I hope influencers realize the only way they will survive this year with these budget cuts is to clearly segment and understand your audience so you can do content for different LSM’s without losing your audience.

I think with the market so saturated, understanding your analytics from a consumer behavior perspective and using those insights as part of your ROI will put you above the rest.

Paid amplification will be the norm which will affect how much you can charge, it also means understanding how to boost/promote content and learning how set up paid campaigns and doing reports

With brands increasing their use of employee and customer advocacy, the need to use influencers will decrease drastically. You tagging brands on work you were not commissioned for will just be considered as User-Generated Content

While I’ve spoken a lot about your USP, your personal brand pillars are about to be under intense scrutiny as brands want aligned values. So yes, you might lose the bag for tweeting from the side of your neck and saying foul shit outside campaigns

Your content has to now be more audio and video. You posting images on a fluffy carpet and adding 6 hashtags won’t cut it anymore.

“Everyone has a YouTube channel now”

Well interesting enough, you will be more likely to get gigs if you have multiple assets that prioritize different approaches to content and distribution.

Brands will want to see if you can drive traffic across various platforms where the audience they want to speak to is active and engaged.

Long term relationships are about to be very important however they won’t make you an ambassador. They will just repeatedly commission work to you and hardly anyone else.

Group offering vs individual. I’ve made an example before about this, you are more like to get gigs if you are part of a pair/group because the brand’s campaign is supported by more than one influencer under one invoice/ payment

The Johannesburg Group is a great example. Commissioning work to them as a group means everyone has to support the campaign but the brand pays one invoice. It also makes it easy to ensure campaign success because you have people of similar interests for campaign suppprt

Which ensures consistency. Because the group also actually lives that life, the content will go back to being authentic and experiential

Your ability to take a brief and make it yours will help A LOT. You will have to push back on certain request to do content that is a copy and past of previous campaigns. It will also serve you to understand campaign objectives to ensure success and accurate targeting

Find out how other marketing channels will be used for a campaign and make sure your offering is consistent with that. The colors, the tone and overall campaign message

The use of social media tools will really help. You need a tool for social listening, one for cleaning up fake accounts regularly, one that can track hashtag analytics and one that keeps you up to date with your sentiment analysis and last, a reporting tool

You also need to always find out how much traffic you are sending to the brand’s website. This is NB as part of your ROI and reporting metrics