Is influencer marketing becoming essential for small businesses?

Remember when influencer marketing meant sending a free product to someone with a few thousand Instagram followers and hoping they'd say something nice about it?

Well, things have moved on a bit.

In September 2026, IAB UK released new research estimating that investment in UK creator partnerships will reach £1.217 billion this year. That's a 26% increase on 2025, when the market generated £966 million.

Yes, billion.

It's a pretty significant milestone for an industry that was once treated as the slightly experimental corner of the marketing department. These days, creators are appearing in everything from product launches and paid advertising to long-term brand partnerships.

But while bigger brands are busy signing creators and spending huge amounts of their budgets on social mentions, where does that leave smaller businesses?

Is influencer marketing something even something that small businesses should be considering? Or is it another marketing channel that sits on the edge of ROI?

The UK creator economy is growing up

First, let's talk about that growth. 

According to IAB UK's September 2026 research, creator partnership revenue reached £804 million in 2024, increasing to £966 million in 2025. It's now forecast to reach £1.217 billion in 2026.

That's a lot of sponsored posts, product reviews and carefully placed discount codes. You’ve probably seen this content plastered in every other post on your daily social media doomscroll. 

But what was once a slightly obscure channel, creator marketing is becoming an important consideration in overall strategy. 

For years, influencer marketing had a reputation for being difficult to measure, unpredictable and occasionally a bit questionable. There were plenty of conversations about fake followers and undisclosed ads. 

Of course, those questions haven't totally disappeared. But the industry is becoming more established and also more transparent, which is great for both sides of the relationship.

In May 2026, IAB UK even launched an industry-backed Creator Qualification to help creators understand advertising rules, disclosures and professional partnerships. It's definitely a strong sign that creator marketing is becoming a more formal part of the advertising industry.

So, the industry is changing. But it doesn't necessarily mean your local bakery needs to start negotiating a six-month influencer contract or does it? 

Do small businesses actually need influencer marketing?

We want to challenge the hype a little. Just because an industry is growing doesn't mean every business needs to invest in it. This is true for many marketing channels!

Influencer marketing can be brilliant for brands with visually interesting products or niche audiences that can be nicely targeted on platforms like Instagram. For example, a pilates studio can think about gym influencers that regularly engage in that activity and who probably have an active community interested in fitness. 

But what about a specialist B2B consultancy? A local accountancy firm? A business selling something with a particularly long and complicated buying process? Creator partnerships might still have a role, but the approach would probably look quite different. 

The question shouldn't be, "How do we get influencers talking about us?"

It should be, "Who already has the attention and trust of the people we're trying to reach?"

And that can take many forms, such as: 

• Content creator (on platforms like YouTube or Instagram)

• Industry expert on LinkedIn 

• Niche newsletter writer

• Event speaker 

• Guest article writer 

  
  

And sometimes, the best use of your marketing budget might be improving your website or finally sorting out that email newsletter you've been meaning to send since March (oops!). We won't judge.

Important! Bigger following doesn't always mean better results

If you do go down the route of an influencer or content creator, there are a few important caveats, like follower numbers. 

There's something quite appealing about seeing a creator with 500,000 followers and imagining half a million potential customers discovering your business. There’s something about human psychology that sees a big number and associates it with greater importance or impact. 

Unfortunately, marketing doesn't work quite like that. A large audience is only valuable if the right people are paying attention.

We’ll put this into an imaginary scenario. Imagine you sell handmade ceramics and you could pay a lifestyle creator with hundreds of thousands of followers to feature your products. Or you could work with a smaller interiors creator whose audience genuinely loves independent makers and beautiful homeware.

The second partnership might generate fewer impressions, but those impressions could be much more relevant, and therefore be more fruitful when it comes to leads or product sales. 

Micro-influencers and niche creators are suddenly much more interesting for smaller businesses.

As we noted, they may have smaller audiences, but their content can feel more personal and their recommendations more closely connected to a particular interest or community. There’s often a higher level of trust in these smaller communities too. 

Bear in mind that doesn't automatically make them more effective, you still need to consider engagement, audience quality and actual commercial results still matter.

But it does mean that businesses shouldn't dismiss creator marketing simply because they can't afford someone with a blue tick and a management team!

The best partnerships don't feel like adverts

Now, let’s consider the idea that you’ve found a creator you’d love to work with, but you don’t know how best to promote your product or service. 

Let’s start with the fact that, people don’t want to buy from social media “adverts”. 

Honestly, we've all seen them. Imagine a creator who has spent years building a community around cooking tutorials, then suddenly a video from them pops up on your feed promoting the Dyson hair wrap, and this suspiciously unrelated product has completely changed their life.

You can practically hear the marketing brief being read aloud, and it feels so inauthentic. 

