2026 Influencer Marketing Trends: Planning & Budgeting Tips

Ongoing & Consistent: The Shift Toward Always-on Creator Collaborations

Influencer marketing campaigns are usually of a limited duration. Isolated, one-off campaigns can be beneficial, particularly to promote a single point-in-time event such as a new product launch or movie premiere. However, ongoing campaigns with consistency across touchpoints can be particularly effective at building brand equity.

When collaborating long-term with brand ambassadors, you can also launch multiple seasonal activations, generating fresh content and engaging further, while reinforcing existing key brand messages.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Kingfluencers worked with BMW on an annual campaign focused on the joy of driving combined with the aspiration to make a positive impact. Collaborating with 6 high-end influencers on Instagram, the campaign generated over 2.9M impressions with engagement of 29K.

2026 Influencer Marketing Trends Planning Tip:
‍Allocate budget for year-round storytelling. Negotiate longer-term contracts with your influencers for sustained collaborations.

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Influencer Marketing as a Strategic Budget Line – Not Just a Nice-To-Have

Influencer marketing is sometimes viewed as a "nice-to-have," a mere outreach channel among many that could be swapped out as budgets are shifted around.

In reality, IM is a strategic lever for boosting discoverability and brand relevance. While it does indeed serve as a channel for social media engagement and PR, viewing it as a mere add-on is outdated.

Knowledgeable influencers can speak for your brand in an authentic and credible way, boosting awareness and visibility, and generating tangible returns. A well-structured IM approach drives authentic exchanges with your target audience, impacting the audience’s knowledge and perception of your brand to drive conversions.

2026 Influencer Marketing Trends Planning Tip:
Think strategically, using IM to not only generate awareness, but also build credibility, deeper engagement, and conversions.

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Influencer Marketing as a Cross-Functional, Strategic Amplifier

Most of us marketers recognize the power of IM, but our colleagues in other departments may not recognize the opportunities and the ways IM can advance their initiatives.

Influencer marketing can serve as a cross-functional, strategic amplifier. Influencers engaging with users can gather feedback – positive and negative – that you can put to good use. While positive reviews and testimonials can help you promote your product, criticisms and feature requests can help drive changes to your product roadmap and service offerings.

Influencer marketing can also play an integral role in events, from product launches to purpose-driven campaigns and everything in between. Finally, IM even has the power to benefit HR. Elevating your reputation as an employer can help you recruit and retain the best talent.

2026 Influencer Marketing Trends Planning Tip:
Engage numerous departments in your organization to support their efforts with IM.

Where to Invest: Platforms & Formats for Influencer Marketing in 2026

Instagram

Instagram, along with TikTok, is still leading the way and releasing new features on a monthly basis. For example, on July 10th, 2025, Instagram began allowing search engines like Google to display public posts on search results pages. This change enables your Instagram content to serve a dual function: it becomes SEO content and is evergreen, meaning it can appear in search results and generate new views long after being published on Instagram.

TikTok

TikTok has traditionally focused more on discovery than community, and creators have said that it’s tough to build long-term relationships. Instagram provides more engagement from followers than TikTok – which TikTok has taken steps to remedy. In July 2025, TikTok released Creator Chat Room, which allows creators to connect and interact directly with eligible followers on TikTok.
With new features emerging frequently, adaptability is key.

YouTube Shorts

With approximately 70 billion views per day worldwide, YouTube Shorts contribute significantly to YouTube’s overall watch time. “Since its launch in 2020, YouTube Shorts has experienced an annual growth rate of 85% in views, indicating sustained viewer interest and increasing content consumption… Over 12 million Shorts are uploaded daily, making it one of the most rapidly expanding video formats.”

Our CCO Gregor Doser, who has been with Google Switzerland for 13 years and was responsible for building up YouTube in Switzerland, states: “YouTube is increasingly evolving from a pure video platform into a comprehensive media ecosystem. It will not only host content but also function as a marketplace, an interactive learning platform, and a community hub. The line between professional content and user-generated content will continue to blur as tools become more accessible to everyone. In addition, YouTube will place an even stronger focus on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to further personalize the user experience and simplify content creation.”

