What you get out of this
Influencer (Creator) Marketing
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This playbook was co-written with Avery Schrader from Modash and Paul Benigeri from Archive.
Intro
Consider two ways to learn about a product on social media:
- An ad—like the millions of others you’ve seen
- Someone you trust and have been following for years tells you how much a product means to them
Now imagine the second approach, but done at scale for your business. You'd be empowering an army of trusted people who introduce your brand and products to excited potential customers.
That’s influencer marketing, and that’s what we’re going to reverse engineer at a more advanced level than you’ve seen before.
On average, every $1 spent on influencer marketing results in ~$6 of revenue—a 600% ROI. And by working with influencers, some SaaS and ecommerce companies are consistently acquiring high–lifetime value (LTV) customers at $5 each.
That’s almost unheard of with paid acquisition. Especially in a world where Instagram ads have CACs that rarely dip below $20.
Influencer marketing can be a more profitable and scalable acquisition channel than paid ads.
We’ve interviewed 10 top influencer marketing practitioners for this playbook—marketers who have actually scaled influencers as a growth channel—so you can get everything you need to test influencer marketing immediately. We'll cover tactics that the best companies are doing but not talking about openly.
You’ll learn:
- How to find and activate influencers who can actually sell
- How to automate your influencer process, so you get more with far less work
- Tactics to optimize top influencer channels: Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok
- How to accurately attribute purchases from influencer marketing
Context on influencer marketing
If you’re advanced in influencer marketing, click here to skip the introductory context and begin with advanced strategy.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a business and an influential person to promote something—typically a product, service, or campaign.
“Influencer” can describe anyone from a celebrity actor or professional athlete to everyday folks who have a few thousand followers on Instagram. The thing they all have in common: They create content that their audiences pay attention to.
Influencer marketing typically looks like this:
- Businesses find and reach out to relevant influencers.
- Influencers create content to promote products and services to their audiences.
- Businesses compensate them in exchange for exposure and creative assets.
Reasons to consider influencer marketing:
- Conversion: Create an affiliate engine by arming a community of influencers with performance-based compensation.
- Grow your organic social following: Some influencers’ followers will follow your company account. Then you’ll be able to reach them “for free” with organic posts.
- Social proof: Influencers’ audiences see your collaboration as a stamp of approval for your brand.
- Get content: Influencers can create content for you. And you can use that content for your own ads, organic social posts, and landing pages.
Goals of influencer marketing
To figure out where you should be focusing your influencer efforts, think about what you want to get out of your campaigns:
- Are you looking for a high return on ad spend (ROAS)?
- Are you building a community?
- Are you prioritizing impressions and awareness?
- Are you simply interested in contracting out the production of quality content?
A few examples of how companies use influencer marketing:
- HVMN works with fitness and nutrition influencers on YouTube to reach audiences who regularly purchase supplements. Their main focus is increasing ROAS.
- Athletic Brewing, a non-alcoholic beer company, works with sports and outdoor influencers whose Instagram audiences are looking for healthy alternatives to alcoholic beer. They focus on building community and brand awareness.
- Apparel brand Moncler collaborated with fashion influencers and created a song for TikTok. It went viral and reached millions of users interested in fashion. The goal of their campaign was to generate impressions and awareness.
- The Hustle worked with tech Twitter influencers to get signups for their business and tech-leaning newsletter. They were focused on conversion and increasing ROAS.
Which companies should use it?
Influencer marketing works exceptionally well for consumer companies that sell broadly appealing products. This lets brands test the effectiveness of many different niches and influencers, then narrow down to those with the best results—which is often needed to make campaigns profitable.
- Take Ridge wallets. Their products are broadly appealing (they sell wallets), so they’re able to sponsor gamers, car enthusiasts, travelers, and athletes. They have enough surface area to hunt for the best influencer arrangements.
- Or Honey, the automatic online coupon tool. Since everyone who shops online benefits from saving money, they can work with influencers across every niche.
Data from influencer platforms supports this claim. Our platform of choice is Modash—they have some of the best influencer marketing data, which brands use to run hyper-targeted campaigns. Modash’s data shows that the best results come in broad product categories like blankets, food delivery, hair care, and ride hailing.
