7 UK influencer marketing examples to inspire your next campaign

The importance of influencers can’t be overstated. More than just a single approach, influencer marketing now represents several campaign types and a core way for brands to use socials to expand reach, further influence and gain new followers.

Much of this is proven by today’s influencer marketing statistics; according to Q2 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey, 32% of Gen Z now choose to use certain social media platforms because they follow creators or influencers who are active on them. Influencers don’t just drive platform choices, they also influence brand engagement. Plus, 32% of Gen Z expect brands to be interacting with influencers on their socials.

We’ve distilled insights from seven UK influencer marketing examples to help you prepare your influencer marketing strategy:

How brands work with influencers in the UK

Influencer marketing campaigns, including the influencer marketing examples we’ve detailed below, come in many different forms. These are some of the most popular types of UK influencer marketing campaigns:

• Affiliate marketing: A brand partnership where influencers earn affiliate commissions from promoting your products or services through their content. These can be useful for building your reach and for growing relationships with multiple influencers.
• Account takeovers: Where an influencer takes control over your brand’s profile for a set amount of time to create content and interact with your followers. Takeovers can work well if you have a strong relationship with an influencer with a unique style or an authentic reputation.
• Brand ambassadors: This involves an influencer partnering with a brand on a long-term basis to regularly promote them. These arrangements can tie your brand to an influencer or a celebrity’s reputation more directly and on a longer-term basis.
• Content and giveaways: These campaigns involve competitions designed to give products away to followers. They’re particularly useful for B2C companies or those working in industries like beauty or food.
• Collaborations: Influencer collaborations usually involve more input from the creator from the get-go. These campaigns end up reflecting an influencer’s personal brand and content style, as well as your own.
• Live brand activations: Unique experiences where influencers are involved with a company’s events, either through socials or live and in-person. These can be effectively combined with your wider events and offline strategies.
• Pre-release content: These campaigns hype up a release date or feature update with the help of influencer content. They’re best used if you have an upcoming launch, larger campaign or company milestone.
• Sponsorships: During sponsorships, brands sponsor an influencer’s content, which usually involves them following a product-forward strategy. These can be combined with different content types, like showing how a product fits into their daily routine.

This list isn’t exhaustive, of course. And the types of campaigns brands and influencers are engaging with continue to evolve as audience behavior and networks change.

Best practices for UK influencer partnerships

Performing well through influencer marketing requires a clear strategy; even though each campaign is different, there are several best practices you can use to set yours up for success.

Treat influencers like long-term collaborators

Building a strong working relationship with influencers enhances the authenticity of your campaigns over time. It also leads to more creative collaboration, which boosts the quality and results of your campaigns as your relationship grows.

Repurpose content across channels thoughtfully

Tailor your influencer content for each different social platform. You’ll have different audiences across social networks, so think about how you can tweak a campaign to appeal to them.

Collaborate with your influencer on your repurposing strategy. Make use of their authenticity, and think about how your creative ideas resonate across different audiences.

Leverage influencer expertise

Always take an influencer’s creative ideas into consideration when planning your campaign. Involve them in your strategic process, and plan your campaigns with them and their inputs in mind.

The best campaigns consider an influencer’s content types and audience. Take the time to understand why your influencer partner’s content works, and apply that knowledge to your campaign.

Stay compliant with UK regulations

If you’re marketing across socials in the UK you need to remember to always follow ASA guidelines. This includes rules like clearly stating when a piece of content is a paid advert, and following GDPR rules when processing personal information.

Compliance strengthens trust in your brand. It shows you value the rights of your audience, and that you’re committed to communicating with them in the right way.

7 examples of influencer marketing campaigns in the UK

We’ve collected some successful examples of UK influencer marketing campaigns. They each tailor their campaign to the unique strengths of their influencer partner, the audiences on their chosen platform, and the types of engagement they’re hoping to achieve.

1. Rochelle Humes and M&S’s mental health partnership

Brand ambassador campaigns are a reliably popular form of influencer marketing in the UK. Some of the most effective examples of brand ambassador programs focus on influencers who promote charitable causes or initiatives.

Rochelle Humes was a popular child celebrity in the UK thanks to her involvement in the pop music phenomenon S Club Juniors. Since she spent much of her early career in the spotlight, she now works to promote mental health support services for young people.

The UK supermarket chain Marks & Spencer’s recruited Rochelle as their ambassador in a collaboration with the charity Young Minds UK. They filmed Rochelle in a sit-down style interview to promote the charity’s message and provide a familiar face for necessary discussions about mental health across the country.

This example shows how important it is to find the right influencer for your campaign idea. Rochelle is a perfect fit for the campaign due to her celebrity career and her present-day activism. These mean she has a large following of people who value her opinion, and also means she can help M&S create conversations with this wide audience.

2. Adidas UK and Sabastian Sawe—London Marathon Collab

Brand ambassador campaigns can also be combined with event promotions and activations. Sabastian Sawe is a brand ambassador for Adidas UK, thanks to his career as one of the leading long-distance runners in the world.

