Brands and agencies are getting bigger budgets for influencer marketing, and they’re making the most of them.
Influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing verticals in the industry, with a near universal consensus among brands and agencies (85%) planning to grow their influencer collaboration in the next year, Kolsquare research has revealed.
Kolsquare polled marketers across 1,123 marketers across 12 countries in Europe including the UK, Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The study found that since 2024, the percentage of marketers deploying 100 or more influencers has grown from 18% to 37% this year. Correspondingly, the share who work with fewer than 50 influencers has dropped from 65% to 44%.
This means investment is accelerating. As much as 60% of organisations now spend over €100,000 a year in influencer marketing and 36% spend more than €200,000.
The median influencer spend at an organisation with 500 employees or more has reached €312,000. Interestingly, this does not scale up in as expected – companies wth more than 1,000 employees spend an average of €367,000.
This could suggest that smaller companies are spending disproportionately on influencer marketing as a way to build brand awareness and trust before diversifying their marketing spend in other channels.
This makes sense given that influencer marketing accounts for over a quarter (28.6%) of marketing-driven revenue for 29% of brands, and 11% or more for 68% of brands.
Fanie Genovese, head of social media and digital marketing for Better&Stronger said: “Investment is advancing faster than vision, because it remains hard to connect individual influencer activations to broad, cross-cutting objectives: affiliation and conversion, awareness, consideration.”
Until influence is built into a full-funnel logic, with objectives and measurement aligned with the rest of the marketing mix, strategic maturity will keep running behind budgets.”
Scaled campaign spending
Influencer marketing is treated as a core growth driver for 79% of brands, but just 3% call it experimental, illustrating how crucial the vertical is.
As such, 89% of brands are expecting to increase their spend on influence marketing this year. By comparison, this figure stood at 54% in 2024 and 75% in 2025.
Three-quarters (77%) will manage influencer marketing in-house with some agency support, while 23% fully outsource this.
In 2025, 43% of influencer content was organic (referring to any social media post, video, or review shared by a creator without a formal, paid financial contract controlling the specific placement), while 34% was sponsored content. In 2026, the gap between organic and sponsored content closed to 53% and 52% respectively.
The Kolsquare report also found marketers are experimenting with new channels. The use of TikTok for influencer marketing has declined by 12 percentage points to 67%, while Instagram is still used near-universally by 91% of marketers.
