For years, marketing departments treated influencers like living billboards. We leveraged their audiences to promote our businesses. We paid them for views, likes and impressions and hoped some of that engagement would trickle down to our bottom line.
In a lot of cases, it didn’t.
Eventually, it stopped making business sense to keep paying for views without knowing whether those views were actually doing anything for the business.
As a marketing executive, I started paying more attention to influencer marketing ROI. I wanted to work with influencers who could drive sales, not just engagement. And I wasn’t the only one. Businesses were starting to rethink how they approached influencer marketing.
We were moving away from paying people simply to talk about our products and towards paying people who could actually sell them.
Influencers were becoming the new digital sales representatives.
Businesses loved this shift. A lot of influencers, on the other hand, weren’t so happy about it.
In the earlier days of influencer marketing, negotiations were relatively simple. A business would pay an influencer a flat fee for a dedicated post, the influencer would create the content, and that was pretty much it.
Today, the conversation looks a lot more like a B2B sales negotiation.
It’s about the numbers. Businesses want to know their expected return, while influencers want to know how much they’re getting paid for the sales they generate.
The best content creators are starting to operate like seasoned sales reps. They understand their audiences, know what kind of content converts and have learned how to turn attention into actual purchases.
And they aren’t necessarily afraid of commission-based deals because they know they can deliver.
The rise of TikTok Shop, Amazon affiliate marketing and platforms like LTK has accelerated this shift. Creators are no longer just making money from brand sponsorships. They’re building revenue streams around the products they recommend and the purchases their audiences make.
Of course, not every influencer wants to work on commission. And that’s understandable. Creating content is work, and businesses shouldn’t expect creators to take on all the risk.
But for creators who consistently drive sales, commissions can be a very attractive part of the deal.
I hate ads just as much as the next person. We’re literally paying for ad-free social media, and if you ask me, it’s worth every dime.
Consumers have become increasingly selective about the advertising they pay attention to. They scroll past obvious promotions, skip ads and are often skeptical of sales pitches coming directly from brands.
So, businesses have had to find other ways to get their products in front of potential customers.
One solution? Influencers.
When we hire the right influencer, we’re not just buying their reach. We’re tapping into a relationship they’ve already spent years building with their audience.
They can introduce a product through personal stories, demonstrations and recommendations. It feels less like a traditional advertisement and more like a recommendation from someone you already follow and trust.
That’s a pretty valuable position for a business to buy into.
But there’s a catch.
Influencers also have to be selective about the brands they work with. Promoting every product that comes their way might bring in some quick money, but it can damage the relationship they’ve built with their audience.
And when audiences stop trusting their recommendations, their ability to sell becomes less valuable.
In other words, trust is the actual product being exchanged here. Reach is just how many people get to see it.
Influencer marketing isn’t just a B2C thing anymore.
We’re also seeing more businesses turn to niche content creators on LinkedIn and other professional platforms to reach potential customers.
Think SaaS companies, cybersecurity firms, consultants and businesses selling complex services.
Traditional B2B sales strategies like cold calling and mass email outreach are still around, but they’re competing with buyers who increasingly want to research products, compare solutions and learn from people they trust before speaking to a salesperson.
This is where B2B content creators come in.
They share real-world workflows, product demonstrations, industry commentary and tool breakdowns that help people understand complicated products and services.
A cybersecurity creator, for example, can explain a security problem that businesses might not even know they have. A SaaS creator can demonstrate how a particular tool solves a problem that professionals deal with every day.
The business gets exposure, but it also gets something more valuable: an opportunity to educate potential customers before they even enter the sales process.
By the time someone eventually speaks to the sales team, they might already understand the product, recognize the problem it solves and have some level of trust in the company.
Honestly, a well-placed product breakdown or case study from a trusted B2B creator can do a lot of the groundwork that traditional outbound sales teams spend weeks trying to achieve.
And that’s a pretty interesting development for B2B marketing.
This is probably the biggest lesson businesses need to understand when investing in influencer marketing.
The creator owns the relationship with their audience. The brand doesn’t.
Think about it.
When you hire a traditional sales representative, the customer information, sales records and pipeline should live in your company’s systems. If that employee leaves, the business still has its customer database and relationships to build on.
Influencer partnerships are different.
You might spend months paying a creator to introduce your products to their audience. You might even generate thousands of sales through that relationship.
The creator can move on to another brand, potentially one of your competitors, and start recommending their products to the same audience.
You don’t own that relationship. You were simply one of the businesses benefiting from it.
And that’s not necessarily the creator’s fault. It’s their audience, their platform and their business.
This is why I wouldn’t recommend building your entire customer acquisition strategy around influencers.
Businesses need to invest in their own audiences, email lists, websites and customer relationships. If possible, they should also consider building an in-house creator or brand ambassador programme.
The goal is to use influencer marketing to bring people into your business, not make it the only place where those people interact with your brand.
I think businesses need to stop hiring creators simply because they want their brands to look popular.
Influencer marketing needs to be treated as a serious customer acquisition channel.
That means looking beyond follower counts and engagement rates. It means understanding whether a creator can reach the right audience, influence buying decisions and generate measurable business results.
And creators need to understand that their value to businesses isn’t just how many people follow them. It’s also their ability to build trust and influence purchasing decisions.
But here’s something I don’t want businesses to forget: Influencers are just one touchpoint in your marketing strategy.
You still need your own brand, your own website, your own customer database and your own channels for communicating with customers.
You can have the best influencer partnership in the world, but if that creator decides to work with someone else tomorrow, you don’t want your entire lead generation strategy to fall apart.
Use influencers to get attention, build awareness and bring customers into your business.
Just make sure you have somewhere to take those customers when they arrive.
Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses collaborate with content creators to promote their products or services to an established audience.
These partnerships can help brands increase awareness, build trust, generate leads and drive sales.
Influencers can make money through flat-fee sponsorships, affiliate commissions, performance-based partnerships, product collaborations and brand ambassador agreements.
Some creators combine several of these income streams.
Performance-based influencer marketing is a compensation model where creators earn money based on measurable results, such as sales, leads, clicks or sign-ups.
It allows businesses to connect influencer spending to specific marketing objectives.
Yes. B2B businesses can collaborate with niche industry creators to educate potential customers, demonstrate products and build trust.
This can help businesses reach decision-makers and introduce potential buyers to their sales pipeline.
Some of the biggest risks include choosing influencers with the wrong audience, paying for engagement that doesn’t translate into business results, losing control of the customer relationship and becoming too dependent on a single creator or social media platform.