Influencer marketing
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is paying someone with an audience on social media to put your product in front of it — as a post, a video or a series of stories. Payment can be money, free product, or a share of the sales made through a discount code. Every paid post has to be labelled as advertising, and an unlabelled one breaks EU consumer law.
Example
A small coffee brand pays €500 to someone with 18,000 followers for two posts and three stories carrying a discount code. The stories reach 6,200 accounts, the posts 9,400. Forty-one orders come through the code at an average of €32: €1,312 of turnover and €12.20 of cost per order.
A second creator with 140,000 followers asks €2,000. The posts reach 31,000 accounts and the code produces 35 orders, or €57.14 each. The larger audience was not the larger result. What mattered was how closely that audience resembled the buyer, not how many people were in it.
The discount code is what makes this readable at all. Without one the report collapses into impressions and likes, and neither converts into turnover.
Why it matters for a business
An influencer sells trust, not media space. So the result depends on three things: how closely the audience matches your buyer, how many other brands in your category that person has promoted this quarter, and whether the post reads as their own content rather than a script read aloud. Smaller accounts often produce a lower cost per order precisely because their audience is narrow and pays attention — the same logic as native advertising.
The legal part is short and not optional. A paid post is advertising and has to be labelled as such, with the platform’s paid partnership tag and in words a reader can see. Under EU consumer rules the advertiser carries responsibility alongside the creator, and paying in free product is still paying.
What to ask
- How will the result be measured — a unique discount code, a dedicated landing page with campaign parameters, or both?
- What does the audience actually look like: how much of it is in our country and in the right age group?
- How many posts, over what period, and may we run them as ads afterwards, for how long?
- Who applies the disclosure, and in what words?
- What happens if the creator ends up in a scandal — is there a clause to stop?
Selection, terms and measurement sit inside social media management.