Marketing Briefing: With ‘belt-tightening across the board’ marketers eye TikTok influencers as they seek performance, efficiency

By Kristina Monllos

The ripple effects of inflation are nothing new. Throughout much of this past summer, the nervousness among marketers and ad agency execs’ about the uncertain economy led them to prioritize efficiency when choosing where to spend ad dollars.

Marketers and agency execs say purse strings will continue to tighten this fall as they seek more performance marketing efforts. At the same time, with consumer spending more difficult to predict, planning windows are shorter as some marketers have yet to sort out Q4 plans — something they’d typically be well on their way to hammering out.

“There is belt-tightening across the board,” said one agency exec who asked for anonymity. “Brands are being very conservative with their dollars right now. There’s more paused campaigns than usual and a lot of the ad spends are very conservative and performance-focused. There’s a lot of concern that consumer spending is going to continue to pull back.”

That focus on performance has led some marketers to lean more heavily on influencer marketing, particularly on TikTok as it is often cheaper than the more established Instagram influencer marketing landscape.

“There’s definitely a dollar shift we see from display ads into influencers, especially mid-tier and micro on TikTok,” said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer to IMGN Media. “Obviously it depends on the advertiser but we are seeing about 2X the number of creator campaigns.”

That’s not to say it’s altogether cheap — costs for influencer marketing are on the rise on TikTok, according to agency execs who say that rates have risen across the platform — but that it can be cheaper than more established influencer marketing platforms like Instagram.

Marketers are also eyeing influencer marketing as they look to cut production costs — working with influencers allows them to get content creation and media.

“There’s definitely more influencer work this year than last and it shows no signs of slowing,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. “Creators are being tapped as production partners more than ever. The economic uncertainty plus the volume of social content we often need to create means we need to be efficient with how we allocate dollars. Creators are often a great option to help scale production efforts. They’re platform experts.”

Danielle Wiley, founder of influencer marketing shop Sway Group echoed that sentiment: “Influencer budgets have been increasing while traditional media spends are going down. Influencer spends are also a lot more flexible. Messaging can be adjusted quickly, content can be repurposed/used multiple places. I’m obviously biased, but in an uncertain economy, I’d much rather put budget towards influencer than a traditional media spend.”

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Source:: Digiday