Among broadly appealing products, these types of brands typically see the best results:
1. Brands that sell physical products directly to consumers (DTC): Physical products show well through social media’s video and photo content.
Good: Well-designed protein shakes are likely to show well through photos and video. They’re portable, so influencers can create an array of appealing content—they might take photos and video at the gym or beach.
Bad: Email marketing software. It’s more challenging for influencers to capture the magic of digital products through photos and video.
2. Brands with perceived high-quality products: If influencers truly love your products—so much that they’d want to pay for them—you can “gift” them product in exchange for content and exposure. High-quality products also create strong word of mouth that amplifies the return on influencer campaigns.
Good: An athletic-wear brand that makes their products with ridiculously comfortable and durable fabrics. When influencers receive gear they're actually attracted to, they’re more likely to become brand evangelists.
Bad: A brand that’s dropshipping stock T-shirts with custom prints. The low-quality products will dissuade influencers from sharing.
But more generally, it can work for most B2C companies. (For niche B2B, it’s doable but more challenging, since there are fewer influencers with audiences that aggregate your desired buyers. For B2B, Twitter influencers, LinkedIn influencers, and podcasts can work better than influencers on other platforms.)
Influencer marketing is evolving
While we’ll use the term “influencer” throughout this playbook, it’s important to note that the people you’ll want to work with are beginning to prefer the term “creators.”
Creators place more artistic value on the content they create than legacy social media celebrities do. They’re writers, photographers, videographers, artists, and performers. They’re craftspeople.
A second change has gone hand in hand with the creator movement: Influencer marketing has become increasingly performance-driven. Brands are moving away from paying lump sums for creator posts, instead favoring payment models that compensate creators based on how many conversions they drive. This is a better deal for brands.
There are a number of platforms that make it easy to track influencer-derived conversions (e.g., Bitly, Shopify, and Tapfiliate)—so you’re paying for conversion, not simply reach.
The old approach to influencer marketing is simply not as profitable. It entails:
- Paying large sums based on follower counts
- Dictating to influencers how you want them to post their content—as if you know their audience better than they do
Affiliate marketing (paying influencers for sales that come in through unique links) and whitelisting (running ads through creator accounts) are two of the new performance-based influencer marketing models that have grown in popularity. We’ll cover both.
There are, however, also downsides to a performance-based approach:
- It’s not easy to find influencers who agree to this model: Big influencers are used to getting paid upfront for their content.
- You could become too focused on ROAS: Many brands fail to track ROAS effectively. Then they shut down their influencer marketing, even though they’re getting a lot out of it, both on the performance side and brand side.
How to 80/20: Starting with influencer marketing
Here’s the 80/20 influencer marketing approach we recommend starting with:
- Begin with Instagram: It’s the ideal test channel.
- Set aside 15 hours per week: This is necessary to properly test the channel. It takes serious work to validate.
- Get good data: We’ll show you how to get data on which influencers are worth working with.
- Start with brand ambassadors: Pay these influencers via an affiliate model and form long-term relationships with them.
- Optimize your processes: Now that it works, reduce your time investment to make influencer marketing more scalable and easier to delegate.
- Optimize the economics: Run tests to increase your ROAS.
- Nurture relationships: Empower your influencers for better results and more brand credibility.
Let’s look at each step in detail.
Start with Instagram
Most influencer marketers should consider starting with Instagram. Here’s why:
- Instagram influencer marketing is already validated across most verticals and business models.
- How the channel works is widely understood. It’s likely that each member of your team has an Instagram account where they're at least occasionally active.
- Most influencer marketing tools are already built around Instagram.
- You can leverage Facebook’s infrastructure. Increase the impact of your campaigns by using Facebook's Brand Collabs Manager, shoppable posts, and Ads Manager.
We’ll explore other channels later. For now, it’s important to focus. Your goal isn’t to “do influencer marketing.” Your goal is to build a process around a scalable, affordable acquisition channel.
Set aside 15 hours per week at minimum
Building an influencer marketing funnel is time-consuming. It involves:
- Finding and assessing influencers at scale
- Communicating with and onboarding influencers
- Managing long-term relationships
- Deciding on incentive structures and payouts
- Setting goals and measuring success
- Automating to reduce cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Running experiments to improve performance
Each of these steps requires serious optimization—not just setup. For example, in your initial outreach to influencers, you have at least three variables to experiment with:
- What do you say in your first messages to build trust and excitement?
