Foundations
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a form of advertising in which a brand pays an independent content creator to promote a product to that creator's own audience, on the creator's own channels.
Also called creator marketing, influencer advertising.
The defining feature is whose audience is being used. In traditional advertising a brand buys access to a platform's audience. In influencer marketing the brand pays for access to an audience that belongs to a person, and that person's judgement is part of what is being bought. That is why the same product placed by two creators can perform completely differently.
Deals range from sending free product in the hope of a post, through to six-figure retainers with exclusivity and usage rights attached. What is constant is that the creator makes the content, and the audience sees it in the same feed as everything else that creator posts.
Common questions
- Is influencer marketing the same as creator marketing?
- In practice the terms are used interchangeably. Creator marketing is the newer label and is generally preferred by people who work in it, partly because it centres the work of making content rather than the ability to influence a purchase.
- Does influencer marketing still work?
- It works when the creator's audience genuinely overlaps with the buyer and the creator is given room to make the content their own. It fails most often for the same two reasons: a mismatch between audience and product, and briefs so tight that the post reads as an advert the audience skips.
Related terms
- Creator economy
- The creator economy is the set of businesses and income streams built around independent creators who publish directly to an audience, including brand sponsorships, platform payouts, subscriptions, affiliate revenue, and their own products.
- UGC creator
- A UGC creator makes content for a brand to publish on the brand's own channels, rather than posting it to their own audience. They are paid for the content itself, not for distribution.
- Brand deal
- A brand deal is a paid agreement in which a creator produces and publishes agreed content for a brand in exchange for a fee, product, or commission.
- Influencer tiers
- Influencer tiers group creators by audience size: nano (roughly 1,000 to 10,000 followers), micro (10,000 to 100,000), mid-tier (100,000 to 500,000), macro (500,000 to 1 million), and mega or celebrity (over 1 million).
Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.