With the rise of social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, traditional ads have transformed into a modern form of digital word-of-mouth known as influencer marketing.
Through influencer marketing, brands can collaborate with influencers and content creators to expand their reach, in a more organic and authentic way. This is why over 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations over traditional ads.
However, there’s one common challenge most brands experience as influencer marketing becomes more mainstream: Creating content that feels genuine rather than promotional. So, how can you build an influencer marketing campaign that prioritizes authentic partnerships?
In this article, we’ll explore the steps you need to take to build a successful influencer marketing campaign, going from how to find the right creators to tracking campaign success - with real-world examples to help you get started.
Influencer marketing is a strategy where brands collaborate with individuals with a strong online presence - known as influencers - to promote their products or services. These influencers can be social media personalities, bloggers, YouTubers, or KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) who have built credibility and trust with their followers.
Unlike traditional advertising, influencer marketing feels more authentic, as it often comes in the form of relatable content rather than a direct promotion.
There are 5 different types of influencers that vary depending on their size, niche, and industry:
1. Nano influencers (1K and 10K followers): Great for niche audiences. Nano influencers have a smaller but more dedicated following, which allows for deeper, more personal interactions with their audience. Despite their smaller reach, their high engagement rate often makes them a valuable choice for brands targeting a particular community.
2. Micro influencers (10K followers and 100K): Known for high engagement. Micro influencers strike the right balance between follower count and interaction. They often specialize in a particular niche, creating highly relatable content that resonates with a more focused audience.
3. Macro influencers (100K-500K followers): Ideal for mass visibility. These influencers have a high following, which makes them the right choice for brands looking for brand awareness. However, they may not have high engagement.
4. Mega influencers (500K-1M followers): Suitable for massive exposure. Mega influencers can reach millions of potential customers. While they can generate significant buzz, the engagement rate may not be as personal or targeted as smaller influencers, making them better suited for campaigns focused on broad awareness.
5. Celebrity (1M+ followers): Have access to an immense global reach. Celebrities appeal to a wide and diverse audience, and they are often good for large-scale campaigns aiming to maximize exposure across different demographics. However, engagement may be less personal and their fees are typically much higher.
The table below compares each of these influencers and highlights some of the key benefits and challenges.
As a brand, if you’re investing in influencer marketing the minimum result you’re expecting is a good ROI (Return on investment). And while partnering with large-scale influencers can give you visibility, if you’re a small brand, it can also impact your budget, as they don't always guarantee high engagement rates.
Recent data shows how there’s been a shift in influencer partnerships. Nowadays, 44% of brands prefer working with nano influencers, and 25% with micro influencers given their high engagement rates. While these are smaller in size, they have an average rate of 6% which is significantly higher than the ER of macro or mega influencers.
Follower count isn’t the only factor that impacts ROI in influencer marketing. At Influencer Hero, we analyzed more than 10,000 commercial influencer data posts to determine the correlation between conversion and data points.
This research allows us to identify which metrics are fundamental to consider when partnering with influencers, helping you reduce your CAC and maximize your ROI.
Through our analysis, we discovered that there’s a strong correlation between an influencer’s audience growth and conversion performance. The average growth rate on platforms like Instagram is usually around 0.1%, however high performers (those that have more than 10 conversions per post) have a growth rate of 3.2%.
When evaluating influencers to work with, make sure you partner with active influencers who create quality content, as these can grow their audience faster.
Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) is one of the key KPIs marketers evaluate when working with influencers. A few years ago there was no reassurance that engagement rate had a direct correlation with conversions, as older audiences tend to engage less.
However, our research confirmed this correlation between engagement rate and conversion performance. This means, that influencers with higher engagement tend to drive better results in campaigns. Want to calculate an influencer’s engagement rate? Try Influencer Hero's Free Engagement Rate Calculator.
One of the current influencer marketing trends is the preference of brands to work with nano and micro influencers because they have higher engagement rates and lower pricing rates.
However, while higher engagement rates do matter, audience size also plays a significant role in conversions. Our research shows that larger performers, those with more than 90K followers, performed better in terms of conversions.
This suggests that even if larger influencers have slightly lower engagement rates, they can still positively impact conversions.
Audience credibility is another relevant metric as it allows you to see how many of an influencer’s followers are real versus fake. Having a small percentage of fake followers is unavoidable, especially for larger influencers. However, those with high percentages of bot followers can negatively affect conversions.
Through our research, and by using Influencer Hero’s Free Fake Follower Analytics Tool, we discovered that influencers with a high credibility score above 73.17% have higher conversion rates.
