Sarah walks into Sephora and buys a luxury serum.
On a sales report, that looks like an in-store purchase. But if you rewind three weeks, you’d have a clear insight into her buying journey.
Her favorite skincare creator mentioned the serum in her evening routine. Sarah kept scrolling, but the brand name stuck in her mind. A few days later, it appeared in another creator’s gift guide. Okay, maybe I should look at it.
She searched for reviews on YouTube, read dozens of comments, checked the price, and eventually decided to think about it.
The next time she was in Sephora, she recognized the bottle. She tried the texture, remembered what she’d heard, and bought it.
Sarah's story is a reminder that the place a purchase happens tells you very little about where the decision began. The purchase doesn’t start at the shelf. It starts in the feed, sometimes days or weeks before anyone’s standing in an aisle.
For enterprise marketers, this has consequences well beyond attribution. It changes which creators belong in a campaign, what their content needs to accomplish, and where the budget needs to go.
Table of Contents
TL;DR
Build around shopper decisions. Discovery, research, reassurance, and purchase can happen across different platforms and retailers.
Give creator content a clear job. Introducing a product, answering an objection, and prompting a store visit require different briefs.
Make the retail connection part of the campaign. Product availability, geography, timing, packaging, and the call to action should work together.
Define success before launch. Agree on the business result you want and the data you’ll use to evaluate it. If the goal is retail sales, build sales measurement into the plan alongside reach and engagement.
What is omnichannel influencer marketing?
Omnichannel influencer marketing connects creator content with the places shoppers discover, evaluate, and buy a product. It coordinates the message, content, distribution, and measurement across social platforms, brand channels, online retailers, and physical stores.
Enterprise teams already know shoppers move across channels. The harder question is whether campaign planning reflects that behavior.
A creator program might have an awareness target. Paid social has a traffic target. The retail team has a sales target. Each team can meet its own brief while leaving gaps between them.
In Sarah’s story, those gaps look like unanswered questions: Is this worth the price? Will it work for me? Where can I try it?
Her journey might take her back to a creator after she visits a product page. She might compare reviews while standing in the aisle, or visit a store and eventually order from the brand’s website. Discovery and consideration can repeat.
According to Circana, 90% of consumers are omnichannel shoppers like Sarah, and they spend nearly twice as much on average as online-only shoppers. MetricsCart describes the corresponding expectation: shoppers want to move easily between apps, websites, and physical stores.
Every touchpoint should help the shopper make the next decision, even when that decision happens somewhere else.
Give creators a job at each purchase decision
In Sarah’s case, no creator link captured the checkout. One creator introduced her to the product, another piqued her interest, and the review helped her evaluate its quality. That doesn’t establish that the content failed, or prove exactly how much each exposure contributed. This is what we call the halo effect in creator marketing, as it's not always specifically attributable to an influencer post, but it indirectly lifts sales.
Your campaign needs to account for those different functions. Start with the questions a shopper needs answered, then choose the creator and format that can answer them credibly.
This should also influence the creators you choose to work with. A beauty creator known for detailed explanations may be well suited to product evaluation. A local lifestyle creator may have a stronger connection to the communities around participating stores. You should review audience location and relevant past content alongside the creator’s own location.
It should also affect format. A quick video can establish a use case; a longer review can explore details. Either can prompt a purchase when it gives the audience what they need. Later’s research on YouTube’s full-funnel role explores how Shorts and long-form can work within the same strategy.
Takeaway: Write the shopper question into the brief. Then make the creator’s job specific enough to guide the content.
What the shopper's path actually looks like
The buying journey today looks more like a loop, and our research shows what happens at each turn.
Discovery starts on social. In our 2026 consumer research, 66% of social media users said they'd bought something in the past year that they first discovered on social. In the previous 30 days alone, 35% had looked up a product because of a creator.
Consideration happens across many touchpoints, often more than once. Before their most recent non-routine purchase, 38% of shoppers read customer reviews, 32% compared prices, and 29% watched video reviews or demos. That research happens on the couch, in retailer apps, and in the aisle.
The purchase often happens where the brand can't see it. Circana found that e-commerce drove 35% of food and beverage dollar growth while holding only about 10% of the market. Across all US retail, e-commerce accounts for 17% of spending, while the rest still happens in physical stores. Our respondents said 46% of their purchases over the previous three months, on average, happened in-store.
Retail analysts call this behavior "phygital," a blend of physical and digital: shoppers treat their phone and the store as one environment. They research online and buy in person (sometimes called webrooming), pull up reviews in the aisle, order online for pickup, or spot something on a shelf and check TikTok before it goes in the cart.
That offline share is the part of the journey a creator link can't track, and it's where most CPG sales begin.
How Later campaigns connect inspiration to the shopping trip
Maruchan: building a creator mix around everyday cravings
For its Saucy Noods launch, Maruchan partnered with Later around specific occasions: late-night cravings, dorm meals, and study breaks.
Each creator group had a distinct job. Food creators provided taste credibility. Dorm chefs demonstrated easy meals. Comedians brought entertainment and shareability. Together, the content gave shoppers different reasons to notice and consider the product.
The plan also evolved with audience response. When a creator’s roommate posted an organic video that gained traction, Later brought both creators together for a collaborative extension. Strong organic assets then became paid media, targeting demographics already engaging with the content.
The campaign achieved 3.2 times its view goal, 3.8 times the TikTok organic engagement benchmark, and 8.4 times the TikTok click-through benchmark.
The planning lesson: build the creator mix around the reasons someone might try your product, then budget to extend the content that resonates. Creator selection, creative, and distribution should inform each other throughout the campaign.
What to change in your next campaign plan
Start with three decisions that make the path to purchase easier.
Define the shopping occasion.“Drive consideration” leaves too much open. “Help busy parents choose these products during their next trip to a major retailer before the promotion ends” gives the team a shopper, a need, a destination, and a deadline.
Build the creator mix around the path. When one major retailer expanded from performance-only creators to a mix of 70% performance, 20% brand, and 10% UGC creators, creator-driven sales grew from $193 million to $437 million on just 7% more spend.
Make the trip to the store easy. Show the exact packaging, name the retailer, and link to the product page or store locator. Confirm availability in target markets, and time posts to on-shelf dates and promotions. Then follow the journey yourself to check that the next step is obvious.
Bring creator, paid media, retail, and measurement teams into these decisions before the brief is approved. Sarah’s receipt records the end of her journey. Your campaign needs to account for what happened three weeks earlier.
Want help building a campaign around that path? Explore Later’s influencer marketing services.