This is one of the biggest challenges with creator marketing: finding the balance between giving a brand what it needs and allowing a creator to sound like themselves. After all, the reason you're working with a creator is presumably because people enjoy their content and trust their perspective.

While it might be tempting, if you hand them a script that sounds nothing like them, you're removing much of the value they bring and people can see it from a mile away. 

Remember that a good partnership starts with finding someone whose interests, audience and style make sense for the brand. It also means being realistic about creative control.

Of course, businesses need to communicate important product information, agree on deliverables and make sure advertising rules are followed. But there's a difference between providing a useful brief and insisting that every sentence sounds like it came from your product page - this is social media after all!

What could creator marketing look like on a smaller budget?

What about the budget itself? You might be unsure how much to spend in this marketing channel. 

But the great thing is, you don't need to launch a nationwide influencer campaign to experiment with creator partnerships.

For smaller businesses, we'd start with something manageable.

• Work with a handful of relevant creators. Rather than contacting 50 people and hoping someone replies, identify a few whose audiences genuinely overlap with yours. To get an idea of where there’s overlap, look at their content, the conversations happening in their comments and maybe even the brands they've previously worked with. Try to make a shortlist of people you’d love to work with. 

• Consider content creation as well as reach. There’s a difference between an influencer and content creator. A skilled creator can make product demonstrations, tutorials or lifestyle videos that your business can use across its own channels, subject to agreed usage rights.

• Think beyond one sponsored post. One-off partnerships can be useful, but ongoing relationships give creators more time to understand your products and build a connection with the brand. It might be worth creating more of a campaign for greater impact. 

• Be clear about expectations. Agree what you're paying for, what content will be delivered, when it will go live, how it can be reused and what success looks like. You want to keep a positive relationship with them and their community. 

  
  

And please don't assume that offering someone a free product automatically entitles you to a week's worth of content. Creators are also running small businesses, so let’s all work together fairly!

But how do you know if it's working?

Ah, the question every marketer loves… this is where it can get tricky. Measurement is one of the biggest challenges in creator marketing, particularly when a campaign is designed to build awareness rather than generate immediate sales.

A creator might introduce somebody to your brand on Instagram, only for that person to visit your website three days later through Google. The creator influenced the discovery, but your analytics might not give them any credit.

Bear in mind that the purchase journey can also be complex. 

Data from Focus Digital shows that on average, it takes 29.4 touchpoints before a customer might buy your product or service. 

And you’ll likely see a difference between B2B and B2C brands too- business-to-business activity can take much longer to convert. 

Even the wider industry is still working through these challenges. In January 2026, the US Interactive Advertising Bureau published research highlighting gaps in creator marketing measurement, including inconsistent metrics and difficulties comparing performance across channels.

For small businesses, we'd keep things practical. If you're trying to generate sales, look at referral traffic, tracked links, discount code usage, enquiries and conversions.

If your priority is awareness, consider reach, engagement quality, branded searches and whether the campaign introduced your business to relevant new audiences. You’ll need to decide on what success looks like before the campaign and consider what metrics you’ll use to measure this. 

And if you've commissioned content to use yourself, think about the value of those assets too.

Otherwise, it's very easy to end up with an impressive-looking report full of views and absolutely no idea whether the investment was worthwhile.

Don't forget the advertising rules

As creator marketing becomes more established, there's also greater responsibility on brands and creators to get the basics right.

Paid partnerships need to be clearly identifiable as advertising. Depending on the arrangement, this can also apply when creators receive free products, gifts or other benefits.

In the UK, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority provides guidance on how influencer advertising should be disclosed, including the use of clear labels such as "Ad". It's worth familiarising yourself with the rules before approaching creators, rather than leaving disclosures to chance.

Also, things are evolving around technologies like AI too, brands will be expected to become even more transparent around how they’re utilising these tools. 

And don't forget to discuss content ownership and usage rights. Being featured in somebody's Instagram Reel doesn't automatically mean you can turn that video into a paid advert for the next two years.

A little clarity at the beginning can save some fairly awkward conversations later.

So, is influencer marketing becoming essential?

For the wider marketing industry, creator partnerships are clearly becoming harder to ignore. The money is growing, which is a good sign that the channel is becoming more valuable for brands to utilise. 

But for small businesses, we don't think the answer is quite as simple as "everyone needs influencers".

A successful creator partnership depends on the same things as any other marketing activity: understanding your audience, having a clear objective, choosing the right approach and knowing what you can realistically afford.

There are opportunities here, particularly for businesses that can find creators with genuinely relevant audiences or use creator-produced content in their wider marketing.

But you don't need to jump on the billion-pound bandwagon just because everyone else seems to be climbing aboard.

Start with your customers, not the creators. And if you do find somebody who genuinely loves what you do, understands your audience and can help tell your story?

Well, that sounds like a pretty good partnership to us.