What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which brands partner with individuals who have built audiences on social media or digital platforms, leveraging those individuals' reach and credibility to promote products, services, or brand awareness to their followers.
It emerged as a formalised marketing discipline in the mid-2010s as social media platforms grew to significant scale, though the underlying principle, using trusted voices to recommend products to their audiences, is as old as advertising itself.
How Influencer Marketing Works
In its most common commercial form, influencer marketing involves a brand identifying a creator whose audience overlaps with their target customer, agreeing on a fee and deliverables, and the creator producing content that features or endorses the brand's product or service.
Beyond paid partnerships, influencer marketing also encompasses product gifting (sending product without a fee or posting obligation), affiliate arrangements, long-term ambassador relationships, co-created products, and creator-led brand partnerships.
Influencer Marketing in Europe
European influencer marketing has distinct characteristics from the US model. European audiences are more sceptical of paid influencer content, disclosure requirements are stricter in several markets, and the creator ecosystem skews toward micro-influencers with tighter community relationships rather than mega-influencers with mass reach.
These characteristics make product seeding, the organic gifting model, particularly effective in European markets relative to paid-only approaches.
For D2C brands entering European markets, platforms like Conciergia provide the infrastructure to run product seeding programmes across European creator networks efficiently and at scale.