Tomoson Influencer Marketing Study: What the Numbers Tell You

The Tomoson influencer marketing study is one of the most-cited pieces of research in the channel, referenced repeatedly in pitch decks, agency proposals, and trade press. It reported that businesses earn $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, and that influencer marketing was the fastest-growing online customer acquisition method at the time of publication. Those figures have been doing the rounds for years. Before you build a business case on them, it is worth understanding what they actually represent, where they come from, and what they cannot tell you.

I have spent more than 20 years in marketing and agency leadership, managing budgets across 30 industries and overseeing hundreds of millions in ad spend. I have seen a lot of research weaponised in pitch rooms. The Tomoson study is a good example of a finding that gets simplified down to a single number, stripped of its context, and then used to justify decisions it was never designed to support. That is not a criticism of the research itself. It is a criticism of how the industry handles data it finds convenient.

What Did the Tomoson Study Actually Measure?

The Tomoson study was a survey-based piece of research conducted by the influencer marketing platform of the same name. It asked marketers about their influencer marketing activity, perceived returns, and channel preferences. The $6.50 ROI figure came from respondents self-reporting what they believed they earned per dollar spent. It was not derived from controlled attribution modelling, incrementality testing, or audited financial data.

That distinction matters enormously. Self-reported ROI from marketers who are already investing in a channel is subject to confirmation bias, recall error, and the simple human tendency to remember the wins more clearly than the losses. It also aggregates across very different types of campaigns, industries, influencer tiers, and measurement approaches. The average of all those different situations is a number that may not accurately represent any of them.

If you want to understand the broader mechanics of the channel before interrogating the numbers, what is the premise behind influencer marketing is a useful place to start. The foundational logic of the channel, borrowed credibility and trust transfer from creator to brand, is where the real value sits. The ROI figure is a downstream expression of that, when it works.

Why the $6.50 Figure Gets Cited So Often

A clean, memorable number travels well. $6.50 for every $1 spent is the kind of stat that fits on a slide, survives a boardroom question, and sounds authoritative enough to close a conversation. I have watched this happen in agency settings many times. Someone drops a headline figure, the room nods, and the discussion moves on to tactics. The number does its job without anyone asking where it came from or what it actually measured.

The marketing industry has a long history of this. When I was building out performance marketing capabilities at iProspect, one of the disciplines we tried hardest to instil was scepticism about benchmark data. Not cynicism, but genuine analytical scepticism. Benchmarks tell you what happened somewhere else, under different conditions, with different audiences. They are a starting point for a hypothesis, not a forecast for your business.

The Tomoson figure also arrived at a useful moment. Influencer marketing was emerging as a formal budget line rather than a PR experiment, and marketers needed something to take to finance teams. A 6.5x return gave them that. Whether it was accurate for their specific situation was almost beside the point. It opened the door.

HubSpot’s analysis of whether influencer marketing actually works covers some of the nuance that gets lost when headline figures circulate without context. The channel does work, but the conditions under which it works, and the magnitude of the return, vary considerably.

The Finding That Deserves More Attention

Buried beneath the ROI headline is a finding from the Tomoson research that I think is more strategically valuable: marketers reported that customers acquired through influencer marketing tended to be higher quality than those from other channels. Higher retention, higher lifetime value, stronger brand affinity.

That finding is consistent with the underlying logic of the channel. When someone buys because a creator they trust recommended something, they are arriving with a different disposition than someone who clicked a display ad. They have had a moment of social proof, a degree of pre-qualification, and often some education about the product. That changes the customer relationship from the first interaction.

This is why influencer marketing often shows up well in cohort analysis even when the headline acquisition cost looks high. The customers are worth more over time. If you are evaluating the channel purely on cost per acquisition, you may be measuring the wrong thing. The more interesting question is what these customers are worth at 12 months, and whether that changes the economics of the channel.

For brands thinking about this at a category level, influencer marketing in retail contexts explores how lifetime value and repeat purchase dynamics interact with influencer-driven acquisition, which is where this quality argument tends to be most testable.

How to Use Survey-Based Research Without Being Misled by It

Survey data from industry platforms is not worthless. It can tell you about sentiment, adoption trends, perceived value, and relative channel preference. What it cannot tell you is what will happen in your specific market, with your specific audience, at your specific budget level. Those are different questions.

When I was at lastminute.com, we ran a paid search campaign for a music festival that generated six figures of revenue within roughly a day. That campaign worked extraordinarily well. But I would not have gone to a competitor and told them they should expect the same return from paid search because of what we had seen. The conditions were specific: the audience was primed, the event had urgency, and the search intent was highly commercial. Strip any of those factors out and the result would have been different.

The same principle applies to the Tomoson data. The 6.5x figure is an average across a wide range of situations. Some respondents will have seen much higher returns. Some will have seen negative returns. The average obscures both ends of the distribution, and the ends are where the real learning lives.

If you want to use this research responsibly, treat it as directional evidence that the channel can generate meaningful returns, then build your own measurement framework to find out what it generates for you. Crazy Egg’s influencer marketing resource covers practical measurement approaches that move beyond headline benchmarks.

What Has Changed Since the Study Was Published

The Tomoson research predates the dominance of short-form video, the rise of TikTok as a commercial platform, the maturation of the creator economy, and the widespread adoption of influencer marketing technology. The channel it was measuring looked quite different from what most brands are running today.

