 1,500 clients and producing more than 11,000 branded contents for clients, SushiVid is growing steadily as one of the leading influencer marketing platforms in the region.

Introduction to influencer marketing

Influencer marketing started back in 2008 with bloggers and slowly transformed over the years as social media continued evolving.

Right now, Tik Tok, podcast and live streams are dominating the social media platforms. While blogs are still highly relevant, they are no longer in trend.

Different influencer marketing business models

Firstly, the cost-per-post which is the traditional method. Influencers will take pictures, write articles or produce a video for clients and will be paid for the content created.

Next, the cost-per-share method is highly useful for influencers with a high number of following. Business owners will be able to utilise the high number of followers to announce or introduce products and campaigns. Usually, businesses will provide the content to influencers and influencers will share the post with their followers.

Lastly, the cost-per-sale method which is a commission-based method. Influencers create content for free and promote products to their followers. Whenever their followers buy these products through them, the influencers will gain commissions.

Why influencer marketing works?

The users are always online especially in this new normal where people are practicing social distancing and staying at home. Almost everyone is having a smartphone and spend most of their time using their phones to shop, watch movies and connect with family and friends.

Influencer marketing covers all range of users such as Facebook influencer, YouTube influencer, Instagram influencer, WhatsApp influencer and many more. So, reaching the target audience has become easy because of influencers.

As such, brands can also target a huge variety of people using influencers. Micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers are enthusiastic about specific things and their followers are highly interested in the products the influencers are promoting. Influencers can also cater to specific location and language target. Instead of blindly targeting audience, brands can narrow down and target specific audience who are more likely to convert into sales using influencer marketing.

According to Yuhwen, influencer marketing is the new media and businesses will do better by adapting to this change in marketing trend. Influencer marketing builds trust with audience using influencers’ credible work ethics and hence, is highly reliable as a marketing tool.

Lastly, influencer marketing is highly affordable. Unlike newspaper and TV ads which are more costly, influencer marketing comes at an affordable rate starting at RM100. For RM10,000, brands can get a wide variety of content from influencers.

What are the influencer marketing trends to look out for in 2021?

First and foremost, there is going to be an increase in demand from SMEs. Previously, large and established corporations were interested in influencer marketing. However, moving forward, SMEs, and individual sellers are beginning to warm up to influencer marketing due to its effectiveness in driving sales and creating brand awareness.

Next, the audience is demanding more creative content. Outdated and passive photo sharing are no longer of interest to the audience. Influencers are constantly kept to their toes to produce more useful and relatable content. For instance, this is why Tik Tok videos received a great welcome from the audience.

On the other hand, when it comes to sponsored contents, brands are expecting ‘testimonial’ like content instead of a random shoutout by the influencers. Hard sell contents are becoming popular and live stream platforms are being used to produce such contents where the audience can have a closer look at the product.

Moreover, brands are getting more data-savvy and put a big emphasis on measuring the performance of influencers in the right way. Analytical data such as engagement rates, click-through rates and audience growth rates are being watched closely to measure the effectiveness of influencers.

Lastly, an influx of matured and hungrier influencers is expected in the next decade. Right now, the influencer market is saturated with students who want to make a side income. But moving forward, due to the unsteady job market and unemployment rate, more people are going to be open to influencer marketing leading to a more experienced and matured influencers.

Questions from the audience during the PGS live session…

Here are some of the questions asked by our audience during PGS to Yuhwen.

1. For CPS campaign, how did you track the conversion?

The products are sold on SushiVid platform making it easy to track the performance of a campaign. So, the influencers will be able to request and sell products from our platform.

2. Instagram without likes, how would it impact influencer marketing and brands?

It is indeed a good thing. This generation of millennials has so much pressure and mental issues because of the need for likes in social media. As for the impact on brands, there are other metrics that you can measure such as the number of clicks and sign-ups instead of the number of likes.

3. What kind of ROI does influencer marketing produce?

It depends on the business model you choose. If you are measuring cost-per-post, your ROI depends on the audience, if you are measuring awareness, the ROI is engagement, if you aim to introduce a new game, your ROI will be the number of people who download the game.

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As the leading affiliate marketing platform in Southeast Asia, ACCESSTRADE Malaysia is committed to bring the latest information and insights to affiliate marketers and digital marketers in the region. If you have missed PGS 2020, worry not! You can watch the full session here!

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