This cheat sheet outlines the key influencer marketing trends B2B marketers should watch in 2026.

Communities

Communities is the new buzzword in influencer marketing, but it is being used incorrectly. Brands are stating they have communities when, in fact, these are often just databases. A database and a community are two different things. Collecting third-party data of your consumers is not the same as building a space for an engaging community to emerge and grow. Brands forget that social media was not created for brands; it was created for people.

As marketers, we need to understand how we create online spaces for communities to evolve, or alternatively, how do we tap into existing communities. The trend that we will see emerge in 2026 is brands focusing on creating communities where they can constantly engage with consumers, source influences, and reward them to create content. Marketers and brands need to turn their eye towards focusing on how to create these digital communities, which is the new form of databases.

Trade exchanges

Don’t be fooled by big influences on TikTok talking about how trade exchanges are going to be taxed by SARS. Influencers have always needed to declare their earnings, in whatever form, to be tax compliant. This, however, is not going to deter brands from investing in trade exchanges. But here’s why trade exchanges are so topical. Bigger influencers feel they are losing pieces of the pie. Meaning that they are concerned that less brands are going to work with them.

This may be the case for bigger creators who do not bring in results. However, trade exchanges actually means that more pies are being baked for smaller creators to have the opportunity to work with brands. Trade exchanges will only be successful in 2026 if they become a fair value exchange. Products or services to the value of the pieces of content that will be created. Trade exchanges are not something new; they are how influencer marketing first started. But we will be seeing a resurgence of trade exchanges, unboxing content, and a surge in nano creator content.

Mass influencer campaigns

With the comeback of trade exchanges, we are going to start seeing advocacy campaigns done at scale. Of course, scale is relative to your brand, and not all brands are able to achieve mass but expect brands to divert budget and go all-in on influencer campaigns. If you’re thinking a thousand influencers is a lot, start expecting campaigns that add another zero to that number. Campaigns with a high touch, strong strategy, and universal reach. In the year to come, we’ll see brands removing the barrier to entry for smaller influencers. And these creators will have the opportunity to work with their favourite brands for the first time.

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360 campaigns

Advocacy-first Strategies are going to be created with a 360 approach. No longer are influences a line item or a secondary execution plan, marketers are going to start thinking about creators and content at the centre of campaigns. Influencers are the new golden thread for through-the-line campaigns but this golden thread approach is not a campaign, it’s the constant presence of creators connecting awareness, engagement, and conversion. It entails putting creators and their communities at the centre of everything we do, no matter what channel the content is being fed through, as long as the content is informed by communities and generated by creators.

IEO – Influencer Engine Optimisation

Marketers will no longer focus on SEO but evolve their approach into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or as I like to call it, Influencer Engine Optimisation (IEO). GEO is ensuring your brand and content are included in AI-generated answers. With consumers moving towards AI search engines / chatbots and away from traditional search engines, brands need to start thinking about how to appear in AI answers. GEO is going to be an influencer-led effort where brands will utilise influencers to create UGC and product reviews that will not only live on socials but also retail websites.

These pieces of content will be GEO fit with keywords and qualifying phrases in the content and the captions in order to show up in AI searches. To further convince you on the importance of GEO, even Google is utilising its AI tool Gemini to create AI answers to every Google search, which is limiting the amount of people that will click on to websites to find the answers. So brands need to show up in these spaces to still be relevant and convert.

Now that I’ve shared the cheat sheet of things to expect in the 2026 year of advocacy, it is important to remember that these are relative. It’s not to say that you need to achieve all of these trends to keep ahead of the curve. Perhaps the goal for 2026 is to choose one of these and aim to achieve it by the end of the year. With that, ensure you have the right experts in your corner to help you achieve the best out of influencer and advocacy for the year ahead.