Straight answer: the influencer type that works best for you depends on your budget, your sales cycle, and whether you need awareness or trackable sales, not on whichever category the last LinkedIn post told you was “having a moment.” Nano and micro-influencers win on trust and cost per follower. Macro and celebrity partnerships win on reach and, in the right hands, on actual conversions. Most brands pick the wrong one because they copy a competitor instead of matching the type to the outcome they need.
I’ve been on both sides of this. I built my own following back when “influencer” wasn’t even the word we used for it, ended up Forbes-listed for it, and then spent the last decade running campaigns for other people’s brands. I’ve seen the invoices, the promo code reports, and the awkward client calls where someone has to explain why 40,000 likes produced eleven sales. So let’s go through the types, with real numbers, not vibes.
The five real categories, and what they cost
Forget the marketing-speak version of this. Here’s what each tier looks like in 2026, in the UK and US markets I work in most.
- Nano-influencers (1,000 to 10,000 followers): engagement rates of 5 to 8 percent are normal. Fees run from free product to £50 to £200 per post. Best for hyper-local businesses, niche communities, and building a wall of social proof cheaply.
- Micro-influencers (10,000 to 100,000): engagement drops to 3 to 5 percent but reach jumps. Fees range £150 to £1,500 per post depending on niche (finance and B2B tech sit at the top, lifestyle and fashion often lower). This is the tier most agencies push because it’s the easiest to scale into a “programme.”
- Macro-influencers (100,000 to 1 million): engagement typically falls to 1 to 2 percent, but you’re buying reach and a bit of borrowed authority. Fees sit anywhere from £1,500 to £15,000 per post, more for video-heavy platforms.
- Celebrity or mega-influencers (1 million plus): engagement can be under 1 percent, but the halo effect and press pickup can be worth it for a launch moment. Fees start around £15,000 and go well past £500,000 for genuine A-listers.
- Creators and employee/founder voices: not always “influencers” in the traditional sense, this includes LinkedIn creators, YouTube reviewers, and UGC-only content creators who make video for a licence fee rather than posting it themselves. This category has grown the fastest of any of them since 2023, largely because brands got tired of paying for reach they couldn’t verify.
The story that changed how I think about all of this
A few years back I ran an influencer campaign for a UK fintech client, a budgeting app, not a crypto product, on a fairly typical mid-size budget. We booked forty micro-influencers on Instagram, mostly in the 20,000 to 60,000 follower range, paid an average of £300 each including gifted premium subscriptions. The content was lovely. Average engagement rate across the group came in at 2.3 percent, which agencies would call a win. When we pulled the promo code data at the end of the month, those forty posts had generated eleven trackable sign-ups. Total.
The same client then paid one YouTuber, a personal finance reviewer with about 180,000 subscribers, £4,000 for a single dedicated video with a mid-roll call to action and a proper explanation of what the app did. That one video produced 340 sign-ups in three weeks. Same product, same offer, wildly different result, because the format let the creator explain the value instead of just holding a phone up in a nice kitchen.
That’s the uncomfortable bit nobody in this industry likes to say out loud: engagement rate is not the same thing as buying intent, and a lot of the “engaged” audience on micro-influencer posts is other micro-influencers, engagement pods, and people who follow accounts purely to be followed back. Nobody audits this because most agencies get paid on the number of creators booked, not on what those creators sold. If you’re spending real money, ask for tracked links or unique codes on every single post, every time, no exceptions. If an agency resists that, that tells you something.
Matching the type to your actual goal
Before you pick a tier, answer these four questions honestly.
1. What’s your sales cycle?
Impulse purchases under about £50 (skincare, snacks, fashion) do well with nano and micro because the follower trusts the recommendation enough to buy on the spot. Anything with a longer consideration window, software, financial products, B2B services, needs a creator who can explain the thing, which usually means a mid-tier YouTube or LinkedIn creator over a quick Instagram Reel.
2. What’s your budget, honestly?
Under £2,000 a month: go nano and micro, run five to ten creators at once, and treat it as testing, not scaling. £2,000 to £10,000: one or two well-chosen macro creators will usually outperform a scattergun of twenty micros, because you get one strong piece of content instead of twenty mediocre ones. Above £10,000: you can afford to mix a macro or celebrity moment for awareness with an always-on layer of micro and nano for ongoing trust and search visibility, since Google and TikTok both increasingly surface creator content in results.
3. Where does your audience live?
This sounds obvious and gets skipped constantly. I’ve had clients insist on Instagram because that’s where they personally scroll, while their actual buyers were on TikTok or YouTube. Before you book anyone, pull real data on where your audience spends time and what they engage with, not where your marketing team happens to hang out. If you haven’t done that homework, it’s worth reading up on what an audience insight tool shows you, because guessing here wastes more budget than any influencer fee.