- Where do you say it? (E.g., comments, DMs, email, Story responses, etc.)
- What sequence do you say it in? (DM then comment? Comment then DM? How many email follow-ups?)
We’ll cover each of these.
1. Finding influencers
Let’s begin.
First, know that most brands that have poor experiences with influencer marketing make a big mistake: They don’t actually find influencers with audience-product fit.
You’d be surprised by how many brands pay influencers who look “on brand,” without realizing that the influencer’s audience is completely different from their own consumers.
You must get their audience data from them before agreeing to a partnership. Some notable data points to request:
- Geography—preferably broken down by country, then state, then city
- Detailed age breakdown
- Gender breakdown
- Topics of interest based on engagement with the influencer’s content
Conversely, don’t overly narrow your target audience. If you sell lamps, your target persona isn’t someone who's interested in lamps. Go one level higher to target people who are interested in interior design, architecture, or even fashion.
Good: Our audience is 22-30-year-old women in New York City, interested in hobbies related to design, architecture, real estate, or fashion.
Bad: Our audience is precisely 22-year-old women in the United States who feverishly scroll Instagram looking for lamps.
You’ll eventually use SaaS tools to find relevant influencers, rather than patrolling Instagram manually. Our favorites are Modash (known for its influencer data), CreatorIQ, Dovetale, and Influent.
But starting your hunt manually is beneficial. Getting into the weeds helps you understand your market and its players. What do they talk about? What do they post?
Here are a few ways to start manually:
- Look at relevant, high-performing brands: Look at adjacent brands on your preferred channel that are getting a lot of positive engagement. Find influencers who are tagging them by navigating to the “Tagged” sections of their profiles.
- Look at hashtags: Search for hashtags related to promotions, like #sponsored, #paid, or #ad. Then search for hashtags in your niche, to ensure that you’re only sorting through influencers who are relevant to your brand. By searching by hashtag, you can narrow your search to the active influencers who are most likely to reach your audience.
- Crawl your audience manually: Look through DMs. Figure out which influencers are already tagging you.
- Once you find a fit, ask for intros: Ask your first influencer for their suggestions of who else to work with. You can also use Instagram's “similar profiles” functionality to find others who might be a fit.
Once you get a lay of the land, it’s critical to switch to one of the tools we mentioned above. They'll help you power your influencer selection and audience measurement.
When assessing influencers, there are two considerations to keep in mind: engagement and ambassadors.
Consideration: Check for engagement
Before reaching out to the influencers who appear relevant, ensure that they have a high-quality and real audience.
Some influencers purchase followers to inflate their asking price. That’s why we rank influencers based on engagement. That said, engagement can also be purchased for as little as $0.0088 per like, but using a fake follower tool can help. Tools can run analytics on profiles and filter out the ones that raise red flags—like profiles without profile photos, followers, and feed content.
Real comments are easy to spot. Check out this example from Blue Apron. You’ll notice that people are commenting on both the recipe and the dog—signaling that they’re actually consuming the content in the post.
Fake engagement, on the other hand, looks more like this:
- Just emojis
- Vague comments like “love it” and “keep it up”
- No substantial comments or questions
If you’re scaling up and using an influencer discovery/analysis tool, it should include an engagement-rate calculator and a follower-credibility checker (like Modash’s fake follower tool).
If you’re not using a SaaS tool, here’s how you can vet your list manually:
- Look at each influencer’s engagement (likes and positive comments). Make sure they look authentic. There should be comments that show genuine interest in the product or ask specific questions—not only generic comments like “Nice! 🔥” You can also scroll through the commenters and look for suspicious profiles (i.e., ones without profile images).
- Do your due diligence on audience fit. Most social platforms have audience insight tools with data about location, age, and interests. Ask influencers for screenshots of their engagement and audience stats.
Consideration: Start with ambassadors
You’ll notice that we use the term "ambassadors" throughout this guide. Ambassadors are long-term influencer partners who operate on an affiliate model.
