Influencer marketing has become a staple of many media plans, yet new research suggests most brands still haven’t pushed the channel as far as they could.
According to a new report from Circana, fewer than 10% of brands have fully saturated their influencer investments, meaning most marketers still have room to increase spending before seeing diminishing returns.
Once treated as experimental or top-of-funnel tactics, influencers are increasingly expected to deliver measurable business outcomes alongside television, paid social and retail media. For CMOs, that means evaluating creator programs with the same rigor applied to every other media investment.
Circana, which provides market measurement and analytics services to brands, argues that many marketers still rely too heavily on engagement metrics or low media costs when deciding how much to invest. Instead, the company recommends measuring influencer marketing through market mix modeling and business outcomes such as sales contribution, effectiveness and return on investment.
Looking Beyond ROI
That distinction matters because the cheapest media option is not always the one that drives the most growth.
“If a marketer comes to me and says, ‘I’m only going to look at ROI, and that’s how I’m going to determine my investment,’ I’ll stop them right there and say: ‘This is a race to the bottom,” said Tsvetan Tsvetkov, SVP and global head of MMM consulting at Circana.
“You might have investments that have a very high return because of a lower price, a lower CPM,” he said. “We always have conversations with our clients about the balance between going for ROI and going for scale, reach and the effectiveness of your advertising.”
Instead of treating ROI as the only success metric, Circana argues marketers should weigh three factors together: contribution to sales, advertising effectiveness and return on investment. Looking at those measures together provides a more complete picture of which channels deserve a larger share of the media budget.
Why Smaller Creators Can Deliver Bigger Results
The report suggests that approach may be especially valuable for smaller and midsize brands. While large brands can generate significant revenue gains from modest performance improvements, Circana’s analysis found influencer marketing often delivers an outsized impact relative to spending for brands still building awareness.
Part of that advantage comes from credibility, Tsvetkov said.
“A big part of it is the ability to reach customers that are much more engaged with your brand,” he said. “There is a certain amount of credibility and genuineness that influencers bring.”
He compared today’s creators to one of marketing’s oldest forms of product advocacy.
“One of our clients is still looking to measure in-store sampling, when you go to a store and get [your] makeup done,” he said. “Think about those as the original influencers.”
The report also challenges another common assumption: bigger audiences don’t necessarily produce better business results. According to Circana’s market mix modeling, mid-tier creators with 50,000 to 250,000 followers generated stronger ROI per thousand impressions than macro or celebrity creators, suggesting audience engagement can matter more than sheer reach.
Creative execution also continues to play an outsized role in campaign performance. Circana estimates that nearly half of advertising’s incremental sales are driven by creative quality. Across influencer campaigns, the company found stronger-performing content typically introduces the product and brand early, features a person prominently and places the product in a natural usage context.
“The human element matters a lot in the influencer space as well. The other is combining the human element with the product itself, with the visibility of the brand,” Tsvetkov said. “A good example is a morning routine for a beauty company. That’s something people go through and being able to put it in the right context matters.”
Measurement Becomes the Competitive Advantage
As influencer spending grows, proving business impact will become increasingly important. Circana argues marketers need greater transparency and more granular data from social platforms to compare creator investments with other media channels and build more predictive measurement models.
“CMOs are looking for transparency. They are looking for granularity,” Tsvetkov said. “It allows you to have more robust models, more granular and more interesting insights that you can act on.”
For marketers, the report’s immediate takeaway is about improving how influencer marketing is measured today. Brands are not constrained by the effectiveness of creator marketing but by how they evaluate it.
