Influencer marketing is still a major part of the growth strategy for direct-to-consumer brands, but the way companies spend that money is changing. Developing an effective D2C influencer marketing strategy can make a significant difference as higher creator fees, tighter marketing budgets and more pressure to prove actual results are forcing brands to question whether the biggest creators are always the smartest investment.
The shift is not pushing brands away from creators. Instead, companies are becoming more selective. Follower count still matters, but it now sits alongside engagement quality, niche relevance, conversion potential and the creator’s ability to influence real buying decisions.
Brands including Farmley, Knya and ETUDE are already showing how different that new playbook can look. Some continue to rely on celebrity and macro creators for scale, while others are moving heavily toward micro and nano influencers. There is no single formula anymore, and that appears to be the bigger change taking place across the creator economy.
D2C Brands Are Becoming More Selective With Creator Budgets
D2C brands once treated influencer reach as one of the easiest ways to judge potential campaign value. A creator with a larger following naturally offered more visibility, so bigger audience numbers often justified bigger fees. That calculation has become much harder to defend on its own.
Brands now have access to much more performance data. Ecommerce platforms, discount codes, affiliate links, referral traffic and campaign analytics make it easier to track what happens after someone sees creator content. Marketing teams can look beyond impressions and ask whether audiences clicked through, searched for the product, added items to their carts or actually completed a purchase.
At the same time, creator pricing has become increasingly unpredictable. Two influencers with similar follower counts can charge very different amounts depending on their engagement, production quality, category expertise, platform, usage rights and exclusivity requirements. That uncertainty is encouraging brands to spend more cautiously and demand a clearer reason behind each partnership.
Farmley Still Sees Value in Large Creator Reach
Farmley continues to see a role for celebrities and macro influencers, particularly because healthy snacking is a broad consumer category that can benefit from mass visibility. Larger creators can introduce products to millions of people quickly and help brands build recognition at a scale that smaller partnerships may struggle to match.
The company, however, does not appear to treat creators simply as advertising inventory. Farmley’s wider creator strategy has focused on working with personalities whose lifestyles already connect with fitness, nutrition and mindful eating. That gives partnerships a stronger connection to the product rather than relying only on the size of the creator’s audience.
For Farmley, larger creators can still make sense when the campaign needs rapid awareness and broad reach. The challenge is that higher fees also increase expectations. Brands paying a premium increasingly want to see more than views, especially when those same budgets could be distributed across several smaller creators.
Knya Is Putting More Budget Behind Micro and Nano Influencers
Medical apparel brand Knya has taken a noticeably different route, allocating most of its creator spending toward micro and nano influencers. The approach reflects the highly specific audience that the brand wants to reach.
Medical apparel speaks directly to doctors, nurses, medical students and healthcare professionals. A creator who genuinely works or studies in that environment may have a smaller following, but their audience can be far more relevant. Their recommendations may also carry more credibility because the product fits naturally into their daily life.
This gives Knya a way to prioritize relevance over raw scale. Instead of spending heavily on a handful of big influencers, the brand can work with multiple smaller creators who each reach specific healthcare communities. That also spreads campaign risk and gives the brand more opportunities to test different messages, formats and creator profiles.
ETUDE Is Looking Beyond Follower Count
Beauty brand ETUDE is taking another approach by focusing more closely on niche relevance, audience quality and longer-term creator relationships. In beauty marketing, that can matter more than simply finding the account with the biggest number beside its name.
A creator known specifically for Korean beauty, skincare routines or makeup tutorials may offer a much stronger commercial fit than a general lifestyle influencer with a far larger audience. The smaller creator may generate fewer total impressions, but those impressions can come from people who are already interested in the category and more likely to consider buying the product.
This reflects a wider shift in how brands evaluate influencers. Follower count has not disappeared as a metric, but it is becoming one factor among many. Brands increasingly want creators whose audiences match their actual customers rather than creators who simply look impressive on a campaign report.
Rising Creator Fees Are Changing Brand Expectations
Creator pricing has become one of the more difficult parts of influencer marketing. There is still no universal pricing structure, and costs can vary significantly depending on content format, production demands, audience demographics, platform, campaign duration, usage rights and exclusivity.
As fees rise, brands naturally become more demanding about what those partnerships produce. A high-priced creator campaign that delivers strong awareness can still be valuable, but companies increasingly want evidence that the investment influenced something meaningful.
