The Big Power of Smaller Creators
- May 22
- 2 min read
Big influencers have their place. So do celebrity partnerships, paid media, PR, email, retail, events, and all the other pieces of the marketing machine. But if your next campaign doesn’t at least consider micro or smaller creators, you’re probably leaving trust on the table.
Not every product needs a famous face. Some products need the right person, talking to the right audience, in a way that feels like it belongs there. That’s where smaller creators get interesting.
Trust Is Getting More Personal
Consumers don’t automatically trust brands because brands say nice things about themselves. Shocking, we know. Nielsen has long found that recommendations from people consumers know are the most trusted form of advertising, with 88% of global respondents saying they trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel. That matters because good influencer work sits closer to word-of-mouth than traditional advertising when it’s done right. Not when it’s over-scripted. Not when the caption sounds like legal wrote it. When it feels like a person actually uses, likes, or understands the product. So no surprise that 61% of consumers trust influencer endorsements more than traditional ads.
Smaller Can Work Harder
Micro-influencers often bring better fit, more engaged audiences, and less “I was paid to hold this smoothie” energy. Influencer Micro-influencers are averaging 7.2% engagement, compared with 2.4% for macro-influencers (and engagement with brand pages on social media is even lower...). This is the part brands should pay attention to. Reach is nice. Relevance is better.
The Big Dogs Still Have a Role
This is not a “fire all the celebrities” take. Big creators can build awareness fast. They can make a campaign feel important. They can help with reach, credibility, visibility, and cultural momentum. But that comes with a significant investment that not all brands can feasibly justify. Smaller creators can often do something different: explain the product, show the use case, build trust with a niche audience, and make the whole thing feel less like an ad.
This approach is especially useful for food and beverage brands, ingredient stories, wellness brands, local and regional campaigns, niche B2B audiences, anything people need to understand before they buy.
Influencers are not a magic button. They are not a strategy by themselves. And they are definitely not a substitute for knowing what you’re trying to say. But they do have a role.
Find the people who already speak to the audience you need. Give them enough direction to be useful and enough freedom to sound like themselves. Then build the campaign around trust, not just reach. The right smaller creator can do what a giant media buy sometimes can’t: Make the product feel real.
Planning a campaign and wondering where creators fit?
