Influencer Marketing has really shot up in the past few years. With the rise of social media marketing, influencers are being leveraged in a multitude of ways to promote and acquire loyal customers. As a result, we’ve put together a list of some awesome trends we noticed in 2018 that will help you kick-start your 2019 influencer marketing strategies. Enjoy!

B2B Influencer Marketing

How great would it be if someone who people actually listen to, spoke about your product and/or service?

The benefit of influencer marketing for a B2B operation, is that you have the ability to build long term relationships with your customers.

The Influencer Marketing Hub mentions that 55% of marketers believe they get better customers from influencer marketing. That’s Huge! There’s nothing better than getting a long-term customer…foreseeable ARR is everything when you scale.

Starting with small groups of targeted and specific B2B influencers will help you accelerate building deep relationships with your new customers. As the influencer grows, so will you.

Influencer Marketing Technology and Solutions

Currently, there is no one solutions that covers everything from discovery, connecting, engaging, recruiting, reviewing, and measuring the success of a potential influencer marketing campaign. Notwithstanding, on a regular basis there are new solutions coming out that individually solve each and every pain point.

The development of influencer marketing and the increase of the micro-influencers (an influencer with less than 100,000 followers) are the main fundamental reasons for rising Influencer Marketing solutions.

Check out these cool Influencer Marketing Technologies that we found incredibly helpful in 2018:

• AspirelQ – Self-service platform that offers access to over 150,000 influencers across major social media platforms
• Upfluence – With a focus on bloggers, Upfluence changes the way companies can plan, create, and deliver on their content marketing strategies
• Influence.co – Create exciting, fresh content with influential creators that drive new followers and customers to your brand

Influencer Marketing and the Customer Journey

Micro-Influencers, Macro-Influencers, and Mega Influencers.

On a year-over-year basis there are more and more types of influencers that are being discovered, all of which have various benefits along different periods in the customers journey. A huge trend we see happening towards the end of 2018 and continuing in 2019 is the rise of merging different influencer types throughout the customer journey.

These integrated influencer marketing strategies will weave together Micro-Influencers, Macro-Influencers and Mega Influencers along with other word-of mouth strategies such as loyalty, advocacy and referral programs in order to generate leads and help convert customers faster.

Building relevant content touch points along the entire customer journey will help target the right customers, thus resulting in significant increase in customer loyalty.