What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of advertising in which a business pays, gifts or rewards people with an engaged social media following, often called influencers or content creators, to feature its products or services in their own posts and videos. It works on trust: people follow creators for their opinions and taste, which is also why UK rules require paid posts to be clearly labelled as ads.

How influencer marketing works

1. Choose creators whose audience matches your customers. Location, interests and age matter more than follower count.
2. Agree the deal. What the creator will make (a post, a video, a series of stories), when it goes live, what you can check before publication, and what they receive: a fee, free products, a commission on sales, or a mix.
3. Let the creator speak in their own voice. Their audience follows them for their style, and a scripted advert in their feed tends to fall flat.
4. Track the results with a unique discount code, a tracked link or both.
5. Reuse what works, with the creator’s permission: their content can appear on your website, in emails or in your own ads, if the contract allows it.

An example: a bike shop and local creators

An independent bike shop wants more customers for its e-bike servicing and sales. It finds two cycling creators whose followers are mostly in the surrounding county: one posts route videos on YouTube, the other short commuting clips on Instagram.

The shop lends each of them an e-bike for a month and pays a fee for one video and three stories. Each creator gets their own discount code for a first service, and their links lead to a landing page for the offer. Both label the posts as ads at the start. After the campaign, the shop compares code redemptions and enquiries from each creator with what it spent, and decides whom to work with again.

Common forms of collaboration

• Paid posts and videos, for an agreed fee.
• Gifted products that the creator keeps, with or without an obligation to post.
• Affiliate deals, where the creator earns a commission through a link or code.
• Ambassador arrangements, where one creator works with a brand over months.
• Ads that use the creator’s content in your own paid campaigns, with their permission and a written agreement on how long and where it can run.

Creators are often grouped by audience size, from small “nano” and “micro” accounts to celebrities, though the thresholds vary from one source to another. For a local or specialist business, smaller creators with a close, relevant audience are usually the realistic starting point.

UK rules: making clear that ads are ads

In the UK, influencer posts are covered by both advertising rules, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), and consumer protection law, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The ASA and CAP publish a joint influencers’ guide to making clear that ads are ads, developed with the CMA; its fourth edition, published in 2026, reflects the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.

The ASA’s advice on recognising ads on social media sets out the main points:

• Any payment or incentive counts, including gifts, whether requested or unsolicited, and affiliate links or codes.
• Labels such as “Ad”, “Advert”, “Advertising” or “Ad Feature” are very likely to be acceptable. “Sponsored”, abbreviations such as “sp”, “spon” and “aff”, and words such as “Gifted”, “Supported by” or “In association with” are unlikely to be clear enough.
• The label goes upfront, where people see it before engaging, not hidden after “See more”. A platform’s paid partnership tag may help, but if it is hard to see, an “Ad” label should be added.
• Both brands and influencers are responsible for making sure ads are obviously identifiable.

The CMA’s guidance for content creators adds that the rules apply regardless of follower count. Since April 2025, the CMA has been able to enforce consumer law directly and fine businesses up to 10% of their global turnover for breaches. Products such as alcohol, gambling and medicines carry extra advertising restrictions of their own. None of this is legal advice; for a specific campaign, read the full guide.

How to measure influencer marketing

Likes and views show that people saw the content; they do not show that anyone bought. Useful measures are:

• redemptions of each creator’s discount code;
• visits, enquiries and sales from each creator’s tracked link, recorded in your analytics;
• the cost of each sale or enquiry, compared with your other channels such as paid social media marketing;
• growth in branded searches and direct visits during and after the campaign.

Before agreeing a deal, ask the creator for screenshots of their audience statistics: where their followers live, their age range and how many typically see a post. A large following concentrated in another country is of little use to a business serving one region of the UK.

How it fits with your other marketing

Influencer marketing works best alongside a credible profile, a website that converts and content marketing of your own. People who discover you through a creator will often check your Instagram, your reviews and your site before buying. Our social media marketing work covers the organic profile and paid Facebook and Instagram campaigns that creator content can feed into.

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