Empirical analysis reveals higher direct sales return on investment from small-scale influencers, indicating that audience engagement outweighs broad reach.
Maximilian Beichert, Andreas Bayerl, Jacob Goldenberg, and Andreas Lanz show that influencers with small followings, despite their limited reach, produce a higher return on investment in direct sales campaigns than their larger counterparts. By linking the strength of viewers’ engagement to actual revenue rather than vanity metrics, they provide the first large-scale evidence that, in influencer marketing, bigger is not always better.
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Beichert et al. (2026) studied this question.
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