Influencer whitelisting: it’s a hot trend that’s guaranteed to get your influencer content more engagement, clicks, and sales... Right?

Maybe.

I'll help you figure out whether whitelisting is right for you, and how to do it effectively. I’ll discuss:

✅ How influencer whitelisting works, and the benefits

✅ How to handle usage rights and maximize ROI

✅ Other practical steps & tips (like how to get access to partner accounts)

All backed up by hands-on insights from Luke Raben, who manages paid media & influencer marketing at Labfresh (a B2C men's techwear brand).

What is influencer whitelisting & how does it work?

Whitelisting is the process of running ads for your business through a third-party page. The third party can be:

• An influencer
• Another business
• A pseudo business (like another Facebook or Instagram page you've created)

In the context of influencer marketing, whitelisting specifically applies to Meta platforms (i.e. Facebook and Instagram). But it’s become a catch-all term for any type of similar activity, including Spark Ads — which are essentially the same thing, but on TikTok.

There are two ways to run influencer whitelisting campaigns:

• Work with an influencer organically first, see if their organic content converts well, then ask for the usage rights
• Approach them directly for a dedicated whitelisting collaboration

(We’ll discuss those options later in the article…)

Understanding influencer whitelisting costs

With a standard influencer campaign, you’re paying the influencer to create and share content on your behalf.

This applies to influencer whitelisting, too, but there are also some additional costs:

• Usage rights fees: In many cases, you'll pay extra for the influencer to let you share ad content from their account, taking advantage of their name, image, and reputation.
• Ad budget: The money you pay to Meta, TikTok, YouTube, etc. to serve your ads to your desired target audience.

Still, if you’re simply replacing some of your standard ads with whitelisted content, it’s not a big increase. In some cases, it might even save you money on content creation.

5 top benefits of influencer whitelisting

🙌 Widen your reach

The whole point of any influencer campaign is to get your brand in front of more potential customers.

But with influencer whitelisting, you’re using your ad budget to spread your reach further — beyond the influencer’s existing followers.

This is especially valuable if you’re already working with an influencer and seeing strong results from their organic posts. It’s a smart way to double-down on that content and escape the limitations of their follower count.

As an added bonus, you can use the targeting tools built into social ad platforms to ensure you’re reaching the right people, such as targeting lookalike audiences that match the influencer’s existing follower demographics.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Leverage social proof

Like any influencer marketing activity, whitelisting helps grow your brand and drive conversions through the power of social proof — a psychological phenomenon that refers to the way our decisions are informed by other people’s behaviors and opinions.

When a trusted influencer says a product is good (or bad), people sit up and take notice.

Indeed, 36% of consumers say influencer posts are the best way to persuade them to try new products, while 46% have purchased products promoted by influencers.

📈 Sell (without sounding “salesy”)

We all want to sell more stuff. But, at the same time, we’re terrified of being too pushy and giving our audience the ick.

Influencer whitelisting is the perfect solution. Because the ads are shared from the influencer’s account, they look less salesy, which can make them feel more authentic.

💰 Get more value from influencer content

Say you’re running a regular, organic influencer marketing campaign.

The influencer shares an Instagram Story promoting your brand. It goes great — but after 24 hours, it disappears.

With influencer whitelisting, you can keep reusing that same piece of content for as long as you want (depending on your rights agreement), giving it a longer shelf-life.

💡 Learn more: 7 ways to repurpose influencer-generated content (& how to do it)

😄 Keep influencers happy

Whitelisting is beneficial for influencers, too.

When a brand promotes their content through whitelisting, they get access to a ton of people who’ve never seen their content before. And because the campaign runs through their profile, it’s an easy way for them to pick up a ton of new followers.

Everyone wins!

6 steps to implement influencer whitelisting in your campaigns

1. Set campaign goals

Different brands will have different goals from influencer whitelisting campaigns.

Clarifying those goals upfront will help when it comes to identifying relevant influencers and negotiating terms (more on this later).

For a massive household name like L’Oreal, the goal might be brand awareness — creating a 360-degree effect where it feels like consumers are seeing the brand everywhere.