In the period since publication, influencer fees have increased substantially as the channel has professionalised. Platform algorithms have changed how content distributes. The audience has become more sophisticated about sponsored content, which affects how trust transfer works. And the tools available for finding, briefing, and measuring influencers have improved considerably.

All of that means the $6.50 figure, even if it was an accurate reflection of the market at the time, is describing a different version of the channel. Returns in a competitive, professionalised market with higher creator fees and more sceptical audiences will not automatically mirror returns from an earlier, less crowded period.

Tools like those covered in Buffer’s overview of influencer marketing platforms give a sense of how much the infrastructure around the channel has developed. That infrastructure exists because the channel has scaled and matured, but scaling and maturing also means more competition for creator attention and audience trust.

The Role of Audience Quality in Influencer ROI

One of the variables the Tomoson study could not adequately capture is audience quality. Two influencers with identical follower counts can produce wildly different commercial outcomes depending on how engaged their audiences are, how well those audiences match the brand’s target customer, and how authentic the creator’s relationship with the product category appears.

This is where social listening becomes genuinely useful as a pre-campaign tool rather than a post-campaign reporting exercise. Using social listening for influencer marketing allows you to identify creators whose audiences are already talking about your category, which is a much stronger signal of commercial potential than follower count alone.

The brands that consistently see strong returns from influencer marketing are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the most disciplined approach to audience matching. When I was running agency teams, we would sometimes push back on a client’s influencer shortlist because the audience demographics did not align with their actual customer profile. The client would occasionally resist, because the creator was famous or had impressive numbers. But fame and commercial fit are different things, and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make in this channel.

HubSpot’s piece on micro-influencer marketing addresses this directly. Smaller creators with tightly defined audiences often outperform larger ones on commercial metrics precisely because the audience-product fit is stronger and the trust relationship is more intact.

Applying the Research to Smaller Budgets and Early-Stage Brands

The Tomoson study was not specifically focused on any one brand size or budget tier, but much of the subsequent discussion around its findings has treated them as relevant to all marketers equally. They are not. A Fortune 500 brand with an established audience, strong distribution, and a high-margin product operates in a completely different context from an early-stage brand trying to build awareness from scratch.

For early-stage brands, influencer marketing can be particularly effective precisely because it allows you to borrow credibility before you have built your own. But the economics look different. You are often working with smaller budgets, gifting rather than paying fees, and measuring success differently. Influencer marketing for start-ups covers the specific constraints and opportunities that apply at that stage, which are meaningfully different from what the Tomoson averages describe.

Product gifting, in particular, has become a more structured part of influencer strategy at the lower budget end of the market. Influencer marketing remote gifting explores how brands are running gifting programmes at scale without the logistical overhead that used to make it impractical. The returns from gifting campaigns are harder to measure cleanly, but they can generate significant earned media value relative to cost.

Early in my career, when I was in my first marketing role and the MD had said no to budget for a new website, I built it myself rather than accept the constraint. The instinct to find a different route when the obvious one is closed is something I have seen repeated in the best influencer marketing programmes at smaller brands. They do not try to compete with big brand budgets. They find the angles where their size is an advantage: authenticity, speed, category specificity, willingness to work with niche creators who the big brands overlook.

Using UGC to Extend the Value of Influencer Content

One of the practical implications of the Tomoson research that often goes undiscussed is the role of content reuse. If influencer-generated content performs well organically, the same content, or content produced in the same style, can extend its value when used in paid social. This is the logic behind the growth of UGC-style advertising, where brands produce or commission content that looks like organic creator content and runs it as paid media.

The infrastructure for doing this at scale has developed considerably. Comparing UGC video software for social media advertising covers the tools that make it practical to source, manage, and deploy this type of content across paid channels. When the organic influencer campaign and the paid amplification strategy are connected, the economics of the channel tend to improve.

This is also where the Tomoson ROI figure becomes more credible as a benchmark. The brands most likely to be seeing strong returns are probably not treating influencer marketing as a standalone organic play. They are integrating it with paid media, using creator content across multiple touchpoints, and measuring the combined effect rather than just the organic reach.

What the Study Should and Should Not Change About Your Approach

The Tomoson study is useful evidence that influencer marketing can deliver strong commercial returns, that the channel was growing faster than alternatives at the time of publication, and that the quality of customers acquired through the channel tends to be higher than average. Those are meaningful signals worth taking seriously.

What it should not do is replace the work of building your own business case. The $6.50 figure is not a promise. It is an average from a self-selected group of marketers, at a specific point in time, describing a channel that has changed substantially since. Using it as a forecast is the kind of analytical shortcut that feels efficient in the short term and creates problems later when the board asks why returns did not match the benchmark you cited in the original proposal.

The more productive use of the research is as a conversation starter. It establishes that the channel has commercial potential. Your job is then to design the test, define the measurement approach, set realistic expectations for your specific context, and build the evidence base that is actually relevant to your business. That is slower than quoting a single number from a study, but it is the work that produces defensible conclusions.

For a broader grounding in the channel’s mechanics and strategic applications, the influencer marketing hub covers the full range of topics from channel fundamentals through to measurement and execution. The Tomoson data is one input among many, and it is more useful in context than in isolation.

Buffer’s overview of influencer marketing provides a grounded explanation of how the channel works at a structural level, which is the right foundation before applying any benchmark data to your own planning.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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