How to choose the right people, build organic or paid relationships, and make influence part of your communication strategy.
By Silse Martell
Would you hire an influencer with two million followers, or seek a collaboration with someone who has just three thousand? And what if that person were willing to participate voluntarily, without being paid?
The answer depends on an earlier question: what does your company want to achieve through this partnership?
If the goal is to introduce a product to millions of consumers, a large audience may make sense. But if your company needs to explain a complex technology, earn the trust of a specialized community, or mobilize people around a cause, a creator with a few thousand followers may be far more relevant.
And not every collaboration needs to be paid. Some influencers and creators share information, advocate for causes, and participate in initiatives out of genuine interest, shared values, or a belief that the content matters to their communities.
The value of influence does not necessarily lie in audience size or the investment made to reach it. It lies in the credibility of the person communicating and the relevance of the message to those receiving it.
The #Publi 2026: Influence Beyond Followers study by IAB Brasil, conducted in partnership with Offerwise, helps explain this phenomenon. Among 1,512 respondents who follow content creators in Brazil, 76% said they had purchased a product after a recommendation.
That is a striking result. But perhaps the study’s most interesting finding is something else: audience size alone does not explain the trust people place in a creator.
So how can companies work strategically with influencers and content creators?
1. Start with the objective, not a list of influencers
The first mistake in an influencer marketing strategy is to start by choosing names.
Before identifying influencers and content creators, a company needs to define what it wants to achieve.
Does it want to raise brand awareness? Explain a product? Strengthen its reputation? Connect with a community? Drive sales? Mobilize people around a cause?
Each objective calls for a different combination of voices, content, and formats.
A product launch may need broad reach. A health initiative may benefit from professionals with technical knowledge and credibility. An organization seeking to work in a particular area may need relationships with communicators who understand that local community deeply.
A meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, covering 251 studies and 1,531 effect-size estimates, shows that influencer marketing effectiveness depends on a combination of characteristics of the content, creators, and their audiences.
The research also distinguishes outcomes related to attitudes, engagement, and purchase intention from those associated with actual consumer behavior.
This distinction matters: a strategy designed to build brand awareness should not be evaluated in exactly the same way as a campaign focused on sales conversion.
2. Identify the communities your brand needs to engage
Influencers and content creators belong to communities that share interests, references, experiences, and often values.
Understanding the community is therefore just as important as understanding the creator.
Who follows this person? What do people discuss? What questions do they ask? What problems are they trying to solve? What kind of relationship does the creator have with the audience?
The #Publi 2026 study identified an important difference: among respondents who rated recommendations, 46% gave the highest trust ratings to recommendations from creators they already followed. For recommendations from a completely unfamiliar creator, that figure fell to 21%.
Familiarity and relationships can therefore be decisive in determining a message’s credibility.
A company seeking to reach farmers, for example, may find greater relevance in communicators connected to everyday agricultural life than in entertainment accounts with millions of followers.
Similarly, an organization seeking to engage technology professionals, patients, educators, or local communities needs to understand who already participates in those conversations and has the credibility to contribute.
The strategy should begin with the communities the company needs to understand and reach.
3. Choose relevance and credibility, not just reach
Follower count indicates the size of an audience, but it does not, on its own, explain someone’s ability to influence.
A researcher with 800 followers may be a respected authority in their field. A community communicator with three thousand followers may mobilize people a celebrity would struggle to reach with the same credibility.
This does not mean that major influencers are less effective. It means that different people serve different purposes.
Sprout Social’s 2026 Influencer Marketing Report, based on surveys of consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, found that only 17% consider follower count when deciding whether to follow a creator. Topic relevance and content style have become more important in digital environments where distribution increasingly depends on users’ interests.
Although the study was not conducted in Brazil, it points to an important shift in how people discover content.
When selecting influencers and creators, consider:
- The relevance of their topics to the organization’s strategy.
- The creator’s knowledge and experience.
- The composition and location of their audience.
- The quality of conversations and interactions.
- The alignment between their values and the brand’s.
- The consistency of their public positions.
- Reputational risks and potential signs of artificial engagement.
The central question should be: why would this person be a credible voice in this conversation?
4. Develop Endorsed Social Content, not just sponsored posts
At Smart, we work with the concept of Endorsed Social Content: content that circulates through voices recognized as relevant and credible by particular audiences.
This approach goes beyond hiring influencers to publish messages a company has already defined.
It can involve three types of relationships.
Organic collaborations
These happen when a creator considers a piece of information, initiative, or cause relevant enough to share voluntarily.
A company can facilitate access to information, sources, experiences, and opportunities to participate. But the decision to create and publish content belongs to the creator.
The logic is similar to media relations: an organization can offer a relevant story, but it should neither assume coverage nor control the editorial approach.
Paid partnerships
These involve commissioning content, appearances, or campaigns.
They can be highly effective when the brand, creator, and audience are aligned. Investment allows deliverables, formats, deadlines, and performance indicators to be agreed upon, but it does not replace credibility.
Ongoing relationships
These develop over time, with or without payment, allowing creators to become more familiar with an organization, its projects, and its positions.
Such relationships can be particularly valuable for complex topics that require learning, ongoing attention, and an understanding of different perspectives.
All three can contribute to a communication strategy. What matters is understanding their differences and avoiding the assumption that every expression of interest is paid advertising.
