
Marketing Tech Will Become Accessible and Further Differentiate Challenger Brands With limited resources, smaller brands will seek solutions that reduce strain on their human resources without straining their budgets. These brands will turn to platforms with experience, robust technology, and actionable data to create affordable and predictable programs that produce results. Influencer Marketing Will Penetrate B2B The B2B and B2C paths to purchase are converging just as consumers personal and professional lives become more intertwined. Brands Will Connect the Dots Between Offline and Online Recent data has shown that online influencer content has a powerful and trackable effect, says the report. A 2016 study with Nielsen Catalina Solutions proved that sponsored blogs and social media posts by influencers increased purchases of the advertised product, and prompted a noticeable shift away from competitors products Real Time Social Channels Will Require Brands to Give up Creative Control Influencers will no longer accept every opportunity that is presented to them. They are becoming selective with partnerships and maintaining authenticity in the content they create for their audience. In 2017, the real-time social platforms will force brands to step out of the creative process in order to take advantage of the quick pace Audience Will Become More Important Than Influencer Audience targeting in influencer marketing demonstrates the natural application of traditional marketing strategy to this emerging discipline, says the report. Marketers will need to build campaigns based on an influencers audience and performance data. People Will Call a Timeout on Traditional Social Engagement Metrics Social media is taking the lead on developing measures that track the types of actions that matter in the digital era. In 2017 marketers will abandon views as an acceptable performance metric, and turn instead to metrics that speak to real engagement with content: likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs.
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