The State of Influencer Marketing 2026 (Aspire)

Summary:

This report from Aspire, an influencer marketing platform that sells software and agency services to brands, looks at influencer marketing going into 2026: budgets, channels, creator pricing, campaign results, AI use and paid media.

The report combines Aspire's internal platform data for 2025 (campaign, content and performance data from creators who connect their social accounts) with surveys of nearly 900 marketers and creators. The split between the two groups and the survey dates are not given. Most surveyed brands are SMBs (74%) running programs in-house (67%). Most surveyed creators are nano creators (63%) whose main channel is Instagram (68%). A few market-size figures come from outside projections.

Key findings:
• Most marketers plan bigger budgets. 74% plan to increase influencer budgets in 2026. In 2025, brands put 23% of their marketing budget into influencer marketing on average.
• Instagram and TikTok lead. 92% of brands plan to use Instagram most in 2026 and 69% TikTok. TikTok campaign volume on Aspire grew 189% year over year. Creators lean into YouTube more than brands do (41% vs 25%).
• Smaller creators get more engagement. Average engagement is 6.29% for nano creators vs 1.80% for mega creators. 54% of brands mostly work with nano and micro creators, and 32% with mid-tier.
• Cheaper reach, slightly bigger campaigns. Average CPM was $2.68, down 42% year over year. The average campaign had 360 posts, and spend rose 11% to $30.2K, while spend per creator fell 28% to $1.3K.
• Brands are split on what drives ROI. Ambassador programs (24%), UGC in paid ads (23%) and one-off campaigns (22%) were named almost equally. Among creators, 63% prefer long-term partnerships.
• Creator content feeds paid media. 77% of marketers reuse creator content in paid social and 69% say it performs better than their other creative. Meta Partnership Ads run through Aspire averaged 2.4x ROAS.
• AI is widely used, AI influencers are not. 59% of marketers use AI in influencer marketing and 49% of creators use it for content creation, but 89% of marketers won't work with AI-generated influencers.
• TikTok Shop is growing. 32% of brands already sell there (up from 17% last year) and 25% plan to start soon.

Margin notes:
This is a vendor report: platform figures come from Aspire's own customers, the survey leans toward small brands and nano creators, and the report ends with a pitch for Aspire's products.