An organic collaboration is not automatically authentic, just as a paid partnership is not necessarily less trustworthy.
Credibility depends on consistency, transparency, and the freedom to communicate.
The IAB Brasil study shows that, among participants who reported that creators had little influence on their purchasing decisions, 27% cited content that felt overly promotional or forced.
This does not mean advertising should be disguised. Quite the opposite.
In Brazil, the Digital Influencer Marketing and Advertising Guide from CONAR, the country’s advertising self-regulatory body, emphasizes advertising disclosure, transparency, and truthful information.
The commercial nature of a relationship should be disclosed when applicable, taking benefits and other forms of compensation into account. A post made without a cash payment is not necessarily an independent endorsement.
The best strategy is to build relationships in which participation makes sense, rather than trying to manufacture spontaneity.
5. Combine different creators to serve different purposes
A coherent strategy can bring together creators with very different profiles.
Some help expand reach. Others explain specialized topics, connect an organization with particular communities, or encourage participation.
These roles can complement one another.
One example is Smart’s work for the Global Citizen Festival: Amazônia, held in Belém, Brazil, in 2025.
The communication strategy combined media relations, content production, local engagement, and participation by content creators.
Instead of relying exclusively on large audiences, the initiative sought to connect the campaign’s messages with different audiences and conversations relevant to the Amazon.
According to the case study published by Smart, the activation of seven influencers resulted in:
- 137 pieces of content published by the creators.
- 361,000 engagements.
- A potential audience of 1.3 million.
These results were part of a broader campaign that also generated 1,031 media placements.
The case demonstrates the importance of integrating different voices and communication channels around a shared objective.
It also illustrates why results should be analyzed by workstream, avoiding attributing the effects of an entire campaign to a single activity.
6. Integrate Endorsed Social Content into your communication strategy
Influencers and content creators should not operate in isolation from the rest of an organization’s communication.
A company can produce excellent content with creators and still fail to realize its potential if there is no connection to brand strategy, media relations, owned channels, and other communication initiatives.
At Smart, we approach brand authority through two complementary dimensions.
The first is Conversational Authority: an organization’s ability to participate in relevant discussions, earn credibility, and help shape opinions.
The second is Algorithmic Authority: the ability of its content, expertise, and references to be found and recognized across digital search and discovery systems, including search engines and artificial intelligence tools.
Endorsed Social Content can contribute to both.
When a recognized creator participates in a conversation, they can broaden the circulation of ideas, introduce new perspectives, and connect an organization with audiences that institutional channels alone would struggle to reach.
Relevant content can also generate new searches, references, mentions, and opportunities for digital discovery. These effects, however, are not automatic and need to be monitored.
As we discuss in our article on integrated communication and building authority, combining organic editorial content, sponsored content, and owned channels allows different tools to support the same positioning.
Influencer participation should be considered within that framework.
7. Define indicators that demonstrate results
The success of an influencer marketing strategy cannot be measured solely by the number of posts or views.
Indicators need to reflect the original objective.
If the goal is to build brand awareness, qualified reach, recall, and recognition may be relevant.
If the objective is to strengthen reputation, companies need to examine the quality of conversations, understanding of messages, and the attributes people associate with the organization.
If an initiative aims to mobilize a community, actual participation, expressions of interest, and the continuity of relationships may matter more than the number of likes.
In commercial campaigns, traffic, leads, conversions, and sales can be tracked, while recognizing the limitations of attribution models.
It is also important to distinguish outcomes across types of collaboration.
In paid partnerships, deliverables and contractual metrics can be agreed upon in advance.
In organic relationships, monitoring may consider unsolicited mentions, the quality of interactions, the relevance of the communities reached, and how the relationship develops over time.
In ongoing programs, creators’ growing understanding of the topics and recurring participation can offer useful signals.
The challenge is to measure results without confusing correlation with causation.
A post that coincides with an increase in brand searches did not necessarily cause that growth on its own.
8. Protect credibility in an environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence
The expansion of artificial intelligence is transforming content production and distribution.
It is also creating new challenges for trust.
A Gartner survey published in September 2026, conducted among 1,006 U.S. consumers, found that 35% were relying less on influencers for information and purchase recommendations because of the growing presence of AI-generated content.
At the same time, 43% said they were turning more to real people for this information.
The findings should not automatically be generalized to Brazil, but they reveal an important tension: as content becomes easier to produce and distribute, the need to identify trustworthy sources may grow.
In this context, experience, expertise, transparency, and consistency become increasingly relevant.
For brands, working with influencers and creators therefore requires more than choosing accounts and approving scripts.
It requires understanding who has something relevant to say, why a particular community would listen to that person, and how to preserve the credibility of the relationship.
So, how should companies work with influencers and content creators?
A good strategy starts with simple questions.
Who do we want to reach? What do we need to communicate? Who already participates in this conversation with credibility? What kind of relationship would make sense? How will we know whether we achieved the desired effect?
The answers may point to a celebrity with millions of followers, an expert known to a few hundred people, or a combination of creators with different profiles.
They may involve financial investment, voluntary collaboration, or relationships built over time.
The essential point is that influence is more than the ability to distribute messages.
To influence is to have enough credibility for a message to be considered, discussed, and ultimately capable of mobilizing people.
And reach alone cannot buy that.
