Influencer Marketing Statistics for 2020 [Infographic]

In the past decade, social media has become inherent in our day-to-day life. On average,  a person spends upwards of two hours on social media every day. These days, most people, especially those in the younger generations, aren’t interested in being sold to in the traditional methods. More and more people are less responsive to television and radio ads or sales calls. Keeping this in mind, it’s not surprising that influencer marketing, which leverages the popularity of social media celebrities to promote brands and products, has come up as one of the fastest-growing segments of social media advertising.

Here are 10 interesting facts and most important influencer marketing statistics you need to know.

Influencer Marketing – Highest Return On Investment

Influencer Marketing - Return On Investment (ROI)

From large corporations to newly minted startups, most varieties of businesses are seeing positive returns from influencer marketing campaigns.

In 2019, “The Influencer Marketing Hub” conducted a survey that emphasized how highly lucrative influencer marketing can be for those brands who decide to engage in it. The top 13% of businesses make $20 and more! Most companies get positive results from influencer marketing, with just the bottom 25% failing to generate any revenue. More often than not, brands simply select the wrong influencers. They fail to choose influencers who have followers similar to their customers and their target audience.

Indeed, most marketers believe that influencer marketing offers the highest return on investment, to an even greater extent than traditional marketing tools such as email marketing, social ads, and SEM.

92% Marketers believe that influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing

Influencer Marketing Effectiveness

Almost all (92% to be exact) marketing professionals believe that influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing. (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2019)
It would be interesting to know whether the 8% who share disbelief in the efficiency of influencer marketing, have had bad experiences, or have never tried it.

Top Goals for a brand using an influencer for a marketing campaign is to build awareness around them, their product, or service

Influencer Marketing Top Goals

Most commonly, the goal for a brand using an influencer for a marketing campaign is to build awareness around them, their product, or service.

86 percent of marketers place raising brand awareness as the main goal, but influencers are also used to reach targeted/new audiences (74%) and to improve brand advocacy (69%).

However, credibility, reputation and quality of followers are at the top of list. (World Federation of Advertisers, 2018)

Influencer Marketing Spend

Influencer Marketing Spend

Business Insider estimates that by 2022, the influencer marketing industry could be worth up to $15 billion, which is almost double of what it was in 2019. 39% of marketers surveyed with a digital marketing budget above $500,000 plan to increase their influencer marketing budget. 54% are planning to spend more than $250,000 annually on influencer marketing, and 17% are going to spend more than $1 million. (Linqia, 2019)

Nearly 40% of Twitter users say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of a Tweet from an influencer

Influencer Marketing and Twitter users

Twitter partnered with @Annalect to study people’s receptivity to influencers on Twitter. It is clear that Twitter influencers have built up a sufficiently high level of trust for people to be confident enough to spend money on their recommendations.

Twitter research showed that those who were exposed to brand Tweets had a 2.7x lift in purchase intent over participants who did not see an advertiser Tweet. When participants were exposed to a campaign that featured both brand and influencer Tweets, the lift in purchase intent more than doubled to 5.2x.

Best combination of engagement and broad reach

Influencer Marketing: combination of engagement and broad reach

Influencer marketing does not focus on celebrity endorsement. Micro-influencers perform the bulk of successful influencer marketing (at least 90% of it). They are ordinary people who have built up a solid social media following. Influencers in the 10k-100k follower range offer the best combination of engagement and broad reach.

As a result of research, most marketers believe that influencers in the 10k-100k follower range are the micro influencers that brands should focus their influencer marketing on – not celebrities with huge followings but low engagement.
Micro-influencers have 22.2 times more conversations weekly about recommendations on what to buy when compared to an average consumer. People trust micro-influencers far more than they do stars, and are far more likely to take notice of a micro-influencer recommendation than one made by a celebrity. (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2019)

The increase in influencer marketing 2015-2020 mirrors the decrease in TV and print advertising

Google Trends shows a comparable rise in influencer marketing

Google Trends shows a comparable rise in influencer marketing at the same time as TV advertising and print advertising has been falling. Searches for “influencer marketing” drew ahead of those for “print advertising” in mid-2016 and TV advertising in mid-2017, and still continue to grow so far.

68% of bloggers prefer to work directly with brands instead of influencer marketing companies or networks

Influencer Marketing Communication

Nearly 80% of the pitches bloggers receive come from an agency or network representative. However, the majority of bloggers prefer being able to establish direct communication with the brand.  

The majority of micro-influencers make up to $1000 per sponsored post

Influencer charge

Influencer marketing statistics show that the majority of micro-influencers, 96% to be more precise, charge up to $1000 per post. 87% of micro-influencers take up to $500 with 84% of them charging $250 or less per sponsored post.
(Influencer Marketing Hub)

67.6% of marketers consider finding relevant influencers their largest influencer marketing challenge

Influencer Marketing Challenge

A study on the state of influencer marketing conducted by Tapinfluence and Altimeter revealed that 67.6% of marketers struggle with finding influencers relevant to their brand and cause.
(BusinessWire)

Conclusion

As one of the most effective marketing tools today, influencers aren’t going away any time soon and will continue to evolve. No surprise that brands are moving their influencer marketing towards micro-influencers, as it can drive an even greater volume of quality conversions. Brands need to be willing to test and learn to find the strategies that work best for them.

Influencer Marketing Statistics