What is Influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where brands pay social media influencers to promote products to their followers, using the influencer’s trust and reach to drive awareness and sales.
Influencer marketing spans nano, micro, and macro influencers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. Deals range from a single sponsored post to long-term ambassador partnerships.
Most teams now favour micro and nano influencers because their engagement and trust are higher and their rates are lower, making campaigns more efficient and scalable.
The measurement problem is what separates programmes that survive a budget review from those that do not. Attribution is messy, because a viewer often sees the post, does nothing, then searches the brand days later. Practical answers are creator-specific discount codes, landing pages per partnership, and holdout comparisons by market, none of which are perfect but all of which beat reporting reach as though it were revenue.
Related terms
- Creator marketing
- Creator marketing is the practice of partnering with content creators to promote a brand, where creators make authentic content for their own audiences or for the brand to use in its channels.
- Micro influencer
- A micro influencer is a creator with roughly 10,000 to 100,000 followers, valued by brands for high engagement and a trusted, niche audience at affordable rates.
- Engagement rate
- Engagement rate is the percentage of a creator’s audience that interacts with their content, calculated as total engagements (likes, comments, shares, saves) divided by followers or reach, times 100.
More in Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing sits in the influencer marketing part of the glossary. These terms come up in the same conversations and are worth reading alongside it.