Why use an affiliate model? Instead of getting paid to post, some influencers will let you pay them to convert others. This de-risks your spend and sets you up to potentially work with them long term, instead of for the duration of one campaign. Here’s what happens when brands work with influencers long term:
- High frequency: Your product is continually surfaced to that influencer’s audience. Audiences often only consider buying products after they’ve seen them multiple times.
- Trust: When audiences see influencers acting as brand representatives over a long period of time, they’re more likely to trust the brand and its products—because it no longer looks like a one-off sponsorship. People internalize the fact that the influencer probably believes in the brand. More trust leads to better results.
- Data: One-off campaigns don't provide enough insights into what type of content or influencers work best for your brand. By developing ongoing relationships, you can run experiments and guide influencers to be more efficient (by sharing what's working).
As a result, content from durable relationships drives higher engagement and, typically, higher conversion rates.
2. Optimize your influencer workflow
Let’s optimize three steps of your relationships with influencers.
Step 1: Look at your internal data
Segment your existing customer data to dial in to your highest-earning personas.
Say, for example, that your brand sells outdoor backpacks. You would analyze your data to understand the psychographic traits of your highest-LTV customers—those who spend the most over a period of time.
Then you would find influencers whose audiences align with your highest-LTV customers. You could match influencer audience data with your own internal data to optimize the influencers you work with.
Once you’re working with a number of influencers, you can pull their data into a dashboard using a data visualization tool like Looker. Compare their audience data with their impression and conversion numbers.
Double down on your top performers, seek out new influencers who have similar audiences to them, and drop the underperformers.
Step 2: First contact and onboarding
To help them figure out how the program works, you can build a landing page for influencers. Include:
- Benefits of joining
- Requirements (like minimal follower count)
- CTAs to collect their information
- Bonus: social proof to increase conversion
Think of influencer recruitment as a funnel: If influencers clearly understand that you run a fun, trustworthy, lucrative program, you’ll recruit more—and higher-quality—influencers.
You attract the best of the best not just by paying them, but also by effectively pitching them on why they should associate their identities with your brand. Don’t rely on a short DM to do this. Build out a landing page.
Here’s an example of a strong partner landing page from Athletic Greens.
Here’s another example, from Four Sigmatic.
On to outreach.
We recommend recruiting your first 20-30 influencers manually before automating first-touch outreach. By reaching out manually to your first batch of influencers, you’ll learn what gets them excited and what establishes trust.
You’ll also find friction points that you can smooth over before scaling outreach or delegating it.
- Maybe your language isn’t casual enough for the type of influencers you’re trying to reach, so you’re not getting responses.
- Or maybe your offer isn’t compelling enough, and you need to increase your affiliate payout.
Aim to get a response from at least 50% of the creators you reach out to. According to our partners’ data, that’s a sign that you’ve found outreach-influencer fit, and you can begin scaling up.
Where should you send your message?
If you try reaching out on influencer channels (like Instagram), the odds of your message getting lost in a crowded inbox are high.
We recommend reaching out through a sequence of channel DMs, email, and comments on influencers' social posts.
- Start by sending an influencer a DM on Instagram. Follow up again after two days if you haven’t heard back.
- Simultaneously, find their email (usually easy through their Instagram profile or personal website). Send them an email, and mention that you also DMed them.
- If you don't hear back within a week, consider commenting on their Instagram posts. Since influencers often check and respond to comments to interact with their audience members, they’ll likely see your comment.
Step 3: Incentive structures
Once they’ve said yes, start experimenting with incentives that sustain you as a top priority for them. Treat nothing as static—everything is a learning opportunity for you and them.
A few examples:
- Run a one-month promotion, with creators getting paid very well per conversion—say a 25%+ commission. Then, when you have enough influencer volume, segment creators to run your promo at different commission levels and find the “sweet spot” that's best for your brand’s economics.
- Give big cash bonuses at notable milestones. For example, send $10,000 after the first 50, 100, and 1,000 conversions an influencer generates.
- Give a random creator in your network a PR boost each month. Highlight them on your blog, influencer page, newsletter, and social media channels. They’ll appreciate the boost, and they might be more likely to push your product organically, without you needing to enter into a contract.
You should always require a minimum number of monthly conversions to stay in your influencer program. Continually increase that monthly conversion quota to keep influencers posting at a regular interval—and keep you from having to manage dead relationships with low ROI.
