Welcome to Part Two of our blog series, sharing the trends from the DMWF in NYC! You can review Part One – Remarketing & Data here.

As you may already know, we recently attended the Digital Marketing World Forum conference in New York City! There are some exciting things happening in the digital marketing space which are set to shape the way we market to our customers in 2017.

We had the pleasure of seeing various digital leaders speak live at the #DMWF this year, including marketing executives from global brands like Trivago, Pepsi Co, National Geographic, Reebok, Wrigley, Intel Security and Buzzfeed. In addition, to industry experts from companies like Sprout Social and The Social Chain and Glen Gilmore and Sean Gardener from the Forbes Top 20 Social Media Influencer’s list!

So much valuable info came out of the conference that we decided to make a series of blogs discussing the top trends for 2017. Here’s what going to be big in digital in 2017, Part Two – Micro-Influencers.

Micro-influencers

2016 was certainly the year of the ‘influencer’. This buzz word has been thrown around so much that people have made careers out of being an influencer and agencies even exist now that represent of the top influencers (some of whom are pets!).

“Influencer marketing is its own marketing channel, ”says Martin Jones from Cox Communications.

However, with the year of the Influencer, came the year of the wannabee Influencer, with tons of people jumping on the bandwagon trying to make a quick buck from growing a large following on social media. These wannabees might sport large follower numbers in the hundreds of thousands but the followers are not very engaged – nor are they loyal.

“True influence is more than just brand awareness”, says Sean Gardener, Forbes #1 Social Media Power Influencer.

Brands such as Glasses USA, have found they are yielding stronger results by building relationships with a handful micro-influencers who have a small, but loyal and highly engaged following in specific niches. These people may only have 500 or so followers BUT are having a much higher success rate when converting customers for brands.

This trend also reflects the shift towards focusing on engagement as a metric for success on social media, rather than just the size of your following. With bots, fake followers, spammers and ‘follow-for-follow’ strategies fudging brands’ ability to measure ROI; an account’s number of ‘followers’ is fast becoming a vanity metric to review with caution.

Engagement rates are one of the stronger and more reliable metrics for marketers looking for real results through digital marketing and social media. Sadly, brands that have spent time building a large, but untargeted following will need to do some back paddling to be able to accurately measure their engagement rates.

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Chronicle Republic Communications is a boutique Sydney marketing consultancy for real estate agents, property and interior design professionals. We specialise in social media, content marketing, email marketing, blogging, search engine optimisation, social media advertising and much more!

We help our clients tell their brand’s story through engaging and meaningful marketing that captures attention.

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