Ask Us Anything: PR expert Anna Porter on how to drive results from influencer marketing in 2026

In this month’s Ask Us Anything series, SmartCompany asked Anna Porter, senior consultant of culture and creators at Thrive PR & Communications, to share her insider knowledge on influencer marketing in 2026.

From how to drive better ROI with influencers, to how to check if an influencer’s audience is genuine, we hope Porter’s answers help you when considering influencer marketing in your business strategy.

1. How do I measure ROI when using influencer marketing?

Too often brands jump straight to ‘did it sell?’ without first defining whether sales was the primary goal in the first place. Don’t make that rookie mistake. Influencer marketing can drive awareness, consideration, credibility and content value as much as it can drive conversion, but you can’t measure all of those outcomes in the same way. Before briefing any creator, ask yourself one simple question: what behaviour do I want to change as a result of this partnership? That answer should shape how ROI is defined and measured.

From a practical perspective, there are solid tools available when your objective is conversion-led. UTM tracking, platform insights and tools like Shopify, Google Analytics and influencer platforms can give clear visibility on clicks, conversions and revenue. 

Affiliate links and unique discount codes can also help, but they can come at the cost of perceived authenticity, so I always use them carefully. Influencer content often works best cumulatively, reinforcing trust over time rather than forcing an instant purchase from a single post.

I always sense-check strategy by putting myself in the customer’s shoes. If you saw the content you’re asking a creator to produce, what realistic action would it influence you to take? If you can’t connect the dots, your audience won’t either.

Sales isn’t always the right primary metric, especially for brands still building trust or awareness. At a foundational level, brands should be looking at engagement quality: social shares, saves, comments and replies, click-through rates, dwell times and video completion rates. These signals tell you whether attention was genuinely earned or passively scrolled past. As strategies mature, it’s also worth looking at deeper indicators like how long people actively spend with content, whether conversation sentiment is positive, and whether influencer activity drives organic advocacy or community growth. In these cases, ROI may show up as stronger branded search, higher-quality website traffic, content reuse value, or lift across paid and PR channels. The biggest mistake brands make is asking creators to perform like ads before the foundations of brand trust are in place. The strongest influencer strategies meet the business where it actually is, and measure success accordingly.

2. How can I tell if an influencer’s audience is genuine? What else do I need to be aware of?

If you want a quick and dirty vibe check: look closely at the content and how people respond to it. Do the comments feel specific, conversational and reactive to what’s actually in the post, or are they generic one-liners repeated across multiple users? Patterns like identical comments or clusters of creators commenting on each other’s posts can be signs of comment pods or engagement manipulation, and your spidey senses should start to tingle when you see it. A quick scroll through recent posts will often give you a strong gut feel.

In addition to your very well-trained spidey senses, you should then look at how the content performs relative to audience size. On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, video view counts are one of the clearest engagement indicators. As a rule of thumb, if a creator is consistently reaching at least 25% of their follower base in views across their most recent content, that suggests a genuinely engaged audience. You don’t need to overanalyse a single viral or underperforming post. Patterns across the last few rows of content are far more telling than one outlier.

If you want to go off more than vibes alone (and you should!), you can use a third-party tool that can help validate what you’re seeing. Most influencer platforms provide automated trust or authenticity scores. These tools can flag suspicious followers, unusual engagement patterns or abnormal growth. It’s important to remember that almost every account will have some level of fake or inactive followers, and that’s often outside a creator’s control.

One of the most useful checks is follower growth over time. Sudden spikes aren’t automatically a red flag if they align with a cultural moment, a viral post or mainstream exposure such as TV, press or a major collaboration. If spikes can’t be explained by relevance or visibility, however, it’s worth asking more questions. Combining instinct, data and context will always give you a clearer picture than relying on any single metric alone.

3. What can influencers do that ads and PR can’t?

Influencers can live alone, however, to drive Excess Earned Attention^TM, integrating influencers and PR activity can optimise results for brands.