3. Optimize the channel
Now that you have real and relevant influencers with working incentives, you can begin optimizing the channel itself (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.).
There are two ways to focus your channel optimization:
- Increase the volume of acquisitions without increasing the number of influencers
- Decrease the cost per acquisition without paying less (increasing ROAS)
Here’s the highest-leverage way to optimize your channel: Regularly share what’s working with your creators. Keep an eye out for when an influencer has a spike in conversions. See if you can identify why their content did particularly well, and reverse engineer it.
Influencer monitoring tools can help you collect your content and understand what’s working more quickly. Share your findings with the rest of your influencers so they, too, can increase conversions.
This is critical. Influencer marketing isn’t like running ads—influencers are people who need feedback loops and ongoing management.
You further benefit from this being a two-way relationship in that, with their permission, you can repurpose the content your influencers create—you can post the same photos or videos they share on their own channels.
Creating quality content is expensive and time consuming. By repurposing your influencers’ authentic content, you’re stretching out the benefit of your influencer marketing spend.
Take a look at this post by Athletic Brewing. It’s the same photo we used in the example in our introduction—but this time, Athletic Brewing used it on their own feed:
4. Invest in your relationships
To repeat, there’s a key distinction between influencer marketing and other growth channels: You’re working with humans, not dashboards.
How to develop win-win relationships with your influencers:
- Become friends with them. Use casual language. Speak to them like a friend, not like a PR mouthpiece. Respond quickly, and avoid canned responses. Influencers don't like talking to robots or responding to scripted messages.
- Let them try your product first. They need to trust your brand and product before they recommend either to their audience. They'll be more authentic when they actually like and respect your brand and the people behind it.
- Get them excited. Influencers do their best work when they’re enthusiastic. Work with your influencers to understand what's been successful for them in the past and what gets their own audience excited.
- Set clear expectations. What are your timelines, goals, and requirements? If you make them clear early on, you’ll gain trust from your influencers, and they’ll be more likely to engage for the long term. There are a lot of fake, flaky sponsors out there wasting influencers' time.
- Limit admin work when possible. A 15-page NDA for a $100 Story post kills momentum. Save time and keep things moving by cutting out as much admin work as possible—especially for low-cost campaigns. If you’re arranging a longer-term contract or an expensive campaign, then some paperwork will be necessary. But keep it light.
- Invest more deeply in existing relationships. When your influencers post about you, thank them, and let them know what you liked about their post. Send them more products for free. Start a conversation about how you can continue working together. It’s often higher ROI to double down on existing quality relationships than it is to find and activate new ones.
Most importantly: Give away creative control
Remember that influencers will be speaking directly to their audiences, so give them creative liberty. Why?
- Your content needs to be authentic.
- They know their audience best. They know what goes viral and what gets engagement.
Meaning, provide guidelines rather than word-for-word scripts.
- Explain your goal and constraints. Share examples of content that has been successful for you in the past.
- But let them create the content.
Only work with influencers whose visions align with yours. Study their content. That way, you know you can trust them to create strong original content.
YouTube and TikTok
For many, only once you’ve proven success with Instagram should you move on to other platforms based on your learnings. Instagram is a clear first step because it’s familiar to most marketers, and most influencer platforms are set up specifically for it.
Content looks different across channels, and influencers operate differently on each channel. So there's a lot of work that goes into building out any given channel.
We’ll briefly cover the rest of the top three: YouTube and TikTok.
Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the top three channels for two reasons:
- They all have sizable, targetable audiences.
- They lend themselves to photos and video, which are usually necessary to drive conversion through influencers.
The following platforms could also work for influencer marketing, but they don't typically work as well. Consider experimenting with them if your product lends itself to the platform:
- Blogs
- Twitch
YouTube influencer marketing
Pros of YouTube:
- Often better attribution: Links are listed directly in video descriptions, whereas with Instagram, users have to navigate to an influencer’s profile to click the link (adding friction).
- Videos are evergreen and searchable: Since videos are searchable, old videos stay relevant—unlike Instagram, where content dies quickly. High-quality older videos can generate 30-60% of revenue for YouTube influencer campaigns. You can see long-tail success.
