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74% of customers trust social networks to guide purchasing decisions. In 2021, when trust is at peak importance, is your influencer marketing strategy delivering the results you need?

Yet again social media is shaking up your marketing mix for 2021. The latest research shows 86% of marketers used influencer marketing in the last 12 months. But with the changing habits and ever-evolving platform diversification we've seen this year in particular, it's more important than ever to consider your influencer marketing strategy.

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Want to plan your influencer marketing strategy for more customer conversions? Segmenting influencers into different types will help you prioritize types of influencers to monitor and interact with. It should be a core approach to support your content marketing, SEO and social media marketing. [si_learning_path_module_shortcode_block id=144502] If you're new to influencer segmentation, take a look at the below practical infographic from Traackr: The Many Faces of Influence -…

These influencer marketing predictions will help you make more informed choices this year

With 2019 already roaring to a start, we want to give brands and influencers a leg up on the competition. So we've compiled a list of the top influencer marketing predictions that will rule 2019. Let's take a look.

1. Brands will be focussing more and more on video content in 2019

Why is video still the king? Because videos are more engaging and authentic than all other forms of content. [si_guide_block id="27934" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Influencer outreach guide for marketing professionals" description="This practical guide shows you how to use tools to find and interact with influencers on the best social media platforms for outreach, that’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more."/] Authenticity has, undoubtedly, been one of the key drivers of the success and popularity of influencer marketing. It’s the predominant reason why people do not trust traditional advertising…

Travel brands must select the right influencers to work with in order to see the best results and create effective stories

Working with influencers can propel a travel campaign forward and help your company reach its audience more effectively. But when you pick an influencer to work with, you are aligning their brand with your own, this is why it's incredibly important to choose the right individuals to work with. This can mean selecting influencers is a daunting prospect, especially if you have little or no experience of working in this way. One of the biggest mistakes that first-timers make is not doing enough research into influencers before choosing who to work with. [si_guide_block id="35932" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Smarter Instagram marketing guide" description="Our Smarter Instagram marketing guide will help you tap into the consumer activity on Instagram to use it to grow your business."/] It’s simply not enough to select the…

Chart of the Week: The majority of marketers find influencer marketing to be an effective strategy, but it doesn’t come without its challenges

Influencer marketing has become a popular tactic for a number of brands, whether they’re using well-known names or micro-influencers. In fact, according to new research from Mediakix, 80% of marketers find influencer marketing to be an effective strategy. Almost half of marketers (45%) said they find influencer marketing effective, with a further 35% saying they find it very effective. In comparison, only 5% said influencer marketing was an ineffective tactic, while15% were neutral on the topic. This suggests that getting your influencer marketing campaign right - finding the right people to work with, promoting the best products or services and having them share content across channels that suit your audience – can help you…

‘A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message’ - Mark Zuckerberg

Influencer marketing has heavily been under the spotlight in the past couple of years, with the rise of social media usage by millennials trying to promote brand and products that they seem to believe it.

Since influencer marketing is a fairly new domain of digital marketing, questions around its regulation, monitoring and revenue stream always come up as topics of debate. Perhaps, it's not immediately as clear as the other areas of digital marketing, in terms of how influencers make money or whether they should be making money at all.

[si_guide_block id="27934" title="Influencer Outreach Guide" description="Engaging influencers is now a key marketing tactic to expand your reach and awareness through integrating with your content marketing, social media and SEO activities.This practical guide shows you how to use tools to…

The field of Influencer Marketing has grown by a whopping 198% in 2017! 

‘Influencer’ seems to be a recurrent buzzword in brand marketing, to raise brand awareness and increase engagement with specific segments of the user base. Many companies, albeit SMEs or large corporations, have become increasingly interested in utilising both micro and macro influencers, to establish effective influencer relations and in turn, run successful brand engagement campaigns for their audiences. As Adweek states, influencer marketing has expanded exponentially over the past two years, where the industry has gone from being just a rising marketing tactic to an essential part of most marketing budgets in 2018. In fact, according to State of Influencer Marketing Report 2018 by klear, Influencer Marketing, as a field, grew by a whopping 198% in 2017! 

Increased budget allocations

According to another report on Influencer Marketing by …

Interview: Assaf Eisenstein, Founder of Lusha

At Smart Insights we're always on the lookout for new tools which help marketers improve their business leads and sales. With many tools out their to help with outreach, we're drawn to Lusha, a new tool that not only helps improve the outreach process but enriches your CRM and Salesforce leads, and can be integrated with a range of other tools including MailChimp, Hubspot, and Intercom. We spoke to the Founder of the company, Assaf, to find out more:

1. What inspired you to create Lusha?

We live in a world that is data rich but information poor. While the web and all the social networks within it giving us countless ways to discover things and connect with people, professional’s are often stuck when it comes to having instant access to the information that matters when it matters. The pace of business is getting faster and our ambition…

Three guiding principles of effective influencer marketing

The concept of influencer marketing is not new and has in fact existed for many decades. For years brands have worked with celebrities and other influential figures to leverage their popularity to positively impact their products and services, however, despite its long history, the rise of digital and social media has propelled influencer marketing into the consciousness of more marketing leaders than ever before. Fuelled by lower barriers to entry and access to a plethora of opinion leaders across a huge range of sectors and interests, the concept of influencer marketing has become a prominent device in the modern marketing toolkit: trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"influencer marketing","geo":"GB","time":"today 5-y"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=today%205-y&geo=GB&q=influencer%20marketing","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"});

2018: the year of the influencer?

Many commentators have illustrated that 2017 proved just how popular influencer marketing has become, leading some to suggest that 2018 may be the year of the influencer.…

Chart of the Day: Is your use of influencer marketing mainly campaign-based or continuous or always-on?

Our Managing digital marketing 2017 research report showed that integrating marketing campaign activities remains a major challenge, so it was interesting to see a new report from Traackr reviewing integration of influencer marketing. Their new report specifically considers influencer marketing in one sector, B2B technology, but references this research from a wider sample on the maturity of influencer marketing integration. Similar to our research, it shows that integrated 'always' on programmes are rare, instead it's more common to have campaign-based programmes. It's understandable that much influencer marketing is campaign-based since that makes it easier to manage as part of campaign activities. The report from Mark Schaefer and Evy Wilkins also considers the role of 'micro-influencers' which I'm a strong believer in. The report interviews several tech marketers including Nicole…

Engage the right influencers to get results from your Instagram marketing

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger set out to create what we now call Instagram less than a decade ago, they just wanted to make a simple photo and video-sharing app. What they never anticipated is what Instagram has evolved into—a top marketing platform that has attracted startups and top global brands alike. The spoil is an immense consumer audience that recently hit the 700 million mark. Instagram’s response was decisive through ad campaigns in the mould of sponsored posts tailored for specific target audiences. Quite evidently, the owners of Instagram have not been the only parties to tap into the incredible financial benefits from advertisements. The meteoric rise of Instagram as a marketing tool has overseen an equally remarkable rise of Instagram influencers who can be likened to online marketing executives. In fact, currently, up to 12% of Instagram influencers…