The past year was nothing short of transformative for the influencer marketing community. As consumers experienced more ad fatigue, brands started pivoting to build partnerships that had substance and authenticity.
I noticed a lot of influencer partnerships where brands let influencers take charge of creative direction to better appeal to their target audience. I’ve even been targeted for multiple Instagram Partnership ads, where brands serve ads from an influencer’s handle for better credibility. These are a part of an overarching influencer marketing trend shaped by trust and community as the new currency.
In this post, I explore some of the top influencer marketing trends that will take over the landscape in 2026. Let’s take a look.
If 2025 was the year of authenticity, 2026 is the year of substance. It’s not just about being honest and authentic, but about having something relevant and useful to say that comes from a genuine place.
Don’t get me wrong – people still love authenticity. But in 2026, influencers are expected to offer something more…as opposed to just being their authentic selves. And I’m not just talking about niche. There has to be something more substantial, more original that makes their content worthwhile.
If someone creates content about food, for instance, they should be able to share something useful – whether it’s a unique recipe or an interesting trick – to keep their audiences engaged.
For instance, Jeremy Jacobwitz aka Brunch Boys regularly shares his unique restaurant finds with authentic reviews that keep his viewers hooked. He doesn’t just tell people where to eat but what to eat and why, which gives them a reason to trust his content.
On top of this, the influencer uses his platform to share his political beliefs and stand up for social causes. This is key to retaining a loyal and engaged fan base because 87% of consumers expect influencers to speak out about causes that align with their values.
And the top quality that people look for in an influencer? Whether they’re aligned with their personal values.
The growing preference for substance also explains the shift from macro and celebrity influencers to micro-creators and niche communities. People are placing their trust in smaller creators who talk about things that matter to them vs. a random influencer who shares experiences they can’t even relate to.
As you can expect, the thirst for substance is creating a shift in the types of influencer content that resonates.
The days of vague and curated product positioning photos are officially over. Now people base their purchase inspiration on get-ready-with-me’s, honest reviews, and in-depth demos – content that actually tells them what makes a product good or how it works. They want a more substantial reason to buy something other than simply seeing it on the table in an influencer’s photo.
For brands, this means 2026 is a year for brainstorming ideas that provide value and authentically connect with audiences.
On that note, brands are tapping into the creativity of influencers to produce content that resonates with audiences. Instead of simply leveraging influencers as models or ambassadors, brands are working with them as co-creators and co-publishers.
That’s why you can now see so many Instagram Collab posts because influencers are publishing content with brands instead of on their behalf.
They’re letting influencers tell stories around products and take charge of how those stories are told. So it’s no longer just their influence or authority that brands are leveraging. Instead, they’re involving them through various stages of the content creation process – whether it’s brainstorming ideas or letting them capture footage to use for their campaigns.
For instance, FUJIFILM worked with the Life on Film Instagram page to tell a fun, heartwarming story through the lens of a FUJIFILM QuickSnap camera. The page asked two strangers to go on a blind date and capture their experience using the QuickSnap camera. What unfolded was a visual story that left audiences enthralled and asking for a follow-up, generating over 2.3 million views and thousands of comments.
The Life on Film page has already earned a name for their unique approach to capturing people’s authentic moments on film, amassing 1.7 million followers on Instagram. By working with the page, FUJIFILM handed over the reins of storytelling to regular people, not professional photographers.
And the page succeeded in positioning the camera as a tool to capture real human experiences on film.
AI influencers aren’t going away anytime soon. But they’re not going to replace human influencers, either.
These influencers boast significantly faster content production and lower costs. So it’s only natural that brands are going to be interested because this only adds to their bottom line. And who wouldn’t want to scale content production while saving money at the same time?
Yet studies indicate that consumers aren’t sold on the idea of watching AI influencers promote products. The fact that human creators see a 2.7x higher engagement than AI personas says a lot.
Additionally, The Influencer Marketing Factory found that 51.4% of respondents aren’t interested in virtual influencers, while 24.5% prefer real influencers.
And frankly speaking, I don’t blame them because a human influencer can speak from real experience, making them more relatable and trustworthy. I’d sooner trust a human influencer talking about a face cream that healed their breakouts than a virtual influencer talking about the same product.
So even if people find it fun and interesting to engage with virtual influencers, they may not necessarily be their go-to persona for purchase inspiration.
That’s not to discount the fact that AI makes it incredibly easy to produce content faster. From captions and voiceovers to ideas and scripts, AI can help creators scale their production efforts and speed things up. That’s why there’s a growing influencer marketing trend of using AI to scale production.
