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What Influencer Marketing Looks Like in South Korea

Published on August 27, 2026

For beauty and fashion brands in South Korea, influencers can account for around 70% of the marketing budget.

That figure comes from Gin Park, WPIC’s General Manager Korea, who oversees our local operations and works directly with international consumer brands in the market.

“For beauty and fashion, around 70% of the marketing budget can go to influencers,” Park says. “The rest usually goes into search and performance marketing.”

The number is striking. What matters more is where that money goes.

In Korea, influencer marketing looks very different depending on whether a brand needs to show a product, explain it, or find a very specific group of people who already care about the problem it solves.

Overview:

Instagram vs YouTube for Marketing in Korea

For fashion and beauty, Instagram remains a major channel. Fashion is still highly visual, and much of the content is built around showing how a product looks when worn or styled.

Cosmetics often need more explanation.

“If we need to educate consumers about a product, that’s when we go to YouTube,” Park says.

Korean beauty creators can go into much more detail there, from product use and formulation to comparisons and routines. The same creator may be active on Instagram as well, but the 2 platforms are serving different purposes. That is especially important for global brands competing in South Korea’s beauty market, where local consumers already have an enormous choice of domestic brands and products.

That sounds obvious once it is written down. In practice, Park says global brands often arrive with a much broader idea of influencer marketing and little sense of how those roles change by platform.

The difference becomes even clearer with products that sit outside the usual fashion and beauty categories.

How Niche Communities Shape Influencer Strategy

Loop Earplugs offers a useful example of how that can play out in Korea.

Before premium earplugs became more visible in the market, Park says most Korean consumers thought of the category as cheap foam earplugs. Loop came in at a much higher price point with a recognisable design and a specific noise-reduction function backed by product data.

There were obvious reasons the product could work in Korea. Dense cities and apartment living mean noise is a familiar irritation. Students were another natural audience, particularly in a country where the pressure around studying and university entrance can be intense.

The less obvious part was X (formerly Twitter).

We began testing the platform after identifying communities there that spent a surprising amount of time discussing functional products in detail. “There are communities on X in Korea that really dig into products,” Park says. “They want to know what is out there, how it works, and whether it is actually useful.”

That made X a better fit for Loop than its overall audience size might suggest.

What Influencer Marketing Looks Like in South Korea - Loop Kr Twitter
Loop Earplugs appearing in specialised conversations on X in Korea

The product also started appearing in more specialised conversations around ADHD, concentration, and sleep. Users were sharing how they used the earplugs themselves, which opened up use cases that went well beyond the usual music festival or lifestyle positioning.

“You have to find the niche group where the product makes sense,” Park says. “Start with the theory, test it and look at the results. Sometimes it misses. This one really hit.”

X was not the strategy. Finding the right audience was.

The same thinking extends well beyond beauty or functional accessories. Categories such as South Korea’s sports and outdoor market have their own communities, interests, and ways of discovering products. Starting with a standard list of the country’s biggest social platforms can miss much of that nuance.

What Global Brands Get Wrong About the Korean Market

Park says most global brands already understand that influencers matter in Korea. The problem is usually a lack of specificity.

“Brands tend to talk about Korea in broad strokes,” he says. “They know influencers are important, but they do not always understand which platforms to use or how those platforms fit together.”

That becomes expensive fairly quickly when influencer activity can absorb the majority of the marketing budget in categories such as beauty and fashion.

A large creator audience is useful. So is reach. But neither tells a brand whether people are in the mood to discover a product, learn about it, or spend 20 minutes debating how well it actually works.

The brands that tend to get more out of influencer marketing are the ones that start with how people already behave around the category, then work backwards into the platform and creator strategy.

For global consumer brands entering Korea, that is a far better starting point than importing the same influencer plan they use everywhere else.

At WPIC Korea, much of our work starts there: understanding how a category behaves locally before deciding where a brand should spend.

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