This means that brands should also prioritize working with influencers who have real followers rather than just looking at audience size or engagement
The blue check mark you see in some of the creators’ profiles, can also impact your conversion rate. Data from our report suggest that verified influencers tend to have higher conversion performance. We noticed that:
This trend indicates that being verified can give better results in influencer marketing campaigns. Check our full report here: Influencer Marketing ROI: 5 Key Metrics That Impact ROI.
One of the key benefits of influencer marketing is the trust it creates. 84.8% of brands find influencer marketing effective, and 36% believe that influencer content outperforms brand-created content.
For an influencer marketing campaign to succeed, you need a well-defined structure that allows you to partner with the right influencer. However, keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all framework, you need to tailor your strategy to your brand’s specific goals and needs.
Here’s a general structure that can help you build a successful influencer marketing strategy in 7 steps:
The first step in creating a successful influencer marketing campaign is to clearly define your objectives. These goals will guide the structure of your strategy and vary based on the size, stage, and needs of your brand.
A good way to do this is by aligning your general marketing strategy and business objectives. For example, if generating more conversions is critical, your influencer marketing campaigns should be focused on that.
Start by identifying the stage of your campaign: TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU, and based on that you can tailor specific KPIs and strategies accordingly.
Goals go hand in hand with influencer marketing KPIs. How will you know your campaign succeeded? By deciding what key performance metrics will help you measure the impact of your campaign.
For example if your goal is to increase brand awareness, relevant metrics are:
Or, if you want to increase conversions and sale, consider:
Based on this, you can create specific, measurable, and time-bound goals that will make it easier to track success. For example ”Increase conversions by 20% by the end of the three-month campaign.”
Takeaway: Establishing goals and KPIs—whether it's brand awareness, engagement, or conversions—will allow for measurable success and guide the execution of your campaign.
The first thing influencers want to know when considering an influencer partnership is what’s in it for them? So before reaching out to them, define your budget and the value you offer.
Influencers have different rates, depending on factors such as: Engagement rate, following size, niche, content requirements, etc. Below is an overview of typical rates across platforms:
To estimate costs for influencer collaborations, you can use this formula:
Influencer Cost = (Target CPM / 1,000) × Average Views per Post
Example Calculation:
If your target CPM is $30 and the influencer averages 5,843 views per post:
Influencer Cost = ($30 / 1,000) × 5,843 = $175
This formula ensures fair compensation based on an influencer’s reach and your budget. Read more in detail about influencer pricing and rate cards.
While one of the most common ways to collaborate with influencers is through a fixed fee, you can also explore other alternatives, such as:
Discover: 9 Ways For Influencer Collaboration
While fixed payments guarantee that influencers promote your brand, they don’t always have the results you expect. When you work for the first time with influencers, it may be challenging to estimate the results. For this, we recommend offering performance-based influencer payments, starting with affiliate marketing and gifting campaigns to identify high-performing influencers.
Influencer marketing follows the Pareto Principle, where a small percentage of influencers generate the majority of results. Data shows that the top 10-20% of influencers drive 80-90% of revenue, while many others contribute little to no conversions.
By running performance-based campaigns, you can evaluate performance without upfront financial risk. High performing influencers can generate 50+ conversions from a single Instagram story, while others may drive only a handful or none at all. So, testing at scale - with at least 100 influencers - can help to identify those who truly influence their audience's purchasing decision.
Once you’ve identified these top performances, you can transition them into long-term collaboration through paid partnerships and affiliate programs, ensuring a high turn on ad spend (ROAs) while avoiding wasting budget on those influencers that don’t perform well.
Takeaway: When considering influencer partnerships, define your budget and the value you offer. To ensure fair compensation, use formulas based on CPM and average views per post, while also exploring performance-based payment strategies to identify high-performing influencers and maximize ROI.
Once the objective and goal are defined and you have a budget in place, you have a better idea of the type of influencer you want to work with. Now, it’s time to find them.
Choosing between the type of influencer you want to work with is tied to the goals you have. As we’ve discussed above, bigger isn’t always better. If you’re looking to generate conversions or more authentic content, you can consider working with nano and micro influencers. If on the other hand, you’d want to reach a wider audience, macro and mega influencers can be the right choice.
On the same line, it’s choosing the social platforms for your campaigns, as part of reaching out to your target audience is to tune in where they spend their time. If you want to target Gen Z, then working with Facebook influencers is probably not the best idea. Here’s a brief overview of platforms and their target audience:
With these things in mind, and the metrics you’re focusing on (like engagement rate, audience location, influencer’s growth, etc), you can start finding influencers that fit these requirements.
There are two main approaches when it comes to searching for influencers: manual searches and influencer discovery tools.
