Eighty-five percent of marketers believe influencer marketing is effective, according to a new report.
The research by Influencer Marketing Hub in association with Viral Nation surveyed 3000 marketers, both from agencies and in-house, around the world.
Sixty percent of respondents who budget for influencer marketing plan to increase their budget next year. 24% of respondents plan to spend more than 40% of their marketing budget on influencer campaign, up from 23% in 2022 and 5% in 2022.
Thirty-eight percent of respondents said it was easy to find influencers.
The research revealed a growing preference for working with influencers with smaller followings than large ones. When asked what size influencers they planned to use, 44% of brands chose nano-influencers, with between 1000 and 10,000 followers, while 26% opted for micro-influencers with between 10,000 and 100,000.
Meanwhile, only 17% of brands opted for macro-influencers with up to 1 million followers while only 13% preferred to work with mega influencers.
The research also found that 63% of marketers plan to use AI in their influencer campaigns. The main application, cited by 56% of respondents, was in using social media data analytics to identify the most effective influencers for a particular brand or campaign.
The most popular channel for influencer marketing was TikTok, with 69% of respondents choosing it. This was significantly ahead of Instagram, used by 47% of respondents, which as recently as 2022 was used by 79%.
The research also examined the objectives of influencer campaigns, with 56% citing generating user-generated content as the main reason for doing campaigns, while sales and awareness were cited by 23% and 21% respectively.