Again, you have to carefully navigate the use of AI in content creation because many consumers have developed an aversion to AI-generated content. So rather than fully relying on AI to generate everything from scratch, you need to use it as a tool to help you in certain areas.
Some best practices for AI-generated content include generating rough ideas, fleshing out existing ideas, transcribing video/interview scripts, enhancing captions, auto-generating captions, and more.
If all this talk of virtual influencers isn’t obvious enough: AI has a hold on influencer marketing. And in 2026, that hold isn’t going to loosen up, especially because marketers are seeing their campaign outcomes improve with the help of AI.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025 found that over 66% of marketers improved their results using AI.
With the speed and precision offered by AI, brands and agencies are embracing the trend of using it to automate certain aspects of their influencer marketing. More specifically, the trend involves letting AI fine-tune your influencer search so it can match you to the right talent more quickly and accurately. Over 60% of marketers in the report are actively using AI for identifying influencers and optimizing their campaigns.
And platforms like Influencity are fueling this trend with an AI Assistant that lets you run AI-powered influencer searches at scale.
You can use the assistant to set search filters and get really specific with your prompt. For example, you can ask it to find influencers wearing a specific brand of clothes on a specific platform and generated a certain number of engagements.
This saves you time and trouble as you don’t have to repeatedly narrow your search by running it through multiple filters. You just have to describe what you’re looking for, and the tool will automatically apply the filters for you.
Influencity even lets you compare profiles and instantly find lookalike creators, so you can find matches that align with your budget. The AI-powered analytics will analyze their followers for quality, making it easy to exclude fake influencers or find influencers with a low audience match rate.
In other words, you can use AI to get really specific with your influencer search – all without spending hours on it.
One of the areas where we can expect to see significant improvements in AI technology is predictive analytics. This was the top demand among marketers in the 2025 Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report, with almost 20% expressing their desire for better predictive analytics.
As the influencer marketing landscape grows more saturated, people are becoming less responsive to influencer-generated content. That means it’s going to get harder for brands to generate ROI.
This makes it more important than ever to execute campaigns that deliver results. Brands will need to ensure that whatever they invest into their influencer campaigns ultimately yields returns. Wasted spend is going to seem much more wasteful when you want to make every single dollar count.
So 2026 will see agencies leveraging predictive AI tools to forecast campaign performance, especially with influencer marketing tools getting better at their forecasting capability. And with better forecasting comes the ability to adjust campaign setup ahead of time.
You’ll be able to test the outcomes of different influencer mixes, which gives you plenty of opportunity to experiment without risking your budget.
Platforms like Influencity offers robust predictive analytics tools that let you predict campaign ROI with various influencer combinations. You can add influencers to an estimate and predict their performance in terms of views and interactions. It’ll also estimate their pricing, which helps you forecast your campaign spend.
And you’ll be able to predict how much value your campaign can generate in comparison to your budget. This effective ROI prediction gives you the foresight to experiment with different influencer lineups to see what drives the most impact.
In line with the above trend, there’s also a shift in how brands are measuring the impact of their influencer campaigns. Previously, vanity metrics like views and impressions were used for measuring the performance of influencer content. If a post got tons of views and attracted plenty of likes, it counted as a job well done.
But now that brands are getting more meticulous with their influencer marketing budgets, these metrics alone are no longer enough. They want to make sure that influencers are delivering real business outcomes and that their campaigns have a real impact on their bottom line.
As such, campaign measurement has transformed to prioritize accountability. Instead of just likes and impressions, brands are looking at metrics like earned media value (EMV) and cost per impression (CPE) to get a more accurate understanding of ROI.
They want to be able to see how much value they’re getting out of an influencer in comparison to how much they’re spending on them.
That’s also why they’ve adopted more accurate performance tracking solutions like UTM links and discount codes. These allow them to track the actual sales that an influencer has generated as opposed to just the views and likes. So they’ll be able to see how each influencer is contributing to real business outcomes instead of simply “going viral” on social media.
To coincide with this shift, there’s also been a change in how brands pay influencers, with a growing adoption of performance-based payments.
Compensation models have shifted from flat-fee structures to commission-based payment and tiered payment structures. These models ensure that influencers get paid based on their actual contribution to the campaign – whether it’s a percentage of the sales they generated or a bonus after hitting a certain milestone.
That’s also why there’s a greater reliance on data to inform influencer negotiations, with brands justifying rate adjustments based on influencer performance data.
2026 is going to be the year that data shapes every aspect of influencer marketing – from how you choose influencers to how you negotiate with them. As the market grows more saturated, data becomes even more indispensable as it reveals the strategies that actually deliver results.
Get inspired by these influencer marketing trends to build campaigns that add to your bottom line.