Manual searching is a low-cost method, but it can be extremely time-intensive as you sift through countless profiles to find the right match. For this, you can:
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Influencer discovery tools are highly time-efficient and provide advanced filtering options to streamline your search, but they come with a cost.
With Influencer Hero for example you can use detailed filters such as audience location, engagement rate, demographics, lookalikes, and more, enabling you to hyper-target influencers that perfectly align with your campaign goals.
Takeaway: Once your campaign goals and budget are set, finding the right influencers comes down to matching them with your objectives and target audience. You can use manual search methods, or speed this process using influencer marketing tools like Influencer Hero.
Once you’ve found content creators that you’re interested in working with, it’s always useful to make a prior evaluation to ensure they’re a good fit. You can do this by considering the following factors:
Takeaway: By creating a shortlist of influencers that have specific requirements, it’s easier to expand your list by looking for lookalike creators who share similar audience traits and engagement patterns.
Now that you’ve identified the influencers you’d like to work with and have a shortlist in hand, the next step is to reach out and onboard them to your campaign.
The two most common ways to reach out to influencers is either through DM or email, however for brand partnerships we always recommend email as DMs get overcrowded with influencers receiving thousands of messages daily, and emails feel more professional.
The most important element in influencer outreach is personalization. When you write personalized emails, you maximize response and onboarding rates. Think about it this way: influencers receive thousands of emails daily, why would yours be worth opening? If it's directed towards them and they feel you have a genuine interest, then you might spark enough curiosity for them to reply.
In your first email, clearly mention:
It’s useful having at hand an outreach template that you can simply customize per influencer. Read more in detail how to optimize your influencer outreach templates.
However, personalizing each email, especially if you’re thinking of doing a massive influencer outreach can take too much of your time. This is why working with influencer marketing CRMs can optimize your campaigns as you're able to send thousands of emails within a few clicks.
With Influencer Hero’s AI-powered influencer outreach tool you can add influencers to your campaign, and through AI you’ll be able to send hyper-personalized emails, including automated follow-ups to boost reply rates.
Takeaway: Once you've shortlisted influencers, the next step is to reach out and onboard them, with email being the preferred method for professionalism over DMs. Personalizing each message is key to maximizing response rates.
Campaign management is a fundamental part of influencer marketing, and it’s often overlooked by brands. Finding and reaching out to influencers is only the first part of campaigns, then you need to ensure that each partnership is going the way it’s expected.
A well-organized onboarding process should include:
To avoid misunderstandings, make sure to build an influencer agreement that addresses essential aspects such as:
If you're running a small campaign with only a few influencers, you can use Google Sheet or an Excel file to track:
For larger campaigns involving multiple influencers, Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) tools like Influencer Hero are ideal to streamline collaboration, automate tracking, and centralize communication.
These tools are useful to manage influencer onboarding, content approvals, and performance reporting more efficiently.
Want to know more about how Influencer Hero can be suitable for your brand? Book a free demo!
Takeaway: Have a clear onboarding and collaboration structure, including formal agreements, detailed briefs, and a defined content approval process. For large-scale campaigns, using CRM tools like Influencer Hero can help streamline onboarding, automate tracking, and centralize communication for better efficiency.
Once influencers are onboarded and content goes live, tracking their performance through detailed reports, based on the goals and KPIs you set from the start will allow you to see how your campaign is truly going. These are the best methods for monitoring campaign success:
Affiliate links are unique URL paths assigned to each influencer. These links automatically embed a cookie in the browser of the person who clicks on them, allowing you to track:
Assigning personalized discount codes or coupons to each influencer allows you to track their performance based on code usage. When customers redeem these codes, you can directly attribute the sales to the influencer.
For campaigns focused on brand awareness or engagement, tracking likes, comments, shares, and views is crucial. Most social media platforms provide insights into these metrics for influencer content.
Use UTM parameters in your URLs to gain deeper insights into influencer performance. By tagging links with source, medium, and campaign details, you can track:
This is what most affiliate software uses automatically but this can be done manually if needed but using a UTM builder. Once the influencers have posted using this link you can create reports in Google Analytics and filters based on the UTM under traffic acquisitions and campaigns.
Takeaway: To effectively track campaign performance, utilize affiliate links, personalized discount codes, and engagement metrics to measure key aspects like click-through rates, conversions, and overall reach. Using tools like UTM parameters and Google Analytics can provide deeper insights into influencer-driven traffic and conversions, ensuring a more precise evaluation of campaign success.
The best way to optimize influencer campaigns is by using platforms that allow you to find, outreach and manage your campaigns from scratch. These are some of the best influencer marketing platforms that can help you with your influencer marketing needs:
Pricing: Starts at $249/month
Best for: D2C e-commerce brands and marketing agencies.
