Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025 may still feel far away—but in influencer marketing, the groundwork you lay now will define your results during the year’s most competitive sales season.
Brands that succeed in Q4 aren’t the ones who scramble in October—they’re the ones who start testing, scaling, and building strong creator partnerships months in advance.
In this article, we’ll break down why early planning is essential to maximize influencer marketing ROI during BFCM. From identifying your high-performing influencers (HPs) to structuring your budget and testing strategy, we’ll show you how to build a performance-driven approach that sets you up for exponential results this holiday season.
The most important variable which will determine how much revenue you generate during BFCM with influencers is:
→ The number of high performing influencers you identify throughout the year.
We typically segment influencers into the following 3 categories:
For most of the brands we work with:
These are the strong power law distributions involved in IM which we refer to constantly in our content. It is often referred to as the 80/20 or Pareto principle.
Below is an example revenue and Ebitda distribution from one of our clients 2024 BFCM influencer campaign, classified by HPs, MPs, GPs:
As you can see from the charts the majority of the performance is driven by a small group of influencers.
And this should be your core objective throughout the year: identifying as many of these influencers as possible.
We have published a detailed case study on the BFCM campaign referred to above which you can access here.
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If you want to succeed at BFCM 2025, finding high-performing influencers (HPs) starts now—not in Q4. The earlier you begin testing, the more data you’ll have to identify which creators truly drive conversions.
But here’s the challenge: only 2–5% of the influencers you work with will be HPs, meaning they generate 10+ conversions per post. That’s why your best strategy is to work with volume early, then double down on what performs.
To identify high performers without burning budget, begin by running affiliate and gifting campaigns. These allow you to test a wide range of creators while keeping upfront costs minimal. Give influencers custom discount codes or affiliate links so you can accurately track performance.
Once you start identifying consistent performers, you can transition those influencers into paid partnerships with confidence.
Based on our internal data from thousands of campaigns:
We’ve seen some micro and macro HPs generate $5K–$30K in sales from a single post. These are the creators who deliver true 10x+ ROI—and they should become the cornerstone of your BFCM strategy.
Once you’ve found your HPs, treat them like gold. Build long-term relationships and invest in keeping them close to your brand:
HexClad’s partnership with Gordon Ramsay is a perfect illustration of this principle in action. By turning a top-tier influencer into a brand face, they’ve seen explosive growth and credibility.
To identify these high performing influencers you have to work with as many influencers as possible throughout the year which starts now.
We recommend to start working with affiliate & gifting campaigns to keep your cost low in the testing phase then work with fixed payments once you identify your HPs and MPs.
As mentioned earlier only around 2-5% of all the influencers we work with are HPs. This means that out of a batch of 100 influencers, 2-5 influencers are HPs and consistently make around $5K - $30K in sales in a single social media post (this is what we have seen, we mainly work with micro and macro influencers - the numbers are very likely higher with celebrities).
These are the influencers where you are achieving way north of 10X ROI and which should be your golden tribe of most precious influencers.
Give them all the attention they need. Assign a dedicated person to manage these relationships, keep an eye on their content to personalize communication, send them gifts.
Some brands have gone as far as offering equity and making an influencer the face of their brand. HexClad’s partnership with Gordon Ramsay is a perfect illustration of this principle in action. By turning a top-tier influencer into a brand face, they’ve seen explosive growth and credibility.
Below is an example of how you should forecast ROI with HPs & MPs in order to allocate the right budgets for payments.
You can also access the respective google sheet to make a copy and edit here.
With Influencer Hero you can directly CSV / Excel export all your influencer performance from your CRM to quickly create these sheets in order to calculate your expected ROI.
The takeaway is clear: your Black Friday/Cyber Monday success in 2025 will be determined by the influencers you identify and build relationships with today. The top 2–5% of your influencer partners—the HPs—can drive the majority of your revenue, as we saw with one of our clients who generated over $331K in sales from just 10 influencers during BFCM.
That’s why now is the time to ramp up your outreach. Aim to collaborate with 50–100+ new influencers each month. Run lean affiliate and gifting campaigns to test performance, then reinvest in those who consistently deliver results. Over time, you’ll build a powerful group of HPs and MPs who become the backbone of your Q4 strategy.
And don’t stop at discovery—relationship building is just as important. High-performing influencers are rare and in high demand. Once you find them, invest in long-term partnerships, offer exclusives, and make them feel like a core part of your brand.
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