As marketers, we know the value of a good influencer. Influencer marketing helps you gain reach in a targeted audience or niche. Using it as part of your social media strategy can drive campaign performance to increase brand awareness, generate leads and boost sales.
Working with influencers means your brand can benefit from their creativity and authenticity. Influencers are creative individuals with a skill for making content that their audience will love, and their voices can be valuable to your brand.
The figures for influencer marketing are impressive. Fortune Business Insights reports that the global influencer marketing platform market size was valued at $17.40 billion in 2023.
By 2032, that figure is expected to reach $71 billion.
Influencers can also allow you to gain traction on platforms where you may not yet have a presence; creators on for example, are experts at making promotional phone number list content that fits in seamlessly with their organic content and entertains their audience.
Plus as marketers look to scale up their influencer marketing activities, artificial intelligence (AI) can help improve performance, reduce risk, and boost productivity.
But influencer marketing can be tricky. It’s not just about finding someone with a lot of followers, it’s about finding the right influencer and making the most of that collaboration. Ultimately, it’s about being clever with your influencer marketing strategy from the start and learning how to work with brands.
This comprehensive influencer marketing guide covers:
What is influencer marketing?
Key influencer marketing statistics
What are the types of influencers?
What’s the difference between influencers and creators?
What are the types of influencer collaborations?
How to build an effective influencer marketing campaign
Top influencer marketing tools
Influencer marketing and AI
Influencer marketing do’s and don’ts
Influencer red flags
Regulations around influencer marketing
Let’s get started!
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What is influencer marketing?
Let’s start at the beginning, what is the definition of influencer marketing? In a nutshell, influencer marketing is about product placement or endorsement on social media networks through an influencer. An influencer is a person with a social following and who focuses on a particular niche.
Just think about some of the biggest social media influencers such as Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Addison Rae along with digital marketing experts like Gary Vaynerchuk and Rand Fishkin.
But they’re not the only ones. In recent years, there has been a rise in smaller influencers that are having an impact.
Key influencer marketing statistics
By 2025, there will be over 4 billion social media users globally according to Statista. That’s a huge amount of people active across social networks with an appetite for content. So what networks are they active on?
Statista
Let’s dig into some influencer marketing statistics to give you an idea of how you can capitalize on this growing social media usage.
The influencer marketing industry What is Google Analytics and how does it work? is set to grow to approximately $24 billion in 2024 – Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report
The average ad spend per user in the influencer advertising market
estimated to be $5.60 in 2024 – Statista
Most marketers who have an influencer program work with a small number, between one and ten – 2024 State of Social Media report
31% of social media users prefer to find out about new products through an influencer they follow as opposed to any other format or channel – HubSpot
There is a strong preference for working with nano (44%) and micro (26%) influencers ahead of expensive macro-influencers (17%) and celebrities (13%) – Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report
59% of marketers who use influencer marketing plan to increase budgets during 2025 – Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 Benchmark report
TikTok is the most popular influencer marketing channel (used by 69% of brands), followed by Instagram (47%), YouTube (33%) and Facebook (28%) – Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report
Check out our blog ‘20 Influencer Marketing Statistics that Will Surprise You’ for more insights.
What are the types of influencers?
There’s more than just one category of influencers, and they all offer different exposure opportunities.
Working with any of them can turbo-charge your marketing campaign by dramatically increasing the reach of your messaging. However, you need to ensure you choose the right type of influencer.
These are classified according to their follower count as nano (up to 1,000), micro (5,000 to 100,000) and macro (100,000 to 1 million).
Chart showing 4 types of influencers
Influencer Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
What’s the difference between influencers and creators?
While there is an overlap between influencers and content creators, they help to achieve different marketing objectives.
According to Deloitte’s ‘The creator economy in 3D’ report, three out of five consumers are likely to positively engage with a brand with the right creator’s recommendation. So what’s the real difference?
Brands can leverage creators to:
Generate higher audience engagement
Be more relevant with niche communities
Help drive middle and bottom funnel behavior
Influencers are more suited to help brands to:
Drive top and middle funnel consumer behavior
Be relevant to a more diverse audience
Generate higher brand visibility and awareness
Creators tend to develop and produce their own content that appeals uae phone number to small communities – for example someone sharing vegan recipes. While influencers are more like mini-celebrities with their own personal brand that companies can leverage.
“Creators want to build a career with brands, they don’t want to just get paid $200 bucks. So I think the more you bring them to the table as a partner of a campaign or effort the better. It’s good for both parties and could be more affordable for the brand,” said Nikki Lindgren, Founder of digital agency Pennock on a DMI podcast.
Top tip: TikTok One is a creative platform from TikTok with tools to create effective campaigns. It gives brands the opportunity to reach out to millions of creators, connect with production partners, and uncover insights. It’s currently free to use in certain regions, so agencies and brands can see if they can use it to augment and modify creative assets at a different level than they were before.
What are the types of influencer collaborations?
There are multiple ways for a brand or organization to engage and collaborate with an influencer. Here are some ideas.
1. Event coverage
Event marketing is a perfect opportunity to engage influencers. If your event is aimed at people in a particular location or with specific interests, influencers who operate within those areas or niches are ideal for getting your event in front of your target audience.
Get them on board early to build up excitement, and allow them to conduct live coverage on the day. Here are some tips for making your virtual event a success if this is something you’re thinking about. One example is TikTok movie guy Straw Hat Goofy.
Straw Hat Goofy
2. Gifting
69% of consumers trust influencers, friends and family over information coming directly from a brand according to Matter Communications. Gifting is your opportunity to capitalize on this.
Gifting involves seeking brand exposure for the price of your product or service. Send a sample or offer them a free experience, and include information about you and your product to make it easy for them to promote you. Here’s an example from Instagram food influencer Carolina Gelen, in partnership with a feta dip brand.
Screenshot from Carolina Gelen Instagram profile