Gen Zers are more trusting of ads in general than their older generation counterparts, but it comes with a catch: they are confident in their ability to see through facetious advertisements. While Gen Z tends to accept advertising as part of their online lives, they don’t tend to trust advertising at face value. This is where influencers are still unmatched. Over 40% of Gen Z social media users trust an influencer’s brand recommendation. Brands who want to target Gen Z should consider utilizing influencer marketing before other types of organic or paid marketing, and take advantage of pre-established relationships between consumers and their favorite influencers.

Meet Them Where They Are
It’s no secret that Gen Z is the most popular generation on social media. According to EMARKETER, a whopping 87.9% of the generation’s U.S. population uses social media. On average across KSM brand awareness Meta campaigns, users 18-24 were 30% more likely to recall an influencer-specific ad compared to a brand-developed ad vs those ages 25+. Gen Z trusts influencers over brand-created content, and influencers can share your brand’s value just as easily as a 15-second sponsored ad. When you want to focus your efforts and need to reach Gen Z, go with influencers.
Influencers & Finance: Think Outside the Retail Box

A KSM influencer program for a client within the financial industry shows that social media users aged 18-24 drove higher CTR performance on TikTok than users aged 25-34. According to EMARKETER, banks are utilizing social media to help educate younger generations about finances. Instead of having a financial advisor, consumers can go to their favorite influencers to learn how to be financially responsible. 50% of surveyed Gen Z consumers use influencer content to research banking products and services on social media. For our client, being present in the influencer space built connections with a critical growth audience and increased their consumers’ lifetime value. Most industries can utilize influencer marketing—especially if your industry is tourism, food, or finance, the opportunity to connect with a Gen Z audience may be greater than you think.
Create Long-Lasting Relationships
Gen Z values transparency and authenticity. Work with influencers who also value authenticity to build the relationship you strive for with Gen Z. Building a relationship and partnership with the same group of influencers throughout many campaigns, over multiple platforms, demonstrates trust between your brand and the influencers, and that trust carries over to the influencers’ audiences.
Utilize Micro-Influencers to Reach Niche, Targeted Audiences
Micro-influencers are influencers with about 1k-100k followers on a given social media platform and tend to have more niche audiences with specific interests. Macro-influencers have around 100k-1MM followers and can be used to reach a broad demographic, such as young women, under a larger umbrella of interests. Partnering with micro-influencers is often a more efficient way to reach targeted Gen Z audiences where they’re already consuming engaging media that aligns with their interests.
Micro-influencers are often regarded as subject matter experts in the topic(s) that they have built their platforms on due to their niche focuses. As a result, they are trusted by Gen Z audiences in those topics. However, a brand’s partnership with a micro-influencer needs to be strategic. As we learned with the KSM influencer program for a financial client, brands/agencies will need to look through the creator’s content to discern if the content aligns with their messaging and/or core beliefs to connect with the audience authentically.
Finding the right influencer is about more than just follower count, however. It’s about sharing brand values, where they fit in the consumer journey, and the quality of their content. It’s also not a given that an influencer will reach the full breadth of your audience, even if they check all your other boxes. In that case, leveraging paid amplification of the influencers’ content can fill gaps. We leverage our data sources and tools like Audience Engine, Consumer Bridges, and Social Sight to both search for the most relevant influencers and optimize the reach for your specific business case. We also, as a standard, negotiate content usage rights so that brands can repurpose the assets in other marketing efforts, further stretching the value of the partnership and providing a platform to continue building trust with Gen Z consumers on your own channels.
Building on Success
Trust is not easily built among Gen Zers, and anchoring a campaign with influencers can pave the way for a better relationship, regardless of your brand’s industry. However, it’s important to remember that influencers aren’t a magic wand: influencer campaigns can help to increase engagement, strengthen brand relationships, and build trust over time, but these principles need to be carried over to the rest of a brand’s campaign. Prioritizing transparency and authenticity across all advertising channels will help to bridge the gap between trust in a brand’s advertisements and trust in a brand itself.