Today’s generation follows social media stars as closely as it does movie stars and sports celebrities.

As a result, businesses of all sizes increasingly engaged social influencers as part of their marketing strategy to connect with the social and mobile-first consumers in 2015.

Several major studies were carried out during the year to understand the efficacy of this channel. McKinsey’s study revealed that marketing-inspired word of mouth generated more than twice the sales of paid advertisement and had 35 per cent higher retention rate.

Another study found that average earned media value from influencer programmes was at $9.6 per $1 spent, up from $6.85 in 2014.

So, how will influencer marketing shape up from here? While 2016 will be the year social influencer marketing will mature, here are the five factors that will be useful for marketers to decipher influencer marketing from being a pure-play branding exercise to driving sustained and meaningful influencer relationship.

Self-serve platforms will drive influencer discovery: The biggest difficulty marketers faced in integrating influencer marketing was the ability to discover and connect with the right set of influencers.

With the emergence of self-serve platforms, this barrier is broken and the power of influence is within the reach of businesses of all sizes.

Influencer programmes will become costlier: Marketers will be selective in engaging influencers, focusing on those who are credible and loyal.

To fall in this bracket, influencers will have to strike a balance between organic and sponsored posts to sustain the trust of their followers and avoid being perceived as spammers.

As a consequence, they will limit the number of brand collaborations and instead increase their costs to maintain their earnings.

Engagement will be the key metric: Brands will be willing to shell out more money for influencer programmes only if they are able to extract real value from it — engagement as opposed to reach. Key metrics they will look into will include number of users engaged (retweets, shares), customer acquisition (website visits, lead conversion, churn reduction, amongst others) and earned media.

Instagrammers and YouTubers will be the rising social stars: Twitterati ruled influencer programmes in 2015.

However, Instagrammers and YouTubers will be the most sought after in 2016 as real-time visual content drives maximum engagement. New social platforms such as Periscope, #fame and Snapchat will see increased adoption as they encourage real-time sharing of user-generated content. Product experience will be at the core: Experiencing the product and sharing personal stories around this would drive influencer marketing in 2016.

Businesses will give additional creative freedom to influencers so that they can create personalised content for their followers instead of bland product/service reviews.

Irfan Khan is CEO, Blogmint, an influencer marketing platform

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