For the past decade, “influencer marketing” has been a buzzword we just can’t seem to shake. What seemed like potentially a flash in the pan is now a full-blown marketing strategy, and creating content as an influencer is now a dream career for nearly 60% of Gen Z.
Lucky for the youths, there appears to be no slowing down this train. In 2016, influencer marketing was a $1.7 billion industry. In 2024, not only has the term “influencer marketing” reached peak interest according to Google Trends, this market has beefed up to a hefty $24 billion with more gas left in the tank than you can imagine.
It’s a tactic that has its talons in a wide variety of businesses across DTC and B2B markets, which means it has massive appeal to pretty much any marketer. In 2025, it’s expected that influencer marketing spend will grow 14.2% YoY, outpacing both social and digital ads.
For brands that haven’t dipped a toe in the influencer waters yet, this might be the year to seriously start considering this flavor of marketing, truly assessing if it’s a fit for you, and planning a path toward making connections and getting your goods in the hands of the internet’s most viral personalities.
User-Generated Content vs. Influencer Marketing
First things first, let’s define influencer marketing and how it compares with user-generated content (UGC) marketing. It’s easy to assume these are the same tactic. After all, these strategies share similar purposes, vocabulary, and (many times) the same content creators. But despite the likenesses, there are some key differences to remember.
What Is Influencer Marketing
With this strategy, a company connects with social media personalities that have a large-ish number of online followers. Influencers can range from micro-influencers with a few thousand followers to macro-influencers with follower counts in the millions.
The company will ask the influencer to use, review, or promote a product or service to their followers on their own social media accounts — not the company’s. Influencers typically have a larger following than the average Joe on Instagram, and it’s because they consistently create content that uniquely connects with their niche audience. They have the power to change minds, influence attitudes, and even build buzz around a brand because of the trust they’ve earned.
In 2023, 83% of Gen Z and 80% of millennials reported having at least some trust in recommendations made by social media influencers, with a third of each generation having complete trust in those they follow. (Comparatively, in the US, just 11% of Gen Z trust the brands themselves. Yeesh.)
Brands typically turn to influencers when they want to gain traction or awareness with a personality’s niche audience.
Check out this example of a influencer Alexa Anglin hyping up Storyworth.
What Is User-generated Content Marketing
Unlike with influencer marketing, creators for UGC are more like “the social media equivalent of paid actors or models in commercials.” Instead of hiring a famous (and expensive) celebrity to star in a social ad, companies may turn to more relatable people to promote their product or service.
Also, unlike influencer marketing, the brand typically then owns user-generated content and shares it on the brand’s channels — not the creator’s. UGC can be used in sponsored ads, across a brand’s website, marketing assets, and more.
You may be wondering, “Why would anyone not want a celebrity in their ads??” The creators in UGC are generally just “regular people.” They’re relatable, authentic, and deliver reviews of products in a “I wasn’t paid to say this” kind of way.
When choosing UGC as your go-to strategy, your marketing budget is going toward the content and using it as you wish. When choosing influencers, your budget is paying for access and exposure to a specific audience.
Check out Opopop's branded content featuring content created by just a regular Joe.
What Kinds of Businesses Use Influencer Marketing? (And Is It Right for Mine?)
If you’ve been mindlessly scrolling your social feeds these days, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to videos of people putting on makeup. Sometimes it’s a person telling a story while you “get ready with them” in the thick of their makeup routine. Other times the video is a how-to for bringing a certain looq to life. Other times, these videos are obvious endorsements for a specific brand in a viral unboxing.
Beauty videos, alongside fashion, travel, and wellness content, are some of the most prevalent examples of influencer marketing today. You might be thinking that if your biz isn’t in one of those categories, influencer marketing isn’t for you.
Wrong.
Influencer marketing is unique because it’s not just for one vertical or market. This is because, well, the internet is full of users who are interested in practically anything you can think of. And where there’s a niche, there’s an influencer.
So whether you’re running a company that sells coaching services or meditation lessons or sock puppets, you can rest assured there’s an influencer out there who’s already deeply connected with your ideal customers.
Instead of wondering if influencer marketing is the right fit for your product category as a whole, think closer to home. Don’t wonder if it’s a tactic for every brand in your industry, but instead ask questions relevant to your own brand:
- What do I hope to achieve with influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing, regardless of the influencer’s platform and audience size, is a surefire way to generate awareness and affinity for your brand among a specific crowd. If those are some of your top goals for 2025, it’s worth the investment.