If your audience lives online, they’re already being shaped by influencer content whether you’re part of that conversation or not. Influencer marketing isn’t a nice-to-have tactic – it’s where attention, validation and purchase decisions are increasingly happening. Globally, the influencer marketing industry is projected to be worth around US$32 billion in 2025, with roughly 86% of brands using influencers and more than 70% planning to increase budgets this year. That’s because brands recognise they can’t reach or persuade modern consumers with traditional channels alone.

More than half of consumers now trust influencer recommendations more than traditional ads, and many use social platforms to research and validate products before buying – surveys suggest over 58% of people turn to social media for product research and the Journal of Marketing and Social Research found that 71% of participants reported making a purchase influenced by something they saw on social media. 

This means, if someone is deep in consideration mode, you can bet they’re doing a little search on socials before they checkout. TikTok in particular has blurred the line between discovery and purchase: with its search function optimised for long-tail queries and a rapidly growing e-commerce ecosystem, users increasingly treat the app like a hybrid search engine and shopfront. 

Holistic strategy matters. Influencers can do something that ads often struggle with at scale: translate product features into lived experience in a way that is relatable and peer-driven, and surface real questions and friction points within the audiences you want to convert. But maximising this power requires coordination with your broader channels. PR sets the narrative and core messaging. Paid ads amplify awareness and drive controlled reach. Creators give life to that narrative on the platforms where people are actively deciding what feels trustworthy. If you’re feeling spicy, you can even flip the order: announce a launch with creators, build organic buzz and PR momentum, and then repurpose the best performing creator content into your paid channels for sustained reach and conversion.

4. UGCs or influencers? Which one is more effective?

These are two very different tools designed to solve different problems, and confusion usually happens when brands try to make one do the job of the other.

Traditionally, UGC (user generated content) meant content created organically by everyday users. Today, the term is more often used to describe a style of content that looks native, unpolished and peer-led, but is created intentionally for brands. This content is typically produced by specialised UGC creators whose role is not to distribute the content, but to create it for brand use across owned and paid channels. Because of that, UGC prioritises control, consistency and efficiency, and the creator’s personal reach is largely irrelevant.

Think of UGC creators as mini production studios built for social-first content. Their value lies in their ability to translate a brief into content that feels authentic to the platform, not in the size of their audience. You wouldn’t choose a production studio based on their follower count, and the same logic applies here. UGC is particularly effective for testing creative variations, replacing or supplementing high-production assets, and scaling performance content through brand-owned digital ads. If a UGC creator also has a sizeable following, brands should think carefully before paying extra for organic posting, unless there is a clear strategic reason to do so.

Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is about leveraging trust, reach and cultural relevance. When you work with established creators, you’re paying for access to their audience and the credibility they’ve built over time. That’s why usage rights can become expensive. 

One way to approach this more economically is through whitelisting or boosting influencer content directly from their channel via Meta Business Manager or TikTok SparkAds, for example. Instead of paying large fees to repost content on your own channels and then adding paid spend, you can negotiate the right to amplify the creator’s post itself. This often benefits both parties: the brand gets extended reach, and the creator’s content reaches new audiences while staying authentic to their voice. 

There is still likely a cost for this option, but it tends to be much lower than the fees involved in posting it from the brand’s owned socials. The real lesson is to plan ahead. Lock usage options into contracts early, because once an agent senses enthusiasm, pricing can suddenly become more… creative. That’s a lesson learned from having sat on both sides of the table.

The key is not to blur the lines. If you’re using a creator purely to generate UGC, don’t overpay for reach you don’t need. If you’re investing in influencers, make sure their audience, tone and relevance align with where your brand sits in its journey. Trying to make one piece of content do everything can quickly become an expensive mistake.

Anna Porter heads creator strategy at Thrive PR & Communications, specialising in strategic communications, social media and influencer marketing.