Influencer marketing can help small businesses grow their brand, reach new audiences, and generate more leads and sales. In this article, we’ll discuss:

• How to build an influencer marketing strategy
• Dos and don’ts for working with influencers
• How to measure influencer marketing performance

And much more besides.

Let’s get into it…

Building an influencer marketing strategy for a small business

1. Set influencer marketing goals

As with any marketing campaign, the first step in building an influencer strategy is to define clear goals.

Influencer marketing almost always achieves multiple things simultaneously. Still, you should identify a primary goal before you start — it’ll help you measure the results of your campaign.

Typically, this will be one of the following:

• Sales/conversions
• Brand awareness
• Content generation (e.g. for paid ad creatives or other repurposing)

Because small businesses typically have tight marketing budgets, most will focus on the goal that delivers the most immediate business impact: sales and conversions.

2. Define your influencer offer

Sure, you want to collaborate with influencers to achieve a specific goal. But what’s in it for them?

The next stage is all about defining how you intend to work with influencers. You’ve got three main options:

• Affiliate partnerships: You pay a fixed fee or percentage of every sale or conversion an influencer generates for your business.
• Gifting or barter deals: You send the product for free (either "no-strings attached", or in exchange for posting)
• Paid partnerships: Negotiating a fixed rate for the whole project, or per post.

The first two options are lower-risk (and cheaper), which is a big thumbs-up for small businesses. But some influencers (especially at higher follow counts) won't be open to it. So, it reduces your potential recruitment pool a little.

3. Identify the best social platforms and content formats

Different platforms and content formats are naturally suited to different campaign goals.

Here's some examples with their advantages:

Instagram Stories are good for driving link clicks, and are therefore more trackable. They are typically cheaper per unit, less polished, and more authentic.

Instagram Reels are great for reaching new audiences (even outside of the creator's follower count). Typically they cost a little more, and are better for awareness than conversion.

Long-form YouTube videos are great for explaining a complex topic, they have a much longer shelf life (years, not days), and they're typically more expensive.

TikTok is great for reaching new people with short, snappy, trend-driven content. It's quite affordable, but generally weaker for driving sales (outside of TikTok Shop).

4. Recruit influencers

Recruiting the best influencers for your campaign is a broad process with five main stages:

• Influencer search and shortlisting of relevant influencers.
• Reviewing profiles to ensure they’re a good fit.
• Influencer outreach to open up a conversation.
• Negotiating your the compensation, deliverables, timelines & more.
• Contract signing & onboarding to confirm the terms & get started.

When it comes to the first steps (finding influencers & reviewng profiles), you’ve got two options — free and paid (AKA doing it manually vs using a paid tool).

Here’s how they look…

The free & manual way

It’s perfectly possible to identify and recruit (a small number of) influencers by doing all the leg work yourself.

All social platforms have built-in search tools, which can help you track down relevant influencers. For instance, you can search on Instagram using location-related hashtags like #nyccreator or #parisinfluencer.

Browse the results, identify a potential influencer partner, and reach out to introduce your brand and ask for audience data. Play the waiting game until the data lands in your inbox, then analyze it to confirm whether the influencer in question is the right fit for your campaign.

Trouble is, the outreach stage is the most labor-intensive. There are no guarantees you’ll get a reply, and even if you do, the audience might turn out to be a bad fit. Or the performance metrics (like average views, engagements) might not meet your criteria.

It works to get started, but the free way will become painful quite quickly.

If you see signs of success & you're ready to scale up, paid tools become a no-brainer.

The paid version (with software)

If you’re running regular influencer campaigns or recruiting more than a dozen-or-so influencers in one go, you’ll save a ton of time by investing in an influencer search tool like Modash. That way, you can:

• Apply filters upfront to exclude influencers who don’t meet your criteria.
• Run a search to surface influencers who fit the bill.
• Open a profile to access audience/traffic data without reaching out.

Here's an example of what the filtering looks like. You can filter based on audience demographics, follower counts, views, engagements, languages, and more.

The tool lets you filter through every public influencer profile with 1k+ followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. So it works in every niche, every country, every city.

And, here's what the results look like. You can click on a profile, and get audience/performance/content information in the sidebar.

All of which means you don’t have to deal with the outreach stage until you’re ready to introduce your brand, pitch your offer, and negotiate terms.

(You can try Modash for free, no credit card required. Pricing is public, and there are monthly plans available.)

5. Measure results and iterate

Once your campaign is up and running, you need to check in regularly to assess performance against your primary goal.

