UK Best Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Latest influencer marketing insights and 10 standout examples in UK from 2024-2025

11 FEBRUARY 2026

PR and Communications Influencer

Influencer marketing isn’t a new tactic. You might even wonder, does it still work anymore? The short answer: yes, and in ways that feel broader and more strategic than ever. With evolving creator ecosystems, the rise of AI tools, and platforms doubling down on creator-first formats, the role of influencers has expanded rather than diminished.

What influencer marketing used to be: reach, discount codes and one-off posts, has evolved. The campaigns that perform best today are built around strong creator relationships, storytelling, community connection and increasingly clearer ways of measuring real impact.

This article brings together current UK data, insight into why influencer marketing still works, and a curated selection of recent UK campaigns that generated buzz, engagement or commercial results worth studying. If you’re figuring out how influencer marketing should fit into your plans for 2026, hopefully this article gives you a solid reference point.

Why Influencer Marketing Still Matters in the UK

Despite tighter budgets and more scrutiny on ROI, influencer marketing continues to grow in the UK — both in spend and in sophistication.

81% of UK marketers plan to increase influencer marketing budgets in 2026, suggesting confidence hasn’t dipped even as accountability has increased.
93% of UK brands now work with micro-influencers, reflecting a shift toward relevance and authenticity over scale.
69% of UK consumers say they’ve purchased after seeing an influencer recommendation, reinforcing the role creators play in consideration and decision stages.
76.6% of consumers say they wish their favourite brands had community-oriented experiences, underscoring how audiences increasingly value connection over broadcast messaging.

Influencer marketing hasn’t peaked, it’s matured. And for many UK brands, it’s now less about experimentation and more about optimisation and meaningful engagement.

Why Influencer Marketing Still Matters in the UK

A useful reframe: Influence is psychological, not just media

One of the most helpful ways to think about influencer marketing comes from Smoking Gun’s report, The New Influencer Battleground.

Rather than treating influencers as just another paid media channel, the report explores the psychology behind why creator content works, especially the role of parasocial relationships: the one-to-many emotional connection audiences form with creators.

“Creator influence is not just a media effect, it is a psychological one. When audiences feel emotionally connected to creators, stories are processed more deeply and remembered for longer.”
— Laurna Woods, Chief Executive Officer, Smoking Gun

This helps explain why some campaigns with modest reach outperform larger activations: audience connection matters more than raw impressions.

Full report here

A useful reframe: Influence is psychological, not just media

Blurring lines: community-led marketing and influence

A trend closely related to effective influencer marketing is community-led marketing — an approach where brands engage audiences not just through creators, but through shared identity, belonging and conversation.

According to Tigerbond’s 2025 community report, 92% of senior marketers say community-driven efforts are highly effective but underused, and 89% believe community activity builds trust, credibility and loyalty better than other channels.

This isn’t a completely separate tactic from influencer marketing, it often overlaps. The campaigns that perform best tend to:

Activate creators who are embedded in community conversation
Encourage two-way engagement, not one-way messaging
Turn individual creator voices into shared cultural moments

A simple example from Tigerbond is its Mam’s The Word effort, where authentic voices in parent communities were mobilised to amplify product launches and discussions, showing how community influence and Creator narratives can work together

Blurring lines: community-led marketing and influence

Our pick of the best influencer marketing campaigns in 2025

Our editorial selection is based on visibility, engagement, originality, cultural buzz and publicly available results.

1. The cultural icon: McDonald’s UK x Stormzy — “The Big Mike Order”

Brand: McDonald's | Agency: Leo Burnett / Ready10
To celebrate the return of the Chicken Big Mac, McDonald's partnered with UK grime legend Stormzy to launch "The Big Mike Order," blending celebrity hype with a massive social media "limited time" FOMO strategy.

The Result: Generated over 15 million organic social views and a record-breaking sell-out of the product in its first week across the UK.
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2. The Data-Driven Discovery: Gym King

Brand: Gym King | Agency: Journey Further
Using a proprietary performance-first model, the agency identified creators based on audience "conversion probability" rather than follower counts, treating influencers as a rigorous ROI channel.

The Result: Delivered a 3:1 ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and a 50% reduction in Customer Acquisition Cost compared to traditional social ads.
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Our pick of the best influencer marketing campaigns in 2025

3. The "Insiders" Model: ASOS x Micro-Influencers

Brand: ASOS | Agency: In-house / The Romans
ASOS shifted their strategy to prioritize "The ASOS Insiders", a curated community of micro-influencers who act as long-term brand ambassadors, creating "shoppable" content that blends seamlessly into followers' feeds.

