Influencer-led content on TikTok, captured 78% of all ticket purchases for the 2025 Tesselaar Tulip Festival, compared to performance from our paid ads. Highlighting the impact of leveraging platform-native content over overly polished paid ads.
Why Influencer Is Becoming a Performance Lever
Influencer marketing used to sit mostly in the “awareness” bucket. But across clients like Simonds and Tesselaar Tulip Festival, we’re seeing it play a much bigger role in overall paid performance.
We’ve been leaning more into creator partnerships — not just to extend reach, but because it’s genuinely helping improve the efficiency of our paid campaigns.
What we’re noticing
Creator content builds trust faster
Creator content just lands differently. It feels native to the platform, less polished, more real — and that makes it more credible.
That trust layer helps both organically and when we put paid behind it.
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How we use it in paid campaigns
Performance is strongest when:
- Creator content runs alongside brand creative.
Ex: For Simonds we ran an influencer ad alongside our paid ads on TikTok, with the influencer driving much higher engagement (9%) compared to 1.14% on our paid brand ads.
- We test it in both the top of funnel (traffic objective) and the bottom of the funnel (lead capture).
- It’s built into the media plan from the start — not bolted on later
When we convert it into an ad, it doesn’t feel forced. And we’re regularly seeing it outperform traditional brand assets.
Why This Matters Now
Consumer behaviour has shifted. People trust people more than brands.
We at Sonar aren’t choosing between influencer and paid ads for our campaigns, we are blending the two to improve performance.
