The public has been enduring a cost-of-living crisis fuelled by soaring inflation and utility bills, but now businesses are also facing their own ‘cost of operating crisis’. Just this morning, it was announced that the UK is halfway into recession, after the latest official figures showed the economy shrank by 0.2% between July and September. Amidst such a challenging economic period for the country, companies are forced to be more prudent with their spending, with marketing budgets being slashed across the board to cut down on costs.

However, a new concept of the ‘barter economy’ has come to the fore, providing savvy brands with an innovative way of reducing costs but still engaging in crucial marketing activities. Through this approach, brands offer goods or services which content creators then post about, solely in exchange for receiving them as opposed to money. In relation to traditional, paid influencer marketing, founders of Room Unlocked Alex Payne and Tanya Hamilton-Smith argue this form of value exchange is far more cost-effective for brands.

This also differs greatly from aimless gifting in which brands send unsolicited products to influencers in the hope that they’ll post about them. By operating in this way, retailers end up with billions of pounds of excess, unsold inventory with returns creating over a staggering 2 billion kilograms of waste in landfills each year, and more than 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide – according to CNBC.

By targeting the correct influencers that have a genuine interest in your brand, partnerships can be created purely based on passion that can then be turned into value. In this way, Room Unlocked provides the most effective form of influencer marketing, which generates real results and over five times more content for brands. Room Unlocked facilitates this through its innovative platform in which influencers bid to secure promotions with brands. However, with no transactional fee passing from brand to influencer, the content produced by influencers acts as advocacy. Put simply, for love, not money.