The Result: The program drives thousands of organic sales weekly, with Insider-specific curated edits achieving a 3x higher engagement rate than standard brand content.
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4. The Community Hub Strategy: Boots — #SummerReady

Brand: Boots | Agency: The Pharm (WPP)
This campaign utilized a "Creator Collective" to provide credible health and beauty advice during the peak UK summer. By using creators to answer specific customer search queries, Boots positioned itself as the "helpful expert."

The Result: Generated a £2.5M uplift in revenue across the suncare category and reached over 25 million UK users on TikTok.
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5. The Travel Authority: Hilton — "It Matters Where You Stay"

Brand: Hilton | Agency: TBWA\London
Hilton replaced traditional celebrity ads with "Creator-Led Search" content. They hired travel influencers to create "vlogs" that address specific travel pain points (like unreliable hotel Wi-Fi), which then rank in TikTok and Instagram search results.

The Result: Achieved a 4.8x ROI on influencer spend and a 30% lift in direct-to-site bookings for featured UK properties.
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6. Mark McCann × carVertical
British creator Mark McCann published 21 pieces of sponsored content, generating 23.7M total views — a strong example of long-term creator–brand alignment.
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7. The Hyper-Local Hero: Buchanan Galleries

Brand: Buchanan Galleries | Agency: The Big Partnership
To boost footfall in Glasgow, the agency used hyper-local "city creators" who focus strictly on Glasgow lifestyle. These influencers showcased "day in the life" shopping trips to drive physical visits rather than just digital likes.

The Result: Delivered a 12% increase in footfall year-on-year and reached 7.5% engagement—well above the industry average of 1.5%.
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8. The purpose play: National Rail - "nothing beats being there"

Brand: National Rail | Agency: Accomplice
This campaign used travel creators to tell emotional stories about reuniting with friends and family via train. It moved the conversation from "logistics" to "emotion," targeting Gen Z and Millennial domestic travelers.

The Result: Generated over 1.2 million trackable website clicks and won "Best Use of Influencer Marketing" at the 2024/25 Travel Marketing Awards.
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9. The nostalgia pivot: Barbie the movie (UK launch)

Brand: Mattel | Agency: Hope&Glory PR/PHD
The agency turned the UK "pink" by partnering with 100+ niche influencers—from interior designers to bakers, to create Barbie-themed content that felt organic to their specific communities.

The Result: 98% brand sentiment score and over 250 million social impressions in the UK, making it the most successful movie launch of the decade.
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10. L’Oréal Paris UK – Revitalift Campaign
L’Oréal partnered with skincare creators to promote its Revitalift range, contributing to a reported 40% uplift in related search activity.
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ASOS influencer insiders

What the best influencer marketing campaigns have in common

Looking across these campaigns in the UK, a few clear patterns stand out and they’re remarkably consistent across sectors.

First, they are built on relationships, not transactions.
Long-term creator partnerships consistently outperform one-off posts. Familiarity builds trust, and trust drives action, whether that’s engagement, consideration or sales.

Second, influence is becoming smaller, not louder.
Micro and nano creators feature heavily in high-performing campaigns, particularly in beauty, fashion, food and retail. Relevance and credibility are now more valuable than raw reach.

Third, storytelling beats selling.
The campaigns that cut through are the ones that feel native to the platform and true to the creator. Education, humour, honesty and creativity consistently outperform polished, ad-style content.

Fourth, influencer content is now a commerce channel.
From TikTok Shop to shoppable links, creator-led content is no longer just about awareness. The best campaigns shorten the path from discovery to purchase without breaking authenticity.

And increasingly, community-led thinking is shaping influencer strategy.
Like Tigerbond highlight how influence doesn’t always come from a single face, but from sustained participation in communities built around shared interests and values. Their work shows how community and influencer marketing are converging, with creators acting as trusted voices within communities, not just broadcasters to them.

The takeaway for marketers

Influencer marketing in the UK hasn’t peaked, it’s matured.

The campaigns that perform best aren’t always the biggest or most expensive. They’re the ones that feel believable, platform-native and genuinely worth watching. For marketers planning the year ahead, success is less about doing more influencer marketing, but more about doing it with intention.

If there’s a benchmark worth taking forward, it’s this:
Build trust first. The results tend to follow.

If you’re thinking about how influencer marketing fits into your next campaign , whether that’s creator partnerships, community-led work or social commerce, getting the right expertise early can make a real difference.

There’s a growing number of UK agencies specialising in influencer marketing, each bringing different strengths depending on your brief. Exploring teams with proven experience is often a useful first step before planning what comes next.

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