Insights
When brands ask me how to "do Europe," I always pause before answering.
Because Europe is not a market. It's not even a region in the way most marketing people mean it. It's 44 cultures, 24 languages, and completely different creator ecosystems, each with its own visual language, its own relationship to advertising, and its own unwritten rules about what feels authentic and what feels foreign.
I know this not from a report. I know it from running campaigns across 14 European markets simultaneously and watching the same brand, the same product, and the same brief perform completely differently depending on who told the story and where.
Here's what I learned.
Italy doesn't want polished. It wants real.
When we ran an influencer campaign for a European heritage shoe brand in Italy last autumn, one of our first creative challenges had nothing to do with creator selection or content format. It had to do with the weather.
October in Italy is warm. Genuinely warm. And autumn/winter footwear collections need cold, or at least the suggestion of it. Asking Italian creators to style boots and closed-toe heels while it's 24 degrees outside is not just a styling challenge. It's a credibility challenge. The audience notices. They always notice.
That was learning number one: seasonal campaign timing doesn't translate 1:1 across Europe. What works in Germany in October doesn't work in Italy until December.
But the more interesting learning was about aesthetics. The Italian creators who performed best weren't the most polished ones. The content that drove the highest engagement looked slightly imperfect. Spontaneous. Like the creator genuinely just wanted to show you what she was wearing, not execute a brief. Engagement rates on feed posts were more than double those on reels, not because the reels were bad, but because the Italian audience responded to the stillness and intention of a carefully composed image over fast-cut video.
In Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece, the opposite was true. Clean, modern, minimal imagery consistently outperformed. No clutter, no chaos, no casual energy. The audience there expects aesthetic precision.
In France, there was a third entirely different preference: clean and reduced, but without spoken text. French creators who let the visuals carry the story — without speaking to camera, consistently outperformed those who narrated their content.
Three markets. Three completely different creative requirements. Same brief, same brand, same season.
The numbers that surprised me most
We tracked CPM, cost per thousand impressions, across markets, and the variance was striking.
The difference between the most expensive and least expensive reach in a single European campaign can exceed 3x. Southern and Eastern European markets often deliver highly engaged audiences at a fraction of what the same reach costs in Germany or Scandinavia. That's not a quality gap, it reflects market maturity, platform penetration, and how established the local creator economy is.
For brands with limited budgets, this matters enormously. Smart market allocation is itself a strategic decision. You can stretch a European budget significantly further if you understand where reach is underpriced and only if you've built the local creator relationships that make it work.
Bigger is not always better
Stories drove some of our highest click-through rates in the campaign and the best performers were not the creators with the largest followings. Our strongest CTR came from a creator with under 100,000 followers. Not the biggest name. Not the widest reach. But a deeply loyal community who clicked because they trusted her recommendation completely.
This is the thing about European influencer marketing that global playbooks consistently get wrong. A mid-size creator in the right market with the right community will consistently outperform a large creator who doesn't truly belong to that audience. Reach is easy to buy. Belonging is not.
What this means for brands
If you're a brand thinking about entering European markets or expanding within them, here is the honest version of what I'd tell you.
You cannot take your existing campaign and translate it. Not linguistically, and not creatively. What resonates in your home market was built for that market's cultural logic. Other markets have different logic.
You need creators who don't just reach your target audience, they belong to it. There's a difference between an influencer who posts about your product and one whose community genuinely trusts them on this topic. The second type is rarer and harder to find. But the results are not comparable.
And you need to understand that the same budget will buy you very different things in different markets, which means smart allocation is a strategy, not an afterthought.
The one thing I'd do differently
We ran the campaign with a strong focus on reach and engagement. What we recommended for the next campaign: add a discount code.
Not because performance wasn't strong. But because we wanted to close the loop between attention and action. High click-through rates tell you people were interested. A conversion tells you they moved. That's the evolution of European influencer marketing right now, from impressive impression numbers toward real commercial proof.
Europe is not one market. But it is one opportunity, if you know how to navigate it.