Adidas created the below piece of content with Sabastian, focused on his London Marathon victory. They posted it across their main account page, as well as their separate brand accounts, Adidas Running and Adidas UK. This combined approach enabled them to reach a wider audience, including their regional UK audience as well as those who specifically want to see running content.

This is also an effective campaign because the product advertising is subtle. The main focus of the campaign is celebrating Sabastian’s victory, but Adidas have included a small promotion for the shoes he wore during his run at the bottom of the post description. This demonstrates how you can still advertise without taking away from the heart of an idea.

 3. Meditations for the anxious mind x Chicken Shop

Meditations for the anxious mind has built a significant following on both UK TikTok and Instagram thanks to his humorous scripts that poke fun at modern-day life. The UK fried chicken restaurant brand Chicken Shop recognised his popularity, and were the first company to reach out to him for a sponsored post.

This campaign succeeds because of Chicken Shop’s trust in the influencer and their clear understanding of the type of content he makes and his audience. The influencer’s audience, based on the content he makes, is made up of mostly younger people in the UK, who likely fit Chicken Shop’s target market. Plus, the video fits in seamlessly with the influencer’s existing content.

Meditations for the anxious mind is a clever choice of partner, as his followers won’t have seen any adverts on his page before, and so wouldn’t expect to see this ad in their feed. The result is an unorthodox and original partnership that grabs attention and breaks through the usual noise of social media. It targets an audience interested in the product in a way that’s different from more traditional content types like food reviews or recipes.

4. Dermalogica UK x Olivia Attwood’s skincare

Sponsored influencer posts can be a particularly effective strategy if you’re marketing certain kinds of products. Beauty products like makeup and skincare remain some of the most popular types of content across networks. And the UK has several dedicated beauty influencers who regularly review products.

Dermalogica UK partnered with Olivia Attwood, a participant on the third season of the UK’s Love Island. Their sponsored post shows Olivia using Dermalogica’s skincare products whilst talking the viewer through the process.

This type of content benefits from the authenticity that’s expected from influencers on social media. By actively using the product, and showing her followers how it looks on her, Olivia legitimises Dermalogica’s brand for her millions of followers. Throughout the video Olivia showcases her skincare knowledge, reinforcing her credibility and the audience’s trust in her insights.

 5. Hannah Crosbie promoting wine bars for Coal Drops Yard

A significant trend on UK Instagram, as well as other networks, is recommendation content. This type of content is designed to show you different restaurants, attractions or locations that audiences have not heard about before from experts in the area.

To promote their retail space, Coal Drops Yard partnered with wine critic and popular social media influencer Hannah Crosbie.

As a wine critic, Hannah is the ideal authority on which wine bars in the Coal Drops Yard area are worth visiting. She’s also known for her detailed understanding of internet culture and the strict focus on aesthetic that she places on her profile.

With this minimalist POV style of content, Hannah and Coal Drops Yard speak to their audience in a clear, effective and funny way whilst gently promoting several different bars.

 6. Alfie Watts travel challenge with DFDS

The most effective influencer marketing examples don’t always involve teaming up with the biggest names. It’s about partnering with influencers whose audiences closely align with your target market and whose content style naturally complements your brand.

One of the more unique UK examples of this approach is cargo and freight company DFDS partnering with Alfie Watts. Alfie has over 200k followers on UK Instagram and is building a notable following after appearing on the BBC’s travel show Race Across the World. He creates travel content where he flies to less well-known destinations, and is often promoting low-budget forms of travel to his young audience.

DFDS operates low-cost ferries across Europe, including several routes from the UK. They created a challenge-style content campaign with Alfie, where they challenged him to visit as many countries as possible in 24 hours. Alfie used one of their ferries to start his journey, which allowed him to promote DFDS and their transport options whilst also making engaging content for his followers.

7. Jodie Nixon x Sage Appliances UK

Our final example shows why it’s important to understand when to launch a campaign, alongside knowing who to partner with and why. Jodie Nixon is a part of Mob, one of the UK’s biggest food content brands, and also has a growing following on her personal influencer profile. She partnered with Sage Appliances UK to promote their coffee machine to her audience.

The timing of this campaign was perfect, as Jodie worked with Sage to focus exclusively on their machine’s iced coffee options. Since this was posted at the start of May, the weather in the UK would’ve just started heating up. Jodie also uses her expertise as a UK food influencer to create several drink recipes, all of which can be made using Sage’s coffee machine. By making five of them, she shows off the machine’s versatility.

This campaign shows how vital it is to listen to an influencer’s creative ideas, and work with them to time and launch a campaign with the best chance of success.

Use these best influencer marketing examples to inform your own campaigns

These influencer marketing examples from the UK prove just how varied the influencer landscape has become. Each of these brands markets hugely different products, and they all work with influencers in entirely different ways to achieve their goals.

If you’re ready to start your next campaign, take a look at our list of influencer marketing tools that can make planning, launching and tracking your influencer campaigns much easier.