That way, you can invest more budget if things are going well — or course-correct if you’re off-track.

(We’ll discuss how to measure campaign success later in this article.)

5 tips for small businesses partnering with influencers

1. Negotiate a "minimum KPI guarantee"

One way to mitigate the risk of missing your campaign target is to ask influencers to commit to a minimum KPI guarantee.

In a nutshell, this means that if your sponsored content partner doesn’t hit an agreed number of views (or some other KPI), the brand gets something extra free of charge. (Usually, an extra piece of content.)

Luke Raben typically asks for an Instagram Story. Why?

• It's low effort for the creator, so more likely to be accepted than a full re-shoot
• His goal is sales, so link clicks are important
• It helps reach a slightly different audience when the initial collaboration was on TikTok or YouTube

Luke says that, generally, influencers & talent managers are open to this if you mention it early & transparently:

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Parfumado

Most managers and influencers are okay with this, as long as you bring it up early, and you're open and honest from the start. We do get a handful that are very against it - which I can understand, but largely, they are open to minimum view guarantees.

2. Run a trial before committing to long-term partnerships

There’s a lot to like about long-term influencer partnerships:

✅ Lower rates per deliverable

✅ Retain top performers (with the option of negotiating exclusivity)

✅ Strengthen your brand by building a long-term association with a reputable influencer

✅ More predictable budgets and content quality

Influencers love them, too, because they get guaranteed work over an extended period. Plus they can fully immerse themselves in a brand, which helps them create better content.

But if you’re taking your first steps in influencer marketing, you likely don’t want to dive straight into a multi-month agreement. What if you get stuck with a dud?

That’s why it makes sense to negotiate a trial period first.

For example, membership-based primary care service One Medical has multiple influencer partnerships lasting 2+ years — and trial periods play a key role. Former influencer marketing manager Georgina Whalen explains how their trial process works:

Georgina Whalen

Influencer Marketing Manager, ex-One Medical

We typically work with creators for a two month trial period to get a feel for how their audience reacts to the brand partnership, what kind of engagement their posts garner, the quality of the content, and how different topics are resonating.

🤓 Pro tip: Transparency is key when pitching trials. Tell influencers you need to test the waters before agreeing to a long-term commitment, and explain how you plan to vet potential partners.

💡 Learn more: Long-Term Influencer Partnerships: Pros, Cons, & How The Pros Do It

3. Offer non-financial rewards rather than high fees

One effective way to stretch a tight influencer marketing budget is to offer influencers a combination of cash and non-financial rewards. These can include:

• Campaign travel expenses
• VIP access to company events
• Gifted products/merchandise
• Early access to new products
• Resharing their content via your social channels/newsletter
• Sending your own film crew to reduce their product burden

Different influencers will be swayed by different incentives, so pitch a range of options and see what works best.

💡 Learn more: 9 Tips To Negotiate With Influencers (Without Being Unfair)

4. Figure out where paid software makes sense

If your influencer marketing budget is tight, you’re likely tempted to do all the work yourself.

And, again, that makes perfect sense to get started. Test the waters, keep the risks low.

If you see some degree of success though, it won't take long before you should consider software.

The only question is: which tasks can be done with software, and which can't?

A lot of tasks related to relationships shouldn't be automated with software. Those human interactions are super important. That said, a bunch of things can be made more efficient with tools, like:

• Finding influencers
• Finding influencer contact emails
• Sending outreach emails and follow-ups
• Running onboarding activities
• Tracking live influencer content

💡 Learn more: 7 Influencer Marketing Tasks You Can Automate (And 5 That You Shouldn’t)

5. Negotiate the scope of work

Haggling over fees isn’t the only way to extract more value from your influencers partnerships.

You can also get more bang for your buck by expanding the scope of work.

For instance, if an influencer is charging a $300 base fee for one Instagram Reel, ask if you can also add an Instagram Story to their influencer brief at the same rate. This strategy requires some wiggle room in your influencer marketing budget, but it’s worth a shot.

5 small business influencer marketing mistakes to avoid

1. Exclusively searching for influencers in your niche

On the face of things, it seems obvious to look for influencers in your niche. They’re the experts, right?

Actually, there are some significant downsides to this approach:

👎 Top influencer talent might be crazy expensive

👎 You significantly shrink the pool of potential partners

👎 There might be a ton of audience overlap among in-niche influencers

👎 Many of those will be influencers your competitors have already found

Looking beyond your niche allows you to target way more influencers, which can help you get better value for money from your partnerships.

