Brand advocacy has become one of the few areas where many senior marketers plan to spend more. Consumers have grown wary of advertising and have plenty of alternatives to switch to, so brands are looking for recommendations that carry credibility, and creators are where many of them are turning first.

Wanting those recommendations is easy, but securing them over the long term is proving much harder. Plenty of brands are raising their advocacy budgets before they have worked out how to find creators they can trust.

Where Advocacy Spending Stands Today

Socially Powerful, a global influencer marketing agency, has published the Brand Advocacy report surveying 150+ senior marketers, 81% of which said they plan to increase their investment in brand advocacy over the next year. Only 10% of them reported that advocacy is a core part of their overall strategy.

The biggest obstacle is people, not budget. Around 48% of marketers say their top challenge is finding and maintaining long-term relationships with authentic creators. So, brands are ready to spend advocacy, but many haven’t figured out how to build the creator relationships that make it work.

Why Attention Is Harder to Earn Than Ever

Consumers today can choose from a huge range of brands. With living costs rising, they check every purchase carefully, and switching to a cheaper or newer option takes little effort. Just over half of the marketers surveyed (51%) said competing for attention in a crowded market is their biggest obstacle.

Shoppers have also grown skeptical of anything that feels like a sales pitch. An ad can buy visibility, but when the spend stops, the conversation often stops with it. Creators earn that trust over time, which is why influencer marketing services can help build lasting momentum.

Advocacy fits this picture because it is built on emotion and trust. Ipsos research cited in the report found that emotionally attached consumers recommend a brand nearly twice as often as those who are merely satisfied. And for a generation that lives online, a recommendation from a creator can carry as much weight as one from a close friend.

The Problem With the Revolving Door

If advocacy matters this much, why is it so hard to get right? The report points to a “revolving door” of creators. Brands treat creators as disposable media assets, hiring one for a campaign and then moving on to the next.

Paid collaborations aren’t the problem on their own. In fact, they can feel very natural when done with creators whose beliefs genuinely match the brand. But if paid deals are all a brand does, they start to feel like ads. People can tell when a creator doesn’t really use the product, and they stop paying attention.

The collaboration between Collection Cosmetics and YouTuber Zoe Sugg (Zoella) is a good example of a partnership done well. Zoella had recommended one of the brand’s concealers for over a decade before they ever worked together officially. So when she promoted a new launch, her followers saw it as something she would have done anyway.

Where Artificial Intelligence Can Help

Finding the right creators at scale is hard, and technology could help. Over 80% of marketers are already using or testing AI, yet 57% of them use it mainly for creative ideation. Far fewer use it to find creators, even though that is one of the biggest challenges they report.

Some marketers are cautious about using AI for this. Nearly 40% say they worry about brand safety and about AI missing the human side of choosing a creator. Those concerns make sense, but AI can still help a team find creators it would otherwise miss, such as people who have already mentioned the brand on their own, or whose personal stories fit the product. 

A skincare brand that makes acne treatments, for example, would get more from a creator who openly talks about her own acne than from one with more followers and no connection to the topic. A person can then review each creator before any deal is made.

How to Build Partnerships That Last

Brands can take a few practical steps to build creator partnerships that last:

  • Start with creators who already like your brand. Look for people who already use and talk about your products or your category. Their followers can tell when the enthusiasm is real.
  • Work with the same creators more than once. When a creator posts about your product several times over a few months, it comes across as a genuine habit, and followers trust that more than a single post.
  • Mix paid and unpaid. Paid posts have a place, but they work best next to creators who already recommend you for free.
  • Use AI to find creators. It can search for far more people than a team can check by hand. Have someone review each creator for fit and brand safety before you sign anyone.
  • Include creators in your main marketing plan. Link them to product launches, customer retention and community building, so they get planned and measured like any other channel.

What Lasting Advocacy Takes

A creator who truly likes your product keeps recommending it long after the campaign is over, and their followers keep listening because they already trust them. That is hard to buy, and it only comes from relationships that last.

So before spending more on advocacy, brands should ask who they want to work with, how they will keep those creators around, and how they will know it’s working. Brands that have clear answers will get far more out of their budget than those that simply pile on sponsored posts.