LTK, the first and largest influencer marketing platform, today released findings from its second annual brand study in partnership with Northwestern University’s Retail Analytics Council, unveiling key insights in creator marketing for 2025. With the creator marketing industry expected to reach $24B by the end of this year, creators remain a top digital marketing investment for 2025 due to their ability to efficiently engage audiences and drive significant impact across multiple channels. Based on insights from top marketing decision-makers at leading global brands, the study revealed investment trends, creator strategies and the multidimensional impact of creators.
Creator Remains a Top Investment for Marketers
Creator marketing continues to be a top marketing investment amongst all marketing options for brands in 2025. 93% of brands anticipate creators taking a higher percentage of budget or an increased role in marketing strategy in 2025. Among all brands surveyed, 41% said they are investing at least half of their digital marketing budget on creators this year – up 14% from last year’s study.
Social and Beyond: Creators are Multipurpose Across Mediums
Creator content is highly valuable as marketers use it in an average of four different channels outside of social media, including content marketing (56%), sponsorships (44%), connected TV (43%), display advertising (43%) and affiliate marketing (31%). On social platforms, media boosting creator content is a top strategy for brands and will continue to be in 2025. According to the study, media boosting accounts for 30% of brands total creator marketing budget and 82% are using creator content in social ads. Brand investment in LTK’s media boosting solution, LTK Boost, is up 202% YoY and delivers 86% more impressions to campaigns for the same budget investment.
Connected TV (CTV) ads, which is another top investment growth area for brands in 2025, is rising to the top as a way to further optimize creator content. LTK’s CTV offering allows brands to use LTK Creator content and their authentic messaging to create CTV advertising spots that are instantly shoppable from the creator’s LTK.
Creator Marketing is a Top Priority for Retail Media Networks
For retail media networks, creator marketing is a top priority alongside CTV and retailer website, including search. 82% of retail media networks are using creators to build awareness, access customer data, leverage offline and online sales and sales conversion. Earned media value is the primary metric brands are using to measure the effectiveness of creators within retail media networks.
Creators’ Expansive Audience Reach is Most Valuable to Brands
Brands recognize the importance of tapping into the audiences built by creators and are heavily investing to reach their dedicated audience and far beyond. The study shows that the top priority for brands is reaching a creator’s expansive audiences across platforms to build awareness. 58% of brands said creators helped increase brand or product awareness over the past year.
Creator Strategies Drive Multidimensional Impact
Creators are multidimensional – driving impact for brands across the entire marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration and conversion. Brands reported they are measuring four different goals across creator marketing plans including audience growth, awareness, engagement and brand sentiment. The study also revealed that brands are using creators to support multiple strategies – including, informing inventory decisions and increasing customer lifetime value – expanding the objectives creators can impact.
Creator is #1 Use for AI by Marketers
The primary way brand marketers are using AI is to identify creators for collaboration partnerships – ahead of creative asset generation, email generation, and messaging. Marketers have found a major benefit of AI is the ability to more efficiently and effectively identify the best partners to reach targeted audiences. More brands have been tapping into LTK Match, a solution powered by LTK AI that leverages hundreds of millions of proprietary data points that selects the best creator partners based on performance to launch and optimize creator programs faster, and it’s had a big impact. More than 60% of creators cast through LTK Match are new to brand partnerships – so brands easily find an expanded group of ideal partners and more creators gain opportunities with brands they love. Brands using LTK AI Enriched technology are achieving better performance overall with engagement up to 5x for each creator cast.
“Creators are no longer a niche portion of the marketing mix – they are essential to driving brand growth and audience engagement,” said Rodney Mason, Head of Marketing, Brand Platform at LTK. “As the digital landscape evolves, brands are seeing creators as one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach and build new audiences across a variety of channels.”
“The ability of creators to engage audiences across multiple mediums has shifted marketing strategies and continues to increase budgets for creator-driven campaigns,” said Frank Mulhern, Professor and Director of Retail Analytics Council, Northwestern University. “This study confirms that creators are driving measurable, multidimensional value for brands compared to more traditional marketing strategies.”
The reported data summarizes key findings conducted by LTK in collaboration with Northwestern University in July 2024 among 185 marketing leaders and decision makers who have invested in creator marketing in the last 12 months. Nearly half of the global brands were $1B+ sized and spanned leading industries including fashion, beauty and personal care, CPG, technology and electronics, health and wellness, auto and more.