Creator marketing has matured into a budget line, not a side experiment. The IAB reports U.S. creator-economy ad spend grew from $13.9B in 2021 to $29.5B in 2024, and is projected to reach $37B in 2025 (26% year-over-year growth). Separately, EMARKETER forecasts U.S. influencer marketing spending will hit $10.52B in 2025, passing $10B a year earlier than previously expected.
For founders and product teams building in the creator economy, this shift creates a new requirement: platforms can’t only support “influencers.” They need to support KOLs, Key Opinion Leaders, whose influence is powered by expertise and trust.
What are KOLs, really?
A KOL (key opinion leader) is someone respected for their knowledge and credibility in a specific niche, whose opinions meaningfully shape decisions. Many KOLs are creators, but not every creator is a KOL. The difference is why audiences listen: KOLs are followed for interpretation, diagnosis, and advice, not only entertainment.
On creator-economy platforms, strong KOLs double as product advisors, reliably surfacing user language, objections, and roadmap gaps well before launch.
That distinction matters even more in 2026, because trust is becoming the scarce currency. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer finds that 70% of people are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural background differ from theirs. In other words, trust is concentrating inside familiar circles, and KOL marketing works only when brands borrow that credibility responsibly, without over-claiming, over-scripting, or breaking authenticity.
KOLs vs influencers: complementary, not competing
Influencers often win on reach, relatability, and culture. KOLs win on authority and depth. A high-performing go-to-market plan typically uses both: KOLs help people believe, influencers help people notice.
From a product perspective, this changes what your platform must enable. A one-off sponsored post workflow is not enough. KOL partnerships demand proof formats, guardrails for claims, and measurement that matches education-led content.
Where KOL marketing fits in the funnel
KOL marketing can impact multiple stages of the buyer journey:
Top of funnel: credibility and category education. KOLs reduce skepticism by explaining “why this matters.”
Mid funnel: decision clarity. KOLs help audiences compare options and understand tradeoffs.
Bottom funnel: action. Some KOL content drives direct conversions, but the bigger contribution is often pre-selling the decision through trust.
If you’re building a creator platform, the key is to treat education as a first-class content type, not an accidental byproduct.
Why mid-tier, niche KOLs are winning
As budgets scale, brands are shifting from “biggest following” to “best fit.” In reporting on the IAB findings, Business Insider highlighted that 61% of marketers chose mid-tier creators (about 50K–500K followers) over micro, macro, or celebrity tiers. That preference makes sense for KOL marketing: mid-tier specialists can deliver meaningful distribution while still feeling close to their audience.
For agencies and platforms, the implication is operational: you need systems to discover and manage portfolios of niche authorities, not just one celebrity partnership.
KOL marketing best practices that survive real-world scrutiny:
Build long-term partnerships, not one-offs
KOL authority compounds with repetition. Multi-touch partnerships (series, recurring Q&As, seasonal campaigns) allow audiences to see consistent thinking over time, how trust actually forms.
Use proof-first formats
KOL content performs best when it teaches or tests. Common high-trust formats include teardown reviews, “what I’d change” breakdowns, routines and frameworks, and live office hours where the community can ask questions.
Protect voice, define boundaries
The brief should define what must be true (facts, claims, disclosure requirements), but the creator should control the voice. Over-scripting turns expertise into an ad read, which audiences detect instantly.
Make compliance non-negotiable
The FTC is explicit: if there’s a “material connection” between an endorser and a brand (payment, free product, business relationship), it should be clearly and conspicuously disclosed unless it’s already obvious. Compliance is not only legal hygiene; it is trust hygiene, especially when the endorser’s authority is the asset.
How to find and vet the right KOLs
Start with expertise signals, not follower count. Look for consistent topic coverage, evidence of experience (credentials, portfolios, prior work), and community behavior that suggests people come for advice, high-quality questions in comments, repeat discussions, and saved/shared posts.
Then pressure-test fit: does the KOL’s audience match your target user, and is their sponsorship history coherent rather than random? Confirm operational basics upfront: cadence, review expectations, rights, and how they handle disclosures and claims.
Measurement: how mature teams track KOL impact
The biggest failure mode in KOL marketing is measuring like it’s 2018: counting likes and calling it ROI. A better approach is to map metrics to intent.
Education and trust: watch time, saves, repeat views, “this helped” comments, newsletter sign-ups.
Consideration: product-page engagement, comparison-page visits, demo requests, qualified inbound questions.
Conversion: attributable sales or trials (codes, links), assisted conversions, retention of creator-sourced cohorts.
As spend grows, the need for standardization grows too. IAB’s creator-economy research reflects the channel’s rapid professionalization and the operational investment required to run it well.
The AI layer is coming, but trust is still the moat
The IAB report also notes that nearly 75% of advertisers are using or planning to use AI in creator marketing workflows. AI helps with briefs, editing, optimization, and research, but it doesn’t replace credibility. If anything, more synthetic content increases the premium on transparent, human authority.
What agencies and platforms should operationalize
KOL marketing is infrastructure. Whether you’re an influencer agency or a creator-economy platform, the winning stack looks like this:
Discovery and vetting: signals of expertise, topic consistency, audience quality, brand safety.
Relationship management: contracts, usage rights, recurring deliverables, and reliable payments.
Creative ops: brief templates, claim substantiation, review workflows, disclosure checklists.
Reporting: dashboards that separate awareness from conversion and show learning over time.
What to build next: KOL-native product features
If you’re building a creator platform (or a creator tool inside a larger SaaS), consider features that make KOL partnerships easier to execute well:
Credibility profiles: structured expertise fields, credentials, proof-of-work links, and topic taxonomies.
Education-first publishing: chapters, pinned resources, link hubs, downloadable guides, and annotated clips.
Partnership tooling: built-in briefs, asset libraries, approvals, usage-right settings, and disclosure toggles.
Better analytics: watch-time and intent signals, cohort tracking by creator source, and multi-touch attribution exports.
Community mechanics: Q&As, live sessions, recurring series, and member-only learning spaces.
A simple example pattern
For a creator-economy platform launching a new monetization feature, a proven pattern is a “belief-to-action ladder”: a KOL publishes an educational breakdown of the problem and decision criteria; a creator then demonstrates the feature in a real workflow; and the brand retargets interested viewers with a trial, checklist, or onboarding sequence. This structure respects how people actually decide, understand first, then try.
How Desilo helps
Desilo builds creator-economy products end to end, from strategy and UX to scalable engineering, so platforms can support real creator business models. For teams designing KOL discovery, collaboration workflows, monetization, and analytics, the goal isn’t to copy influencer tooling. It’s to build systems where trust can be expressed, protected, and measured.
In a market growing as quickly as the IAB and EMARKETER forecasts suggest, KOL marketing will keep moving from “nice to have” to core distribution strategy. The best products will treat KOLs as partners, not placements, and will give brands, agencies, and creators the infrastructure to scale credibility without losing it.