For example, a travel brand could search for influencers in niches like:

• Parenting (traveling with kids, family-friendly destinations)
• Personal finance (how to save for a vacation, budget travel tips)
• Food and drink (restaurant recommendations, local cuisine)

2. Trying to replicate big brand strategies

What works for the Apples and Netflixes (Netflixii?) of this world won’t work for a small business.

The success of any big brand’s influencer marketing campaigns relies on a large team, colossal budget, reputation, familiarity, and brand name. Your influencer marketing looks different — you’re a small business with a scrappy team and a tight budget.

If you’re a food business, for example, don’t expect to learn anything useful from how McDonald’s uses influencer marketing. But KetoKrate, which runs 100 – 600 influencer partnerships monthly with a small but mighty team of three (!), will have a better blueprint to follow.

So, instead of glancing enviously at the top table, look around and take inspiration from companies at the same stage as you. Since they’re in an identical situation, they’ll have more actionable advice for you to implement.

💡 Learn more: Wondering where to start finding companies like yours? Check out the Creator Partnerships Podcast, where we interview influencer marketing pros in the same boat as you.

3. Relying on spray-and-pray influencer outreach

Sure, sending exactly the same outreach email to every influencer is quick and easy.

But mass outreach rarely works.

Why? Because influencers want to be treated as individuals.

Sending generic emails doesn’t just get your relationship with potential influencer partners off on the wrong foot — it also increases your chances of landing in the spam folder. So it’s a definite no-no.

Instead, take the time to personalize outreach emails for each influencer. It’s well worth the effort given that personalized emails generate 32.7% more replies.

To be clear, we’re not telling you to write every email from scratch. Rather, personalize copy that’s specific to the influencer you’re targeting — such as complimenting their content and explaining why they’d be a perfect fit for your campaign. Meanwhile, use boilerplate text for generic details about your brand and product.

4. Forcing creators to stick to a script

You’ve found an influencer your audience loves and they’ve agreed to be part of your campaign. Hooray!

Now it’s time to brief them. Essentially, you’ve got two options:

✅ Encourage them to use their natural tone, style, and vocabulary

❌ Force them to stick to a script you prepared

Sure, you want their creative to align with your brand and goals. But you also want to leverage their flair for reaching and engaging your audience — and that’s not going to happen if it sounds like they’re reading from a teleprompter.

When preparing a creative brief, be sure to offer guidance around your:

• Primary value proposition
• Product and brand
• Campaign objectives

But give the influencer leeway around things like presentation and tone of voice.

5. Targeting multiple goals in a single campaign

When running your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s easy to get carried away with fancy numbers and metrics. You want to build brand awareness, generate sales, or build a library of influencer content. But when you try to do everything, you end up doing nothing.

A lack of clarity on your influencer marketing goal seeps into every area of your campaign and makes every task harder. The influencer is overwhelmed, the audience doesn’t understand your message, and it gets harder to report success to stakeholders.

Measuring the success of your campaign as a small business

Know your metrics

Measuring influencer marketing success is about tracking the right metrics.

Your "headline" metric in a report is likely just revenue and return on spend, often tracked through code redemptions (more on sales tracking later…).

If you want a deeper understanding of campaign performance, you can also track KPIs that speak to your top-level goal. For example, if your objective is to sell more, you can use KPIs like:

• Total revenue
• Click-through rate
• Add-to-cart rate
• Average order value
• Customer acquisition cost

💡 Learn more: Influencer Marketing KPIs That Drive Focus & Action (With Examples & 30 Metrics)

Quantify content value

The content influencers are creating on your behalf has its own value beyond any awareness, leads, or sales it generates.

For instance, say an influencer has created an awesome video for your brand. Could your internal team have done it themselves? If so, how long would it take them? And if not, how much would you have to pay an agency or freelancer to do it for you?

You might also want to consider the following when calculating ROI:

• If you’ve benefited from influencer-generated content (e.g. reused as social proof or ad creatives), how much would that have cost to produce otherwise? How much did you save?
• If you have a noticeable uplift in direct traffic or brand searches, how much would that traffic otherwise cost (based on an average cost per click)?
• If you gained social followers, email subscribers, or even grew your remarketing audiences with your campaign, there’s a chance they’ll convert in the future. How much would that have cost in paid social spend?

Track sales with UTM links, affiliate links and discount codes

Tracking total revenue gives you a decent idea of how your campaign is performing.

📈 Sales go up = things are going well.

But for a clearer picture, you need to attribute sales by source. That way, you can understand how much revenue your campaign generated — and which creators are making the biggest contribution to your bottom line.