- Long-form content builds trust: The longer-form video format allows consumers to understand a product better than they would if they were to come across it on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.
Cons:
- High production costs: It’s expensive and time consuming for influencers to create video content. So it’s likely that YouTube influencers won’t work with you strictly on an affiliate basis—they’ll want to be compensated for the content they create.
There are two types of influencer sponsorships on YouTube:
- Dedicated video: Pay for a custom influencer-created video featuring your brand.
- Mid- or end-placement: Pay for a placement either in the middle or at the end of an influencer’s main videos. This type of sponsorship can keep your costs down significantly because influencers aren’t creating dedicated videos for your brand.
Examples of dedicated videos:
Next Games partnered with YouTubers Lele Pons and Anwar Jibawi to advertise the release of their new Walking Dead mobile game. Pons and Anwar created a dedicated video for Next Games that raked in over 13 million views.
Castrol Edge partnered with tech YouTuber Austin Evans for a dedicated video review of Castrol’s VR product.
Example of mid- or end-placements:
Yes Theory’s YouTube channel features Morning Brew at the end of one of their original videos:
Ali Abdaal features Audible in the middle of one of his videos:
Things to keep in mind when running YouTube influencer campaigns:
Find influencers via search
Look for YouTubers who have videos ranking for your products. They typically have Amazon affiliate links in their bios. You could onboard them into an affiliate program, so customers purchase directly from you instead of through Amazon.
Create tests for longer-term relationships
Because it's more time-consuming to produce quality content for YouTube, there’s a higher barrier to entry for influencers. Compared to Instagram, there are fewer nano-influencers who are willing to accept affiliate pay for quick videos. So working with influencers on YouTube generally requires more cash upfront.
But similarly to other channels, you can get more attractive influencer rates when you offer longer-term deals for multiple videos per month. It costs influencers less to create a few videos in one sitting for your brand, and they’ll pass those savings on to you.
So consider creating “tests” for long-term, higher-ROAS arrangements:
- Find an influencer you’d like to work with. Pay them to shoot a single video.
- If you're happy with the results, offer a one-month test project: a 30-day opt-out contract for a set number of videos, based on clear ROAS targets.
- If they hit their ROAS targets, negotiate a 12-month contract that gives them extra compensation when they re-hit those targets. By offering a 12-month contract—which means steady income for the influencer—you're likely to get a better price.
- Make sure you and the influencer agree that the rights to the content remain with your brand. That way, you can use the content for ads, landing pages, or organic social down the road. This gives you more mileage and helps de-risk the campaign’s cost.
Another reason for running long-term campaigns is that YouTube video performance is often volatile for influencers. For one video with an influencer, you could make $15k. For the next, it might be $1k.
To guard against this, consider paying extra for performance—if the influencer will allow it. Use coupon codes and trackable links to help with attribution. Put these links and codes in the video description, and have the influencer pin a comment to the top of the comments section that re-shares them. For added redundancy, use a post-purchase survey to ask customers where they heard about you.
TikTok
TikTok is experiencing explosive growth for influencer marketing.
Why?
- Attention spans for long form are losing ground to short-form memes.
- Production challenges favor short, on-brand, authentic video content.
TikTok leans into this pattern with brief, engaging video content. It’s more approachable to create content here than polished videos on YouTube.
Types of influencer content that work best on TikTok:
- Before and after videos. Guess paid for a video with a TikTok couple changing into new denim products.
- Education or tutorials. Gaming company Backyard worked with an up-and-coming TikTok influencer on a tutorial for one of their popular games.
- Unboxings. Apple works with influencers for product unboxings. By partnering with TikTok influencers, they make their products feel more accessible.
- Comedy. Red Bull works with TikTok influencers to create comedy videos featuring their products.
TikTok is volatile
TikTok has a high-variance algorithm. Meaning, the impressions that creators' posts get aren’t constant. So pay for performance or pay for a package of multiple videos.
One outcome of that variance: Smaller influencers can have more power than they do on other platforms. If a video is good, it gets boosted. It’s that simple.
Because of that, TikTok is better for discovery than most other platforms. It can be worth taking a chance on smaller creators if they’re very talented and you believe in their ability to break out.