4. Do you need reach or do you need trust?
Launching a new product to a cold audience needs reach, so lean macro or celebrity. Defending market share against a cheaper competitor needs trust, so lean nano and micro, because that’s where the “I use this every day” content lives.
TikTok changes the maths again
TikTok deserves its own paragraph because the engagement and cost dynamics don’t map neatly onto the Instagram model above. A TikTok creator with 50,000 followers can outperform an Instagram macro with 500,000, purely because of how aggressively the algorithm pushes video that performs in the first few hours. I’ve watched a client’s £600 TikTok creator spend outperform a £6,000 Instagram macro booking in the same month, on the same product. If you’re weighing TikTok specifically, it’s worth reading through how to choose a TikTok growth tool or service that works before you commit spend, because the platform punishes lazy targeting harder than most.
Employee and founder-led content: the category most brands underuse
This is the one I’d push hardest for B2B businesses specifically. A founder or a senior team member posting useful content on LinkedIn will, in most cases I’ve seen, outperform a paid influencer partnership for lead quality, because the audience already half-trusts the brand and just needs the human face attached to it. It costs nothing but time and a bit of discomfort on camera. I talked through exactly this shift, from paid reach to founder-led trust, on the Marketing Leadership Podcast, and it’s still the piece of advice I give most often to B2B clients who assume influencer marketing means Instagram and nothing else.
Where agencies help and where they don’t
There are now thousands of influencer marketing agencies operating globally, and the honest truth is most of them are optimised to book volume, not to protect your budget. If you’re going to use one, ask three things before you sign anything: how they verify follower authenticity, whether they track conversions per creator rather than just reach and impressions, and whether they get paid a flat fee or a percentage of your media spend, because the second one gives them an incentive to spend more of your money than you need to. I go into the full landscape, including how many influencer marketing agencies operate globally and what that means for pricing pressure, in a separate piece if you want the fuller picture before hiring one.
My actual recommendation, tier by tier
- Local business, restaurant, salon, gym: nano-influencers, always, paid in product or a small fee, five to ten per quarter.
- E-commerce brand under £5m revenue: a mix of nano and micro, run as an always-on programme, tracked with unique codes, reviewed monthly and cut ruthlessly if a creator’s codes aren’t converting.
- B2B software or services: founder-led LinkedIn content first, one or two YouTube or podcast creator partnerships second, traditional Instagram influencers rarely worth the spend.
- National consumer brand launching something new: one macro or celebrity moment for the launch week, backed by a wave of micro and nano content that started two weeks earlier to build search and social proof before the big name posts.
I talked about a version of this journey, going from being the influencer to building the strategy behind other people’s campaigns, on the OneShot Podcast, and separately about where marketing and sales are heading together on the UNmiss Podcast, if you want the longer version of how I got to these opinions rather than just the summary version here.
The bit I’d tell you over coffee
If you only take one thing from this: stop picking a tier because it’s fashionable and start picking it because it matches how your customer buys. A £30 impulse product and a £3,000 B2B contract should never be marketed through the same influencer type, yet I see it happen constantly, usually because someone in the business saw a competitor’s TikTok and panicked. Run a small test, track it with codes or links, and let the numbers tell you which tier earns a bigger budget next quarter. That’s the whole strategy, really. Everything else is decoration.
Frequently asked questions
Do micro-influencers convert better than macro-influencers?
Not automatically. Micro-influencers usually show higher engagement rates, often 3 to 5 percent versus 1 to 2 percent for macro accounts, but engagement isn’t the same as sales. For considered purchases, one well-briefed macro or mid-tier YouTube creator with a proper explanation and call to action can outsell twenty micro posts combined, as happened in the fintech example above.
How much should a small business budget for influencer marketing?
Start with £500 to £2,000 a month and treat it purely as a test, running five to ten nano or micro-influencers with tracked codes on every post. Only scale the budget once you can point to a specific tier and creator type that’s producing sales, not just likes.
Is TikTok or Instagram better for influencer marketing in 2026?
It depends on product and audience age, but TikTok’s algorithm often gives smaller creators disproportionate reach compared with Instagram, which increasingly favours accounts that already have large followings. For younger audiences and impulse products, TikTok creators frequently outperform Instagram macro-influencers at a fraction of the cost.
Should I use one type of influencer or mix several?
Mix them when your budget allows it. A common working pattern is an always-on layer of nano and micro-influencers for ongoing trust and search visibility, topped up with a single macro or celebrity moment around a launch or seasonal push, timed a couple of weeks after the smaller creators start posting to build momentum first.