Reviews: 5.0/5.0 (Shopify Apps)
Influencer Hero is an all-in-one influencer marketing software designed to help D2C e-commerce brands manage their influencer marketing campaigns. With Influencer Hero’s CRM, you can have access to detailed analytics useful for tracking KPIs, identifying high-performing influencers and tracking your outreach statistics. You can easily track performance, monitor engagement and measure ROI.
Pricing: $1.6K per month (Annual contract)
Best for: Medium to large ecommerce brands.
Reviews: 4.0/5.0 (Capterra)
Upfluence is an influencer marketing and affiliate management platform that helps brands identify, engage, and track influencer collaborations across multiple platforms.
Pricing: Starts at $2.2K (Annual contract)
Best for: Large e-commerce brands.
Reviews: 3.8/5.0 (Shopify)
GRIN is an influencer marketing platform that helps e-commerce brands to manage influencer relationships, campaigns, and reporting in one place. It integrates seamlessly with e-commerce tools like Shopify, making it ideal for brands focused on direct sales.
You can access a detailed comparison of the best influencer platforms here.
Once your influencer marketing campaign is underway and tracking tools are in place, creating detailed reports is essential to showcase its effectiveness. Below are the most important metrics and KPIs to include in your influencer marketing campaign reports.
When it comes to measuring influencer marketing ROI, in essence, you’re looking at how much you invested vs how much revenue your campaign has generated.
The formula to calculate ROI is: (Revenue/Cost) x 100
For example, if you spent $5,000 on a campaign and generated $20,000 in revenue, your ROI would be (20,000 / 5,000) × 100 = 400%.
Additional ways to track ROI:
Influencer marketing can take your brand to the next level by increasing engagement, brand awareness, conversions, and more. But what do successful influencer campaigns look like? Let’s take a look at some of our most successful campaigns:
One of our clients wanted to collaborate with 50-100 influencers per month, to increase their sales. The focus was on identifying top-performing influencers to maximize returns during this seasonality campaign.
Goal: Drive significant revenue growth during Q4 by leveraging influencer marketing and seasonal campaigns.
Influencer Marketing Campaign Strategy Used: Identified top-performing influencers through gifting campaigns, focused on high-conversion influencers, and executed a well-timed BFCM campaign to maximize sales and revenue.
Results: $448K during Q4, including an impressive $34K revenue spike in a single day.
Key takeaway: Seasonal campaigns provide a valuable opportunity to strengthen relationships with top-performing influencers while maximizing campaign ROI.
Access full case study here.
Olivia, a skincare brand from the Netherlands, used Influencer Hero’s CRM to manage their influencer marketing campaigns, through gifting campaigns, affiliate marketing, and user-generated content (UGC) for paid social ads.
Goal: Olivida aimed to improve the efficiency and profitability of their social media strategy by integrating Influencer Marketing and reducing their customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Influencer Marketing Campaign Strategy Used: The strategy involved combining influencer gifting campaigns with an affiliate marketing model to identify top-performing influencers, reduce costs, and increase ROI. Influencer-generated content was also repurposed for paid social ads, further amplifying results and achieving significant improvements in Meta ROAS for both cold acquisition and retargeting campaigns.
Results: Olivida achieved 7.2X ROAS and they were able to identify 7 top performing influencers who now are part of their brand ambassador program.
Key takeaway: Influencer marketing can extend beyond affiliate programs or one-time partnerships, becoming the backbone of paid advertising.
Access full case study here.
A brand with no prior YouTube presence launched an influencer marketing campaign using Influencer Hero’s search and outreach tools.
Goal: The goal was to establish a successful YouTube influencer marketing campaign for a client with no previous YouTube activity, achieving significant revenue growth over six months.
Influencer Marketing Campaign Strategy Used: They onboarded 240 influencers through a gifting and affiliate model, with 150 creating video content. High-performing influencers were re-engaged for a Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) campaign, leading to a surge in sales.
Results: The campaign generated $109.9K in attributed revenue, with one influencer alone driving $61.8K in sales. ROAS exceeded 10X.
Key Takeaway: Identifying and reinvesting in top-performing influencers maximizes long-term ROI and brand growth.
Access full case study here.
Influencer marketing is a powerful strategy for brands looking to build trust, drive engagement, and boost sales in an authentic way. By leveraging the reach and credibility of influencers across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, brands can connect with their target audience effectively.
This guide has provided actionable insights into influencer marketing strategies, pricing, ROI optimization, and campaign management. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, implementing a well-planned influencer program can unlock substantial growth for your brand.
Schedule a Demo with one of our media experts below.
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