Interest in Using TikTok Increases 325% Since 2020, New Platforms Highlight the Need for Influencer ROI for Enterprise Marketers

Linqia, the leading influencer marketing company, today released The State of Influencer Marketing 2021 report, its survey of how enterprise brand marketers and agencies use influencer marketing and how they plan to leverage the channel in 2021. TikTok exploded in the last year for consumers and marketers alike. The fifth annual survey found that TikTok became a key platform of choice for influencer marketing. In early 2020, only 16% said they were planning to use the platform in their influencer marketing. In this year’s survey that number exploded to 68% – a 325% increase.

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71% of marketers who have already established their budgets have increased their influencer marketing spend in 2021, a testament that they are finding influencer marketing to be a successful strategy and are putting their dollars to support it. The study also discovered that marketers are now savvier at activating campaigns and are seeing incredible results, proving that the influencer marketing channel will continue to be a crucial way to connect with consumers in 2021.

Additional key findings from the survey include:

• Micro-influencers have always been the top choices for marketers. In this year’s survey, 90% of enterprise marketers wanted to work with micro-influencers, up from 80% in 2020.
• Marketers are working with significantly less influencers than three years ago. In 2018, we found that 62% of marketers activated more than 10 influencers on a single campaign. This year only 31% of marketers activate that many on a program.
• Instagram continues to be the premiere platform for influencer marketing, with almost 93% of respondents saying that they plan to use it.
• With the popularity of TikTok and Instagram Stories, marketers are looking to vertical video as an important channel for influencer marketing. Nearly three quarters of respondents said that vertical video is important to their efforts. In fact, one in three marketers said it is extremely important.
• Engagements continued to be the most common metric used to track success, with 77% of marketers using engagements as a KPI. Clicks, conversions, and impressions were also selected by at least 60% of marketers and are being tracked to measure performance.
• 86% of respondents are already using shoppable links to allow consumers to go from inspiration to purchase instantly, showing that shoppability is a hot trend in influencer marketing.
• 65% of respondents indicated that measuring ROI continues to be the biggest pain point in influencer marketing.

“For the past five years, Linqia has measured the trends in influencer marketing with our State of Influencer Marketing report, and this year we wanted to take a closer look at those who have invested the most in influencer marketing – enterprise marketers,” said Nader Alizadeh, CEO and Co-Founder of Linqia. “Enterprise marketers are spending more in influencer marketing, but the biggest concern is how to determine the ROI of their campaigns. To solve for this, Linqia now offers guaranteed influencer ROI, delivering peace of mind and outstanding results for the world’s largest brands.”

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