- Is this influencer aligned with my brand’s mission and values?
Creating partnerships with influencers that aren’t aligned with your brand’s values could cause some serious whiplash for existing and new customers alike, as well as the influencer’s audience.
While this marketing strategy is popping up left, right, and center, it’s not a good idea to just pick any influencer in your space that fits the audience you’re trying to reach.
Make sure to do your homework and ensure the influencer you want to work with matches your mission so everything’s copacetic between your website and this influencer’s profile.
- What does your relationship with an influencer look like?
Do you want to send them products to hype up and let them have full creative control, or do you want to have more say in their content? If yes to the latter, are you prepared for the back-and-forth, the briefs, the feedback and revisions? If yes to the former, are you OK not having 100% of the output? It’s best to find an influencer who is willing to work with your preferred processes instead of risking butting heads later on.
- Do you want to build connections on your own or do you want to outsource to an agency?
Similar to the rise of full-time content creators over the past decade, there’s been a similar rise in platforms and services made specifically for sourcing talent and managing relationships.
You can invest in things like agencies that will source and plan influencer campaigns for you like Whalar, platforms that help brands connect with influencers and manage that relationship like Grin, or tap social media agencies that specialize in influencer marketing like Movers + Shakers.
Don’t sleep on influencer marketing just because you haven’t seen a ton of content in your specific vertical. While you may be in a market less inundated with influencers than beauty products or luxury tourism, your dream customers are on social media waiting to hear about you. Now you just need to get your products in front of them.
How to Gift Influencers Your Stuff in 2025
More than 60% of B2B leaders plan on investing more in influencer content in the year ahead, while 57.6% of brands already working with influencers run DTC ecommerce stores. While this may seem like the room is getting kind of crowded and there might not be many influencers left, don’t worry. There are plenty people to pick from.
A quarter of marketers report spending more than 40% of their marketing budget on this single strategy. If you’re just getting started in the influencer marketing game, odds are good you don’t have that kind of coin to toss at an unproven tactic.
And while working with creative agencies and influencer platforms ensures seamless communication, secure payments, and campaign reporting, those can quickly eat up a modest just-getting-started budget fast. The good news is that many successful relationships between brands and content creators take off from some simple outreach and thoughtful influencer gifting.
Do influencers even want gifts?
Sure, the industry has taken off tremendously, but that doesn’t mean influencers are totally out-of-reach. Nothing can squelch your marketing goals faster than assuming an influencer is too big or too cool or too busy to work with your brand, keeping you from ever reaching out.
If your brand or products seem 100% aligned with some influencers you’ve selected, slide into their DMs and start the conversation. Take the time to research the person you’re messaging and kick off the connection by getting to know each other — do not dive in headfirst with a heavy pitch.
Don’t overthink your brand-influencer relationship. Instead, take these tips:
- Be yourself! Influencers want to work with brands that have shared values, and the best way to express those values is just being genuine in your interactions.
- Be transparent with your payment structure or timeline. If you’re looking for a free review of your products, tell influencers up front instead of clouding that fact. On the other hand, if you have a bit of budget to offer in addition to gifted product or an affiliate link deal, let them know how much that is and exactly when they could expect to receive any payment.
- Give the influencer full creative control or, at the very least, include them in every step of the creative process from brainstorming to published post. Influencers want to create content that’s genuine and resonates with their followers. If they publish something that doesn’t sound quite like them or is overly promotional, they could erode trust and turn off a good chunk of their audience.
- Consider approaching someone about a long-term campaign versus a one-off post. Roughly half of influencers prefer this model and say it’s their favorite way to partner with brands. Plus, it’s a great way for your brand to build trust and rapport, making it easy to work together in the future.
- If you’re really unsure, spend some serious time on social media and find influencers who are already organically using your products or services, whether with your brand or even a competitor. If they aren’t clearly in a sponsored relationship with competing products, take the leap and reach out with your goods as the great alternative for them to try and review.
Now that we have the basics out of the way, what about sending them a gift? As long as influencers trust a brand, truly think it’s a quality product, and the value of the gift is high, 93% of influencers are willing to work with a brand in exchange for free products. (So, don’t send out your $5.99 nail clipper to influencers and expect them to put in the hours it takes to write, film, edit, and publish content about it. That ain’t gonna happen.)
According to Business of Fashion, global authority on the fashion and beauty industry, “today, creators are more open to gifts as a way to start a relationship with a brand; they can make up the income from affiliate revenue.”
TL;DR: Go on and send some gifts!
