With millions of users connecting and checking their phones every day, influencer marketing has become one of the most useful forms of marketing worldwide to guide a brand’s product to its target audience to build its consumer base.

The upside to partnering with these influencers and content creators is that it will ultimately improve brand awareness and online presence which is important when trying to create a connection with your target audience in a way that’s more efficient than the traditional method of using ad campaigns. This strategy has been working so well that it’s said that the influencer market is due to increase in size and grow to approximately 22.3 billion dollars worldwide by 2024.

In Europe alone, the continent is home to some of the biggest digital advertising markets. To get insight into this space, Influencity, via data from Statista, has done an updated analysis on the market and overall state of the influencer sector within the continent. 

Let’s take a look at the key takeaways from this survey.

Who Conducted the Survey?

Using the data from Statista, Influencity has conducted a collaborative report in order to further explore the European influencer landscape.

Statista is a data company that specializes in the gathering and visualization of data that can then be formed into statistics and reports, consumer insights, and market insights. They provide information in four languages; French, Spanish, English, and German. 

Influencity on the other hand, is an online platform where businesses are able to manage their interactions with influencers directly. This is why many brands, companies, and marketing agencies use this platform because of how user-friendly the overall process is to run a campaign. 

Survey Methodology

The team conducted a survey that measured digital ad-spend and investment in 30 European countries. The patterns in which this data is composed show the digital ad expenditure and the predictions for investments.

The total number of Instagram users included both public and private users with a variety of age ranges. The data from the study initially was sourced from Statista Report on Digital Advertising in Europe. 

This study was carefully conducted and was sure to maintain its integrity by only using influencers that were over the age of 18 years old with a public profile that had over 1.000 followers. 

It should be noted that though all these individuals do not all participate in influencer marketing, they do have the credentials and criteria that would make them eligible to do so.

In order to categorize and filter profiles according to the type of influence they can provide and utilize with their reach it is necessary to sort them into 4 categories.

Nano-influencers:  1k – 10k audience size

Micro-influencers: 10k – 100k audience size

Macro-influencers: 100k – 1 million audience size

Mega-influencers: 1 million plus audience size

To get a better read on these profiles, they were then categorized one step further by gender: male, female, and no-gender. “No-gender” influencers are influencers whose gender is not necessarily relevant for the social media page(i.e. A brand) or an influencer whose gender is clearly evident.

Influencity’s software was a critical part of getting a more accurate and reliable number that better represents real-time on every category and gender. The platform, being powered by AI, uses image recognition & natural language processing to understand data on all profiles worldwide along with any other types of datasets that are publicly available. 

By creating filters in order to narrow down the number of followers, the location, and the gender, we are then able to reduce the giant pool of prospects to know the exact number of male, female, and no-gender content creators that make up our 4 categories referenced earlier.

Key Takeaways

The number of European Instagram users has risen by around 18.4% in the past 2 years alone. With that in mind, the increase in users that have influential status has become even more staggering, having shown a 22% jump in those 2 years.  Even though the total population levels of these 30 countries have decreased since 2020 it’s amazing that there is still extremely impressive growth in this market.

The question is, what exactly does this mean for the industry moving forward? Some people would argue that the popularity of Instagram is in decline, but in reality, the rule of thumb is, as long as new users continue to join and log into the platform on a regular basis, ad revenue and marketers will continue to look at the platform as one of the best forms of client acquisition and a good way to create new relationships with potential customers directly. 

Digital Ad Investment Leader: United Kingdom

Digital advertising is defined by the market as so, the use of the Internet to deliver marketing messages through various channels. This includes, but is not limited to internet search advertising, banner advertising, social media, video adverts, and even classifieds.

One section of the study went into detail examining the amount of investments within each country’s digital advertising market to see the connection that it has between the money that is spent and the number of influencers that are in each given country. The general consensus is that the higher the investment is in digital marketing and advertising, the more established the influencer market is likely to be.

It’s evident from the data that, the countries with higher investment potential in digital advertising subsequently had a higher number of influencers. That being said exceptions include Russia and Italy, who both have larger numbers of influencers regardless of having relatively low investment numbers when it comes to digital marketing.

The interesting part of it all is that Russia, while it may be 9th overall in investment out of the group, it’s the first in the total number of influencers. Out of this, they’re also sitting at more than double the number of content creators than Italy which is the runner-up with 1.58 million.

The chart below shows that the United Kingdom is currently the leading country for investments in the digital advertising space. To be specific they have 30.3% of the total investment market in Europe, which is more than double that of Germany, at 16.7%. The next runner-up to that is France and then Italy. Unsurprisingly these four countries, with Russia, hold a whopping 50% of the total European economy.

