The news: Social media marketers are prioritizing user-generated content (UGC) and influencer collaborations. More than three-quarters (82%) of B2B and B2C marketers say UGC is at least somewhat important, and 67% plan to increase influencer budgets next year, per Emplifi’s State of Social Media Marketing 2026 report.

Influencer content is becoming a growth engine for social media marketing, especially when paired with UGC. Forty-one percent want to repurpose influencer-created content as UGC, marking how combining the strategies can boost their potential, per Emplifi.

Top campaign goals:

• 70% of marketers cite brand awareness as a major objective for influencer campaigns, followed by content creation (48%).
• Sales ranks lower at 43%, indicating that marketers still view social media as an upper-funnel tool rather than a direct sales driver.

Influencer content can also demonstrate product value to consumers and encourage discovery: 65% of customers say such content sways their purchase decisions, per Emplifi.

Zooming in: Internally, enthusiasm around AI’s potential continues to drive experimentation. More than three-quarters (82%) of marketers are seeing at least moderate benefits from AI adoption and say it has made them more productive.

Top use cases:

• 30% plan to use AI for predictive analytics and customer insights.
• About one-quarter will use it for ad targeting and visual recognition, such as tagging images and videos.

This confidence in using AI for higher-level tasks, rather than limiting its application to content creation, demonstrates that the technology is resulting in ROI, though not necessarily monetarily.

The caveat: Despite AI’s assistance with workloads, marketers face challenges with their workload.

• Just 7% report never feeling burned out, and nearly half say they need more headcount and resources (45%) and better collaboration across teams (41%).
• 30% of social media marketers say their leadership only sometimes offers adequate budgets and tools to test new technologies.
• Less than half (37%) report their teams work together very closely, and 49% say they definitely want more joint planning.

Without better alignment and resources, the promise of AI efficiencies across teams could fall short of expectations.

What marketers should do: CMOs should focus on building teams that can work together across silos efficiently and identify measurable outcomes for AI—like time saved and improved data quality and analytics—to empower teams.

Marketers should invest in joint UGC and influencer strategies and monitor impact beyond vanity metrics, including conversions from influencer campaigns.

This content is part of EMARKETER’s subscription Briefings, where we pair daily updates with data and analysis from forecasts and research reports. Our Briefings prepare you to start your day informed, to provide critical insights in an important meeting, and to understand the context of what’s happening in your industry. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.