How to Use Influencer Marketing to Boost E-commerce Sales (The Original Platform List Was Missing TikTok Entirely)

This guide’s original platform breakdown covered Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. TikTok isn’t mentioned once, because in March 2019 it barely registered as a Western e-commerce platform. TikTok Shop alone is projected to generate $23.41 billion in US e-commerce sales in 2026, more than Target, Costco, Best Buy, or Kroger.

The global influencer marketing industry is now worth $32.55 billion, with 87% of brands increasing their budgets in 2026, according to SQ Magazine’s compiled research, and 58% of consumers over 18 have purchased a product because of an influencer endorsement, according to BBB National Programs. The core strategy this guide laid out in 2019, define your audience, pick the right platform, find genuine influencers, vet them carefully, and run measurable campaigns, remains structurally sound. Here’s what’s changed inside it.

Groundwork: audience research and goal-setting, unchanged

Identifying your target audience before choosing a platform, researching their social media behavior, and setting clear goals, customer acquisition, brand awareness, or both, remains exactly the right starting sequence. Nothing about this foundational step needs correction.

Choosing the best social media platform: TikTok is now essential, not optional

The original guide covered Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in detail. Missing entirely was TikTok, which launched globally in 2018 but hadn’t yet become the e-commerce force it is today. TikTok Shop is projected to reach $23.41 billion in US e-commerce sales in 2026, a 48% year-over-year increase, according to EMARKETER, a figure that would make it larger than the e-commerce operations of Target, Costco, Best Buy, or Kroger combined with any one of them individually. Among brands that have adopted social commerce in their influencer programs, 66.17% specifically use TikTok Shop, according to SQ Magazine’s 2026 research.

Instagram and YouTube remain exactly as relevant as the original guide described, and Instagram Stories shoppable tagging, still evolving when this guide was first written, has since become a mature, standard feature. Snapchat remains a smaller, younger-skewing option, though it’s now considerably less central to a typical influencer strategy than TikTok has become.

Finding influencers: one of the original recommended tools no longer exists standalone

BuzzSumo remains active and continues to serve the influencer discovery and outreach function this guide described. Peg, one of the four tools originally recommended, was acquired by Current in 2021, and its technology now operates within Current’s broader influencer marketing suite rather than as an independent product. When evaluating how to target the right influencer for your brand today, current tools increasingly bundle discovery, TikTok Shop affiliate management, sales attribution, and creator payouts into a single platform, a more integrated approach than the separate point-solutions this guide originally listed.

Vetting influencers: unchanged

The original red flags, an unusually high ratio of sponsored content, and a mismatch between follower count and actual engagement, remain exactly the right things to check before pitching. The Scott Disick copy-paste caption example this guide used to illustrate poor influencer relationships remains a relevant cautionary tale about ensuring genuine buy-in rather than scripted compliance.

Working with influencers: the do’s and don’ts hold up

Paying influencers fairly, giving them creative freedom, and clearly labeling sponsored content all remain exactly right, and disclosure requirements have if anything become more strictly enforced since 2019, making the original guide’s “make sure the post will be labeled as sponsored” point more legally important now than it was then.

Campaign types: add UGC as its own category

Product reviews, giveaways, and entertaining branded content, exactly as covered in our guide to influencer campaign strategy, all remain effective formats. What’s genuinely new is that platform-agnostic user-generated content has emerged as its own distinct, and now dominant, category: UGC accounts for 35% of influencer marketing campaigns worldwide, surpassing TikTok-specific campaigns at 21%, and trailing only Instagram at 40%, according to a January 2026 Collabstr report cited by EMARKETER. Treating UGC as a strategy in its own right, not just a byproduct of a platform-specific campaign, is a genuinely new consideration this guide’s original framework didn’t need to address.

Metrics to measure: unchanged

Click-through rate, organic search traffic lift, engagement, cost per visitor, and conversions remain exactly the right metrics, and tracking them has become considerably easier as most modern influencer platforms now build sales attribution and reporting directly into their tools rather than requiring separate manual tracking.

Wrapping up

The core argument this guide made in 2019, that influencer marketing offers a native, non-intrusive way to reach shoppers who are increasingly resistant to traditional advertising, has held up completely and been validated by a much larger, better-measured market since. The specifics worth updating are the platform mix, TikTok now belongs at the center of any e-commerce influencer strategy, not on the sidelines, and the tools, several of which have consolidated since 2019.

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