There are three main ways to track sales:

• UTM links: Snippets of text in a URL containing information about where the traffic originated.
• Affiliate links: Similar to UTM links, these tell you which influencer referred a lead or sale.
• Discount codes: Assigning unique codes to each influencer, to be redeemed on purchase, helps you understand where the sale came from.

None of these methods is perfect. For instance, if a customer misspells a discount code, it’ll screw up your tracking. But they’re a simple, cost-effective way to get deeper insights into campaign and influencer performance.

Measure brand awareness

Brand awareness is easier to measure than sales, because you can rely on the analytics tools built into each social media platform. These make it easy to measure awareness-related metrics like:

• Views/impressions
• Engagements
• Brand mentions

💡 Learn more: How to Measure Influencer Marketing: 8 Proven Tracking Methods

Use campaign tracking software

The easiest way to track performance is through dedicated software like Modash, which allows you to measure all your different collaborations via a single dashboard.

With Modash, you can:

• Collect and save creator content: Modash automatically collects all your campaign content from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and saves it to a dashboard. All your influencer content is in one place — ready for reporting and repurposing.
• Check reach/engagements: Modash tracks the number of posts, likes, comments, estimated reach and impressions, and engagement rate, which you can use to capture top-of-funnel activity.
• Track ROI from codes: Use discount code redemptions to track the number of conversions, conversion value, and ROI per collab and campaign.

👉 Like the sound of Modash? Give it a try for free!

Taking your influencer marketing to the next level

Drive efficiencies with influencer marketing software

Manual influencer marketing will only get you so far — plus it involves a ton of busy work.

To scale your campaigns and drive efficiencies, you’ll want to invest in influencer software. It’ll save you time on:

• Finding influencer partners
• Analyzing creator audiences
• Tracking campaign performance

Convert top creators into long-term partnerships

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.

Influencer marketing is no different: a small number of creators will likely deliver the bulk of your results. These are the folks you want to be working with long-term. Consider offering preferential terms and guarantees of regular work in return for exclusivity.

Secure usage rights and run paid campaigns with influencer creatives

Chances are, influencer campaigns aren’t your only form of marketing. You might also be running paid media campaigns, which rely on quality content. Rather than creating all that content yourself, you can drive efficiencies by repurposing creatives from your influencer activity.

Just be sure to negotiate usage rights upfront.

FAQs:

Is influencer marketing expensive for small businesses?

Influencer marketing doesn’t have to be expensive for small businesses.

You can get started with compensation methods like affiliates & gifted collaborations, and finding nano influencers who are more affordable.

If you work with the right audiences and influencers, it can be a cost-effective way to reach niche audiences, build brand awareness, and drive sales.

How can I find influencers who resonate with my brand?

Here are some tried-and-trusted ways to find relevant influencer partners:

• Search by keyword or hashtag using the built-in search features on social media platforms
• Look in the comments section on influencer posts (other influencers might comment)
• Use dedicated influencer search tools like Modash
• Search on Google (e.g. “beauty influencers in New York”)
• Ask your network for influencer referrals

💡 Learn more: 11 Ways To Find Micro Influencers (Free & Paid Methods!)

What type of content should I ask influencers to create?

Ask influencers to create content that aligns with your campaign goals. For example, if you’re aiming to generate sales, you should prioritize content formats that allow link clicks (like Instagram Stories).

Remember to keep the content authentic to the influencer's personality and usual style.

How can I measure the return on investment (ROI) of my influencer marketing campaign?

Measure the return on investment (ROI) of your influencer marketing campaigns using this formula: ROI = (Revenue/Cost) x 100. For example, if you pay an influencer $500 and the campaign generates $1,000 of revenue, you’d have a 200% ROI.

💡 Learn more: Influencer Marketing ROI: Proving The Impact of Influencers

Do I need a contract when working with influencers?

Contracts are useful for setting expectations and protecting you (and your creator partners). But they’re not necessary in all scenarios. You might not need them if you’re:

• Running a no-strings-attached influencer gifting campaign
• Running a “self-serve” affiliate or ambassador program
• Planning a short-term collaboration or trial period

💡 Learn more: What To Include In an Influencer Contract: 7 Non-Negotiable Components (+ Free Template)

What are some legal considerations for influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing involves many legal considerations, including:

• Contracts outlining the campaign’s terms and conditions, including content usage rights and payment.
• How the influencer will disclose their involvement in a paid marketing campaign.
• Influencer permissions to use content like images, videos, and music created by third parties.
• Data privacy laws
• Intellectual property laws