The Influencer Budget report reveals only 10% of marketers are fully integrating the influencer channel into their marketing mix.
Influencer marketing is becoming a much bigger channel for marketers, and 89% of brands are planning to invest more of their 2027 budgets into the channel, according to Kolsquare’s Influencer Budget report.
Of the 2,000 global brand marketers and agencies Kolsquare polled, 79% are treating influencer marketing as a core or important channel, but just 10% are fully integrating it into their marketing mix.
Analysis by Kolsquare of Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey showed that globally, marketing spend has remained flat at around 7.8% of company revenue this year. Within that, the average (median) budget for influencer marketing has risen from €127k in 2025 to €144k in 2026 on a like-for-like basis, Kolsquare found.
Meanwhile, data from eMarketer revealed in the US, influencer spend is expected to hit $13.7bn by 2027, up from $10.5bn in 2025. In the UK, advertising investment in creator partnerships is projected to rise to 26% in 2026 to reach £1.217bn, according to the IAB.
As much as 29.4% of marketers cite rising costs as a key challenge for 2027, which rises to 33% among small businesses (those with fewer than 50 employees), and drops to 26% for the largest companies.
The number of firms which work with 100 or more influencers has doubled from 18% to 37% since 2024, and those working with fewer than 50 has dropped from 65% to 44%. Kolsquare’s research outlined that 85% of agencies and brands are planning to boost their influencer rosters in 2027.
Companies are choosing the influencers they use very carefully, and selecting those with more precise audience relevance over a more broad but less compatible audience.
As much as 71% of brands now work with micro-influencers compared to macro-influencers (60%), nano influencers (31%), and mega or celebrity influencers (25%). Nano-influencers are those with under 10,000 followers, micro is between 10,000-100,000, macro is 500,000 to one million, and mega as over one million.
A growing expense
Using influencers with fewer followers for more authentic voices and smaller fees has proved to be more cost efficient per activation – but this is becoming difficult to sustain.
A study by Matriochka Influences on the median price of paid collaborations found the fees had increased by 30% – from €4,000 to €5,200 between 2025 and the first half of 2026.
But the price jump varies significantly across creator tiers. For micro-influencers, the collaboration fee rose 200%, from €1,000 to €3,000, while macro-influencer prices rose 19% to €8,000. Mega-influencer pricing held flat at €13,000.
This means that price deviation between micro and mega-influencers collapsed from 13 times to roughly four times in a year. As a result, brands can no longer book large numbers of micro influencers for the price of one mega influencer collaboration.
Outside of influencers, paid social and video ads are now more expensive across all major platforms. The average price of a Meta ad rose 12% year-on-year (YoY) in the first quarter of 2026, the company reported.
TikTok, which doesn’t publish financial filings, saw CPMs rise roughly 12–16% YoY across independent adtech benchmarks, while YouTube ad revenue increased between 11–13% YoY in 2026.
The report cited projections from the IAB, which predicts social video adspend in the US to increase by 13% in 2026; while eMarketer forecasts spend on creator production fees and amplification will even out in 2027.
Going forward, as budgets rise, marketers are learning to be more precise and intentional with their influencer placement, especially as micro-influencer pricing becomes less efficient compared to mega-influencers.
The research added: “The so-called ‘cheap-at-scale’ model simply does not exist,” so fewer, better-matched creators on longer contracts will be the big performer for marketing teams.
Charlie Trouillebout, partner and co-founder, Matriochka Influences, said in the report: “The 2027 portfolio will look like a media plan: one big one-off signing for a brand’s key moments, and a core of mid-tier and micro creators under contract over the long term.
“As for the limit, it exists: on a real cost-per-contact basis, a micro-influencer is already more expensive than paid social. What the brand is paying extra for is the production of authentic content and the quality of the contact with its audience. That premium holds up as long as the influencer contact outperforms a bought impression.”