Progressing far beyond a site to post your résumé, LinkedIn is on the rise for B2B influencer marketing. Engagement rates on LinkedIn vary by industry, but most fall between 2% and 6%.

Kingfluencers helped Sunrise Business collaborate with B2B influencers to highlight how their telecom services keep remote workers secure.

Snapchat

With its ephemeral nature, Snapchat is a great fit for pop-up activations and collabs on trend-driven moments. These qualities make Snapchat especially relevant for lifestyle, fashion, and entertainment brands, as well as for reaching Gen Z.

Twitch

Twitch has always been great for games, but it’s also a suitable channel for creator partnerships in e-sports, live streams, and reaction content. Twitch creator streams can be a great fit for beauty, fashion, and food. Kingfluencers produced a campaign to promote OREO in collaboration with Minecraft, which included Lisa Trok streaming on Twitch in a second activation.

Don’t Forget Niche Formats! Podcasts

Long-form audio content continues to grow. The deep-dive storytelling that podcasts enable is particularly beneficial for brands that need to foster a high level of trust, such as B2B, finance, and health.

Pro Juventute is a Swiss non-profit organization dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and young adults. Because around 70% of users of their counseling service are girls and young women, Pro Juventute wanted to better reach boys and young men. Together with Kingfluencers, Pro Juventute launched their own podcast series with the central message, "Self-care is strength – even for boys and men."

The campaign focused on role models perceived as masculine, cool, or honorable, and engaged them in honest conversations about personal topics. The 6 episodes so far have achieved 66K views and 1,300+ likes. One particularly impactful episode with Swiss rapper XEN achieved an average watch time of 11:10.

Web3, Virtual Influencers, & AI-Generated Content

While these areas remain niche, they’re also experiment-worthy. Experimentation may not be the highest priority for your budget, but if you’re able to allocate some additional funds, consider pilot projects in this area. In addition to test-and-learn, you can also run hybrid campaigns, leveraging content assets developed for use on other platforms.

2026 Influencer Marketing Trends Planning Tip:
Stay adaptable. Reserve budget for newly released features and/or keep budget flexible so you can reallocate to take advantage of new opportunities.

Budget Beyond Influencer Campaigns

Allocate budget not only for influencer marketing and content production, but also to boost your stories with initiatives such as for paid amplification, UGC licensing, and community management. Repurposing existing content and leveraging it in new ways enables you to achieve your goals while also saving money.

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Integrated Campaign Planning: Engage Experts Early

Involving experts early in the process enables them to contribute their expertise to the broader scope, optimizing all aspects. This includes aligning messaging, platform choices, creator selection, and timing with the broader marketing plan. And contracting an influencer marketing agency like Kingfluencers doesn’t always significantly increase your total costs. Among the many benefits, an agency can get you better rates with influencers.

"Influencer marketing isn’t just a standalone channel – it’s a strategic force that amplifies your biggest business moments. Whether it’s launching a new product, driving purpose through community engagement, or making seasonal campaigns stick, creators bring not only reach but relevance and resonance. The earlier we’re brought into the planning process, the more impact we can generate across the board." — Sarah Schmid, Head of Marketing, Kingfluencers.

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Build in Flexibility

2026 will continue to be shaped by trends, shifting politics, and new pop culture events, along with emerging technology. Brands should establish their budgets while also keeping room for reactive campaigns, such as creator-led trend hijacking.

Kingfluencers works closely with L'Oréal to identify current social media trends early on and develop appropriate content. This allows L'Oréal products to be showcased in a targeted and trend-oriented manner, keeping the brands relevant and top of mind among the target audience. In 2024, Kingfluencers implemented 201 campaigns with a total of 892 influencers to promote 23 different brands in the L'Oréal Group.

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Don't Just Budget – Plan to Win

Influencer marketing should be baked into your brand’s strategic marketing mix. The earlier you bring in an expert agency, the more we can amplify your full-year impact.

CTA: “Let’s co-create your 2026 strategy – book your free planning call with our team, no strings attached.”