Sending Influencers Gifts Without Being Weird
Now that we’ve established that striking up a relationship with an influencer is extremely possible if you do your research and stay chill, it’s time to check out ways to actually get them your very cool stuff.
Asking for an address can feel like crossing a boundary. And if the vibes are off when you do it, that could be enough to bust up the bond you’ve been making altogether. And it makes sense — it would have to be a very special circumstance for most to willingly dole out their address to strangers online. Even if they use a P.O. Box, they don’t want nefarious goods to start filling it up.
One way to get around this admittedly awkward step in the process is to add a gifting platform to your tech stack.
An online gifting platform like Zest is built to help brands grow gifting as a sales channel directly from their website.
For example, if the CEO of a company wants to give your products to all of their employees as a holiday gift, the process typically involves a lengthy back-and-forth email chain, scrounging for addresses, and brands painstakingly processing each gift order manually. With Zest on their site, though, that same CEO could go to their gifting storefront and send 200 gifts as quickly as buying one item for themselves.
Safe Gifting via Link, Email, or Text
Zest is also made with modern digital-first shoppers in mind as its tech enables people to send gifts to one or tons of people via a link, email, or text message — no addresses required.
Just as swiftly as a shopper can come to your store and send hundreds of gifts using a link, your marketing team can also gift influencers.
By sending a gift via a secure link in an influencer’s DM, you’re giving them a safe way to enter their address for their gift instead of making them just send over that sensitive info in a message. Here’s how it works:
Step 1. Choose which of your products you want to gift and have featured in some sweet, sweet influencer content.
Head to your Zest storefront, whether it’s your main public one or a private storefront you’ve set up just for influencer gifting, and pick out which product/s you want to send.
Maybe you want to hype up your best-seller or give some love to more overlooked items. For example, Freja New York gifted a free tote to an influencer in a color that hadn’t been a best-seller. After the influencer accepted the gift and used the tote in a TikTok video, sales for that shade spiked.
Pssst! Setting up a private storefront just for influencer gifting also means you get to set custom prices for shipping and products. This means you can get into your influencer store and send gifts on the fly without paying in the moment.
Step 2. Select “send as an e-gift” as your delivery method.
E-gifting ensures you can send gifts instantly and automatically share tracking info with your influencer along the way. Plus, when a recipient clicks their gift link and opens up their present, they have the option to select the variant of that product or even swap for another item. This is perfect for products that would require an influencer to choose a size or preferred color.
Step 3. Customize the digital unboxing.
With Zest, e-gifts come complete with customizable gift note copy, card design, and even digital gift wrap. We recommend writing a sincere gift note to accompany a digital unwrapping that’s customized to the influencer.
Step 4. Add your recipients.
If you’re sending gifts to one or a few influencers, we recommend simply adding their names manually. If you’re going to be sending to hundreds of influencers, then uploading a CSV containing their names is going to be the fastest way to get this done. Then, ensure you select “link” from your options in the Contact Info column.
Step 5. Review, check out, and send your gift link!
Lastly, check out! Buy and track these expenses on your company card so you know exactly how much product you’re sending each month and gauge the ROI. Or, if you’re buying from your private storefront for influencer gifting, just check back in your Orders tab and filter by storefront to see how much has been spent.
Once your gifts have been picked and links are created, send that link off to your influencer! They’ll click, unwrap, and accept their gift all while adding their own best shipping address in a secure, delightful, and non-sketchy way.
Kickstart Your Influencer Connections Through Easy Gifting in 2025
Influencer marketing is one strategy not about to go anywhere. Its global rise means the creator economy is strong, more consumers count on creators for trusted recommendations, and more companies than ever have plans to invest more in this move in the year ahead.
Be yourself, be transparent with your processes, and carefully select a curated group of influencers to start sending gifts. Start slowly, understanding which influencers are great to work with or what kinds of audiences react best to your products.
Relationships that grow with time will undoubtedly result in the most authentic content — and the biggest spikes in sales for gifts getting reviewed or making cameos in an influencer’s daily posts. Over time, what starts as just a gift could grow into fruitful collabs and hot drops. The sky’s truly the limit in this arena.
If you’ve been wondering if influencer marketing is the right move for your brand, gifting is a great way to get started. If you’re already one of the many brands using Zest to grow their gifting channel with B2B and DTC customers, just start shopping your own storefronts and send gifts in just a few clicks.
Influencer marketing is a huge opportunity for brands that get it right. An entire new audience of shoppers is waiting for your goods, all you have to do is get gifting.