For D2C companies, that pressure is even stronger because performance numbers sit close to the business itself. Customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, repeat purchases and margins directly affect growth. Spending more on creators is not necessarily the problem. Spending more without understanding the return is.
Performance Is Becoming Part of Creator Selection
Influencer marketing is gradually beginning to resemble performance marketing in the way brands evaluate creators. Instead of choosing talent purely on popularity, companies can compare campaigns, test different profiles and allocate more budget toward creators who consistently deliver stronger results.
That does not mean every influencer campaign needs to produce immediate sales. Awareness, brand perception and cultural relevance still matter. Some campaigns are designed to make people remember a product rather than purchase it within minutes of seeing a post.
What is changing is the level of scrutiny. A creator with 50,000 highly relevant followers who regularly generates clicks, searches or purchases may become more attractive than someone with ten times the audience but little connection to the category. Performance gives brands another way to understand creator value beyond visibility alone.
Micro and Nano Creators Could Gain More Influence
Micro and nano influencers have traditionally been positioned as the cheaper side of creator marketing, but that description does not fully capture why brands increasingly want to work with them.
Their main advantage is often audience concentration. A creator may have a relatively small following while still holding significant influence within a specific community such as healthcare, fitness, parenting, gaming, skincare or travel.
That level of specificity can be extremely useful for brands. Instead of paying for millions of impressions that reach a broad audience, companies can pay for access to smaller communities where interest in the product is already much stronger.
As campaign measurement improves, smaller creators who can demonstrate strong audience quality and proven performance may gain more negotiating power. The size of their following matters less when they can show that their audience listens and acts.
Long-Term Creator Relationships Are Becoming More Attractive
Brands are also starting to see more value in working with the same creators over longer periods rather than constantly running one-off campaigns.
Finding new influencers requires time. Brands need to research audiences, negotiate fees, agree on deliverables, approve content and evaluate performance. When a creator already understands the product and consistently delivers strong results, continuing that relationship can be more efficient.
Repeated partnerships may also appear more natural to audiences. When followers see a creator use the same brand several times over a longer period, the endorsement can feel more credible than a single sponsored post that disappears after one campaign.
For creators, longer partnerships can also create more stable income and give them more room to understand the brand before producing content. That can result in campaigns that feel less scripted and more aligned with their normal style.
There Is No Single Winning Creator Strategy
The strategies used by Farmley, Knya and ETUDE show why influencer marketing is becoming harder to reduce to a simple formula.
Farmley still sees value in large-scale creator reach. Knya is prioritizing smaller creators inside a specific professional community. ETUDE is focusing on audience relevance and longer relationships. All three strategies can work because they are responding to different audiences, products and campaign objectives.
A mass-market consumer product may need broad reach. A specialist product may benefit more from niche credibility. Another brand may use both approaches depending on the campaign.
The important change is that follower count alone is no longer enough to justify creator spending. Brands increasingly want to understand why a specific creator is the right person for the campaign and what that creator is expected to achieve.
What This Means for the Creator Economy
The growing focus on performance does not suggest that brands are losing interest in influencers. It suggests that creator marketing has become established enough to face the same scrutiny as other major advertising channels.
Brands now expect stronger reasoning behind campaign budgets. Creator fees need context, audiences need to be relevant and campaign objectives need to be clear. Creators, in turn, may need to show more evidence of what makes their audience valuable.
That shift could benefit creators who have built genuine trust inside a particular niche. A huge audience will always have advantages, but size is no longer the only thing brands are buying.
The next phase of D2C influencer marketing looks less focused on finding the biggest creator available and more focused on finding the creator who actually makes sense for the brand.
Sources
Storyboard18 — D2C brands redraw creator playbook as fees rise, performance scrutiny deepens
https://www.storyboard18.com/influencer-marketing/d2c-brands-redraw-creator-playbook-as-fees-rise-performance-scrutiny-deepens-109892.htm
Adgully — Creators aren’t ad channels, they are trust builders: Farmley’s Aman Gupta
https://www.adgully.com/post/17144/creators-arent-ad-channels-they-are-trust-builders-farmleys-aman-gupta
Digiday — As creator fees rise, so does the confusion over what to pay
https://digiday.com/marketing/as-creator-fees-rise-so-does-the-confusion-over-what-to-pay/
Companion — What Should a Creator Partnership Cost?
https://www.imcompanion.com/blog/how-much-is-a-creator-partnership-actually-worth
