Influencer marketing in Asia has been one of the trending topics in the global influencer marketing market in the past decade. Soon businesses of different sizes started experimenting with this new phenomenon and realized the endless potentials and values such as adding influencer marketing to their marketing strategies can bring to their businesses.
Like everything digital, influencer marketing is evolving fast, and sometimes keeping up with all the new trends can prove to be a challenge. At Influencer House we think these trends will dominate the Asian influencer marketing scene this year and everyone should know about them:
A New Marketing Stratification Approach
The integration of social media, content, and influencer marketing is going to be one of the biggest changes in the whole digital marketing industry in Asia. This has been going on for the past years but it is expected that this new approach would become a standard practice this year. Brands will no longer see content marketing, social media, and influencer collaborations as separate entities. Instead, they will make sure to come up with strategies that prioritize organic unity within the mentioned areas.
Interest in Niche Influencers
Brands are increasingly looking to work with influencers who share the same values with them and are aligned with their market positioning and messages. This trend will make niche micro-influencers the top guns of 2020. Macro creators and household names will be used for more awareness driven campaigns and conversion-driven campaigns will start paying more attention to niche creators.
Rise of Automated Influencer Marketing Platforms and AI-Powered Campaign Management
According to the most recent market analysis we conducted in some Asian countries including Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, we understood that brands are gradually losing interest in running campaigns with traditional creative influencer marketing agencies who run their campaigns manually on mostly excel sheets.
Instead, they are looking into using platforms as the main instrument to find influencers and implement their campaigns. It is expected that in house teams will still be important for certain brands but they will be needing assistance from even multiple platforms and full-service agencies to take care of their campaigns or help them make the process more automated and accessible.
More Videos and Podcasts
With the digital infrastructure advancing at an incredible pace in Asia, brands have realized that having influencers create videos and audio content would be much more engaging for their target audience. Platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Snapchat, and TikTok will be even more popular with creators and audiences alike.
Fewer Celebrities and More Genuine Creators
This trend has been gathering pace during 2019 and now in 2020 will see this becoming much more produced in Asia. It is generally understood that in order to be a creator or a niche influencer, one has to have interests in that specific area and specialize in the topics surrounding it which means simply having many followers is no longer going to be the only benchmark for collaboration offers.
More and more data are suggesting that niche creators provide much better value to brands compared to celebrity influencers when it comes to conversions.
Conclusion:
During the past few years, many brands have ended up disappointed with their influencer marketing campaigns in Asia. The reason behind that was the fact that brands realized working with certain influencers failed to bring them the ROI they expected before they teamed up with them.
2020 will see brands becoming more result-oriented, demanding more data, and not just the number of followers, shares, and likes.
The rise of organic content and creators is showing brands that getting likes and clicks are not necessarily the right KPIs for them. Instead of working with smaller niche influencers will provide them with more valuable clicks and likes that have a high chance of a conversion.
This new trend will bring those brands who had bad experiences with influencer marketing in the past back in the game.
About IH
At Influencer House we put a lot of emphasis on organic and authentic content creators who can really drive sales and not just clicks and likes. Want to know how we do it? Get a free demo and experience automation and authenticity in one place.