Influencer marketing will become a $1b industry in Australia this year
Sharyn Smith, founder and CEO of Social Soup, explains that influencer marketing has truly gone mainstream, with Australian brands set to spend over $1b in the sector this year. Here’s how to get involved if you aren’t yet part of that billion-dollar spend.
Sharyn Smith - author
Influencer advertising is now the second-fastest-growing digital vertical in the country, behind only online retail.
Meltwater and We Are Social’s Digital 2026 report found Australian brands spent A$830m on influencer marketing over the past twelve months: a 13.5% year-on-year increase. For those of us who’ve spent years making the case that influence deserves a permanent seat at the media table, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for.
Influence is finally getting its flowers, but while the budgets have arrived, so have new challenges for CMOs.
The number of companies offering influencer marketing services globally – according to Influencer Marketing Hub – has grown from around 1,100 in 2019 to nearly 7,000 in 2025. Many of those new entrants bring fresh thinking, technology and expertise, which is certainly healthy for the category.
The more interesting question is what all this activity means for the CMOs and marketing leaders now trying to figure out where influence fits in their media mix, and how to get it right.
Spending money on influence and actually building influence are completely different activities. One is a media buy, the other is a long-term strategic commitment that compounds over time. And as the category matures at pace, the distance between those two approaches is becoming more consequential.
Seventy-four per cent of brands are moving budget into creator programs this year, according to impact.com’s latest benchmarking, and CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Marketing 2025-26 report found that nearly two-thirds of that new spend is being reallocated from traditional paid and digital channels.
That’s a serious shift, and for the most part it’s a smart one: the evidence for influence as a performance channel is now overwhelming. But over eighteen years of working in the space, there’s a pattern: the temptation to prioritise speed over strategy.
When pressure builds to get into market fast, brands tend to over-index on reach at the expense of relevance. They book a handful of high-profile creators, run a burst campaign, measure impressions and move on. It produces activity, but it rarely produces the compounding returns that make influence so commercially powerful over time.
In a market where the choice of partners, platforms and approaches has never been wider, it’s worth taking a breath and thinking about what actually drives results before the budget hits the table.
Kylie Jenner is one of the most successful social influencers in the world
Here’s how to play it right in 2026
Think in layers
The strongest influence strategies operate across multiple tiers simultaneously to create a real, breathing community around your brand: macro creators for cultural visibility, mid-tier for high-quality conversion content that performs organically and through paid amplification, and micro and nano creators embedded in real communities who act as your on-ground brand advocates.
Micro and nano creators (everyday brand fans) make up the vast majority of Australia’s creator landscape and consistently deliver the highest engagement rates. One well-known face can generate a spike of awareness, but a hundred creators build a community. Communities are what shift purchasing behaviour.
Think long-term
Some of our most successful programs have seen the same creators partnered with a brand for five, six, even eight years. Over that time, some of those partnerships have seen engagement rates climb from 3% to 10% – numbers that would be extraordinary for any channel. That kind of performance comes from creators who genuinely know and use the product, whose audiences have watched that relationship develop over years, and whose advocacy carries the weight of real consistency.
Influence, done well, doesn’t wear out. It wears in. The brands investing in always-on creator ecosystems rather than seasonal bursts are the ones seeing that compound effect.
Think connected
This is where the biggest opportunity sits and where most brands are leaving the most value on the table. When PR, social, search, influence and ecommerce teams all reinforce the same narrative, you build the kind of consistency that human audiences and AI systems reward.
When influence operates in a silo, disconnected from the broader brand story, you lose that multiplier effect. You also lose the joined-up strategy that allows the content to be optimised for other channels and deliver even greater ROI.
That connectedness also matters more now than ever, and the reason is AI. The conversation about artificial intelligence in influencer marketing has mostly focused on synthetic influencers and automated content; which, for the record, nearly half of consumers say they’re uncomfortable with. The more consequential shift is happening underneath that headline.
Our data shows 72% of Australians now use AI assistants when shopping online including turning to LLMs for their research and discovery. These systems pay attention to how real communities talk about your brand: in reviews, in forums, in social posts or creator content. They’re looking for pattern, consistency, volume and sentiment across authentic sources. That’s what shapes whether your brand gets recommended or overlooked.
Bain and Company have indicated 60% of searches now end without a click. The discovery layer has fundamentally changed, and influence is one of the most powerful levers brands have to shape how they show up in it.
This is why we’re seeing budgets that used to sit squarely in SEO shifting into creator ecosystems, and why the old model of running a seasonal campaign and then going dark for six months works against you.
In an always-on AI environment, dark periods become gaps in the signal that these systems use to build their understanding of your brand.
Extreme branding, with Aussie influencer Tammy Hembrow
The Australian market is forecast to pass A$1 billion in creator ad expenditure this year, with projections reaching A$2.46 billion by 2030. That growth is exciting, and it’s warranted. Influence has earned its place in the media mix. The opportunity for brands entering the space now – or scaling their investment – is enormous.
Match the ambition of the spend with the rigour of the strategy. Layer your creator ecosystems, commit to partnerships that have time to compound, connect your influence program to the rest of your marketing so it reinforces one narrative, and measure what matters: the commercial outcomes that justify the investment.
After eighteen years in this industry, the thing that keeps coming back is that influence – real influence – creates a community around your brand. This community isn’t your social channel, it’s the collection of people that are talking about you in the market which matters a whole lot more than what you are saying about yourself.
Communities are built on trust between real people. They are always on, and they compound over time. That’s exactly what makes influence worth doing properly.
Related Content
SUBSCRIBE
Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.
So what experience or credentials does one need to be an ‘influencer’ and how do you become one? I hope they all have a back-up plan when things start to go ‘south’!