Suggested strategy
- To find Tiktok influencers, consider an app like Swipehouse, which allows you to break down your campaign and get inbound requests from high-quality influencers. You can sort through your inbounds and work with the creators who fit your brand.
- Split your budget: Work with a few bigger creators, but take bets on a large number of small creators.
- Because of TikTok’s high-variance algorithm, we recommend giving creators even more creative freedom than you would on other platforms—they really need to hit an authentic nerve for videos to go viral. Restricting their creativity won’t get you closer to hitting that nerve.
Other ways to incentivize influencers
There are two types of influencer activations that require more nuance: gifting and whitelisting.
Gifting
Some brands bypass paying cash to influencers. Instead, they “gift” them: They send products for free.
This generally works with nano-influencers (influencers with fewer than 10k followers). Nano-influencers typically build small followings on social media alongside their other pursuits. This isn’t their full-time job, so they’re more likely to be satisfied with free products instead of cash.
Pros of gifting:
- It’s easy to get started with because it’s affordable—your only costs are inventory and time.
- Brands get their products directly into the hands of creators, who can then try them without having to discover them on their own. If they like your product, they might share it with their audience for free—and even give you better rates on paid sponsorships.
- Content that influencers make as a result of gifting is usually genuine, since they’re not obligated to post to fulfill a paid sponsorship. This quality content may be repurposable into ads.
Cons:
- It’s harder to make gifting work with bigger influencers. They'll generally only work with you if you agree to pay them, since this is their full-time job.
- You might wind up competing with brands that do offer to pay nano-influencers.
- It takes a lot of time to find creators who will agree to promote your gifts—it’s hard to execute at scale. And you need scale for impact.
Gifting could be another playbook entirely, since it demands a different approach. We suggest starting with our 80/20 affiliate model. Then, once you’ve proven influencer marketing as a channel, you could test process-driven gifting at scale, to compare your ROI with the affiliate model's.
We also recommend checking out EAG if you're ready to test gifting—that's their bread and butter. They've scaled many brands through gifting campaigns with nano-influencers.
Whitelisting
Whitelisting refers to running paid ads through influencers’ accounts.
With normal “organic” influencer marketing, you’re reaching influencers’ existing audiences—those who follow their accounts. But with whitelisting, you’re effectively taking over influencers’ accounts and running ads out of them, to reach people who don’t yet follow those influencers.
Why would you use whitelisting?
- It’s influencer marketing at scale. You're continuously reaching new audiences, and you’re not capped by influencers’ followings.
- It's social proof. Running ads through influencer accounts signals that those influencers support your brand and product. It’s a stamp of approval—a heavily weighted testimonial. People are more likely to engage with whitelisted ads than classic brand ads.
- Influencers are often willing to create more good content for you. Why? Because you’re putting ad dollars behind their accounts—and they’re getting new followers as a result. You’re helping them promote themselves. They're more likely to create content for free if you agree to put a certain number of ad dollars behind their account.
You can use a platform like Lumanu to run your whitelisting campaigns. It integrates directly with Facebook Ads Manager, and you can quickly put together A/B tests.
To get results from whitelisting, you’ll need to understand how paid social acquisition works. The process is much more like running paid social ads than navigating influencer relationships.
(We share tactics for running paid ads in our Growth Newsletter, which goes out to 50k+ marketers.)
Tracking results
Giving coupon codes and special links for influencers to share helps account for some conversion. But they won’t tell the whole story. People will often hear about your product from an influencer, then think about it later and come back to your site in a way that’s not tracked to that particular influencer.
The workaround? Combine analytics data with an attribution survey. Implement a post-purchase survey, and ask customers where they heard about you. List specific influencers as options.
Although your link data may show a low ROAS, you’ll likely find that your influencers are actually bringing in a higher ROAS once the survey data is accounted for.
There are tools like Enquire for Shopify that can get you 80%+ completion rates for post-purchase surveys.
What a job well done looks like
Here are two examples of companies that have scaled through influencer marketing, taking different approaches.
Daniel Wellington
Daniel Wellington scaled their brand through an ambassador influencer marketing program. Here’s how they made it work:
- They teamed up with influencers whose audiences best matched their highest-LTV customers.
- They sent their influencers watches and had them create and post content on Instagram (feed and Stories).
