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-driv