Nano-Influencers For The Win

Then we have nano-influencers; it was determined that 92.6% of the 8 million content creators were considered to be nano-influencers. In the following two years 2021-2022, that number seems to have decreased to around 91.0%. 

However, the number of micro-influencers increased in that time by around 7%. The decrease in nano influencers and increase in micro-influencers was concluded to be attributed to the content creators’ success rather than their profiles becoming unpopular, which is a green light for marketers. 

This is directly linked to businesses pushing certain nano-influencers into the spotlight and making their content more legitimate. This inadvertently helped them build their following and turned them into micro-influencers over the span of a couple of years.

New Markets And Growth For Mega-Influencers

It comes as no surprise that the largest number of mega influencers were located in established European creator economy markets such as Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and Russia.

That aside, the growing media-influencer markets also had an increase that was hard not to notice with growth from countries like Spain, which went from having 159 macro influencers in 2020 to 259 macro influencers in 2022, the Netherlands, which went from 24 to 27, Poland, from 47 to 74 and Romania which went from 18 to 27.

The Majority Of Mega-Influencers Are Male

As per the study, content created by females made up the majority of the influencer categories. On the other hand mega-influencer accounts were predominantly male content creators, standing at 56%. The majority of these influencers are celebrities, TV stars, and professional athletes. 

Greece And Switzerland Set New the Trends

As referenced in the section above, female content creators reign supreme in almost every country that was included in the survey. The only exception to this was Switzerland and Greece, where male influencers and content creators make up a whopping 53% of the total influencer space in both countries respectively. This trend dates back to 2020, which shows that both markets have not seen a change over the last couple of years.

What Does This Mean for Influencers And Content Creators?

The data confirms that influencer marketing is on an upward trajectory. There are only two questions that remain, “what form will it take in the future? How will it adapt to consumer preferences moving forward?”. With that in mind, it will be interesting to see which types of content creation become more and less popular as time goes on as well as how the marketing investments of brands respond to inevitable changes in this market.

In the study, the majority of profiles were identified and placed in the “nano-influencer” status, but following up two years later we saw an increase in “micro-influencers” ( 10k-100k). This is evidence that people are building up a following fast and upgrading into larger profiles with their content going viral and being shared. It also is evidence that with marketing and “stamps of legitimacy,” viewers of the content are more inclined to follow an influencer when they are backed by a trusted and more established brand.

The “leveling up” is a great sign because it shows not only a good return on investment for the marketers but also has a great monetary value for the content creator and is a good incentive for all parties involved. 

An example of this is in-app shopping, which allows for influencers to act as the marketing funnel for the company and convert viewers into consumers for their brands. This is a great concept because it shows how the influence of these people and the creative content they deliver can make their money on a commission basis which is their collaboration fee. This is the best part because brands moving forward won’t be picking people solely on their follower numbers and aesthetic but on the actual content and personal brand they have created for themselves.

Interestingly enough, another trend that was worth noting is the digital transformation, which is what’s responsible for bringing all aspects of life online. This means that the way brands place their ads and find new ways to differentiate in the market is more important than ever, especially in a market that’s constantly expanding. This creates new variations of collaborations and a whole new reliance on user-generated content. Brands, in turn, will not just collaborate with influencers for their content but will use them to shape the culture and community behind their brand.

At the end of the day, marketing on social media with influencer campaigns will be highly data-driven in the future. Remaining static in a market that changes monthly if not weekly isn’t an option and marketing directors and content creators will have to adapt and change with trends, events, and preferences to be successful consistently

Other Notable Highlights

• There were 250.1 million users on Instagram’s platform, in Europe, in 2022. That means 37% of the population of Europe used this app to connect and share photos, as well as make purchases online.
• Investment into digital advertising increased to $89 billion in 2022, which is a staggering 131% increase from the study conducted in 2020.
• Russia has maintained the lead in the total number of Instagram users, coming in at 55 million in 2022. This makes up 38% of the total Russian population.
• Luxembourg, the country that has the lowest number of influencers, only has 1,229 content creators that met the study’s criteria.
• Influencer demographic distribution maintained its numbers with 62% of influencers recorded as female and 37.5% as male. 

Link to the Report

Then “The State of Influencer Marketing in Europe in 2023” by Influencity can be found here, along with the data from Statista that was used in the study which can be accessed here. 

Both companies also share a wealth of information on their websites, some of which include case studies, reports, data-driven strategies, news, and trends.