- Each influencer provided their audience with a unique coupon code (10-20% off).
- Codes tracked influencer performance, so Daniel Wellington was able to add/drop influencers based on conversion.
- They also repurposed influencer content for their own Instagram and website, stretching ROI.
Health Via Modern Nutrition (H.V.M.N.)
H.V.M.N. took a slightly different approach. The main goal of their influencer marketing was to scale content creation for their social channels, website, and ads.
So they created a gifting ambassador program.
- They sent free product to nano- and micro-influencers (fewer than 50k followers).
- Influencers created content on H.V.M.N.’s behalf.
- Influencers also received a discount code to share on social.
The creative assets generated helped H.V.M.N:
- Cut $8K/month in creative costs—they didn’t have to pay for content
- Lower their Facebook CPA by 25%—influencer content resonated with H.V.M.N.’s ad audiences
Cheat sheet
We've trimmed our strategy section into a concise cheat sheet. Below, you’ll find all the tactics without the context or reasoning. Consider this a checklist for you to reference while you implement your influencer strategy.
Start with Instagram
- Instagram influencer marketing is already validated across most industries.
- Members of your team probably already have Instagram accounts where they're at least occasionally active.
- Most influencer marketing tools are built around Instagram.
- You can leverage Facebook’s infrastructure.
Set aside 15 hours per week at minimum
Influencer marketing takes serious work. Set aside time for:
- Finding and assessing influencers at scale
- Communicating with and onboarding influencers
- Managing long-term relationships
- Deciding on incentive structures and payouts
- Setting goals and measuring success
- Automating to reduce CPA
- Running experiments to improve performance
Step 1: Find influencers
Look for influencers whose audiences match your target consumer:
- Geography broken down by country, then state, then city
- Age
- Gender
- Topics of interest
Start your search manually to get a lay of the land:
- Look at relevant, high-performing brands: Search for influencers who are tagging adjacent brands by navigating to the “Tagged” sections of their profiles.
- Search for high-quality content by location.
- Look at the hashtags #sponsored, #paid, or #ad, combined with hashtags in your niche.
- Crawl your DMs/tags for influencers who are reaching out to you.
Then use a SaaS tool to confirm that their audience data matches what you target:
Check for engagement
Use Modash’s fake follower tool to check your influencers’ percentage of fake followers. You should be skeptical of anything over 25%.
Start with ambassadors
Pay through an affiliate model (unique URLs or personalized discount codes) and form long-term relationships with these influencers.
Step 2: Optimize your workflow
Finding and analyzing influencers at scale
Use your influencer tools to track ongoing performance data (conversions, audience demographics, etc.).
Leverage this data to decide which influencers to work with. Drop underperforming influencers and niches and double down on influencers whose audiences are converting at higher rates.
First contact and onboarding
Build a landing page for influencers so they can easily figure out how your program works. Include:
- Benefits of joining
- Requirements (like minimal follower count)
- CTAs to collect their information
- Bonus: social proof to increase conversion
Automate your communication so you’re not spending a lot of time managing relationships. You can do this through your influencer tools:
- Start by sending an influencer a DM on Instagram.
- Simultaneously, send them an email and mention that you also DMed them.
- Consider commenting on their Instagram posts if you don’t hear back on 1 or 2.
A 50%+ response rate proves that your messaging is working.
Incentive structures
Experiment with incentives to improve your influencer ROI. A few options for tests:
- Run a one-month promotion, with creators getting paid 25%+ per conversion.
- Give free products or gift card bonuses for accomplishing different goals.
- Randomly highlight one of your influencers in your newsletter and on your blog, influencer page, and social media channels.
- Continually increase the monthly conversion quota.
Step 3: Optimize the channel
Two tactics to increase your ROI:
- Regularly share what’s working with your creators, so they can convert better.
- Leverage influencer-generated content in your ads and on your social media feed and landing pages to stretch out your influencer marketing spend.
Step 4: Invest in your relationships
With influencer marketing, you’re working with humans, not dashboards.
- Become friends with your influencers.
- Respond quickly, and avoid canned responses.
- Let them try your product first.
- Set clear expectations.
- Get them excited.
- Limit admin work when possible.
- Invest more deeply in existing relationships.
- Most importantly: Give away creative control.
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