But for most startups & scale-ups, direct sales & immediate ROAS are likely the goal.

2. Identify high-potential influencers

Since you're likely to be investing a significant amount on whitelisting, you don’t want to work with any old influencer. So how do you pick the right ones?

The most obvious place to start is your best existing collaborations.

Typically, Luke avoids whitelisting collaborations with influencers unless they’ve worked together (and been successful) previously, because “it's just a little bit too risky”.

Outside of that, for Luke, there’s a couple of exceptions: micro-influencers and UGC creators.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

I will do it with micro influencers or bigger UGC creators who have around 8,000 – 10,000 followers and are just trying to grow. The risk is super low. You get all the benefits: someone else's page, their social proof, they'll create ads — but it's cheap.

When it comes to assessing smaller influencers for whitelisting collabs, Luke considers the following factors:

Do they understand what makes good content?

You don't need to be an influencer with 100,000 followers for me to want to work with you on a whitelisting basis. You just need to have a general understanding that the first three seconds of a video needs to grab people's attention.

Can they speak in front of camera?‍

A lot of people will just post photo content or do voiceovers. The power of whitelisting is that you can see someone else's face in the content.

Are they relatable?

‍Are they within your target demographic? If you're targeting women and it's a guy, it doesn't make sense unless he comes at it from a different angle, like ‘this is for my girlfriend, it’s the best gift ever..

💡 If you're trying to scale influencer discovery, consider using an influencer search tool like Modash. It will speed up the process of finding small, untapped creators in your country / niche. Plus, you can get performance & audience data without even reaching out. Try for free.

3. Negotiate terms and usage rights

Influencer whitelisting is still a shiny new thing for many brands and influencers, so there aren’t really any agreed industry standards around what a whitelisting partnership looks like.

This can be a barrier to negotiating terms, with both parties trying to secure the best deal (and neither wanting to get ripped off).

👉 For context: Luke is a Growth Manager at a scaleup based in the Netherlands. He predominantly works with Dutch influencers and doesn’t do whitelisting on a huge scale. So his experiences aren’t a benchmark for every territory, industry, brand, or influencer strategy. Still, he was happy to share what he’s seeing from whitelisting agreements.

In terms of length, Luke says agreements typically run for one or three months. So far, so simple.

Unsurprisingly, things get a little more complex around the subject of pay. Luke says the influencers he works with are never prepared to hand over the keys to their ad account for free (although this won’t necessarily be the case for different influencers and markets). And while the influencers he works with ask for an average of around €1,000 for 30 days of usage rights, costs can vary significantly — with larger accounts often demanding higher fees.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

Some influencers are very open to it because they recognize the potential. ‘This company is going to put extra ad budget behind me, I'll get exposure, so I'll ask a lower usage fee.’ Generally, bigger or more established influencers will ask for more money because you're using their name to advertise.

If you're just starting out, my advice is to start as many conversations as possible to get a feel for your space. Fees might be higher or lower. Some smaller creators might even offer usage rights for free. Without experience, you won't know until you start having the conversations.

Luke also noted that some influencers — typically those with higher profiles and/or larger followings — will additionally ask for a percentage (e.g. 10%) of the campaign’s ad spend.

While no brand wants to stump up extra cash, these percentage-based agreements can also work in your favor by incentivizing the influencer to create quality content.

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

4. Get account access

Because influencer whitelisting is still kinda new, your influencer might not be familiar with the process of granting access to their ad account. In which case you’ll have to hold their hand through the process.

Here’s what your influencer needs to do to give you access for whitelisting campaigns on Facebook and/or Instagram:

1. Log in to Meta Business Suite. If they don’t have a business account, they’ll need to create one first.
2. Click Help > Go to Business Manager.
3. In the left hand menu, navigate to Users > Partners.
4. Click Add and choose Give a partner access to your assets.
5. Enter your brand’s Business Manager ID
6. Click Next.
7. Choose to give your brand access to their Assets and Permissions.
8. Select the relevant Facebook Page.
9. Tap the slider next to Create ads to assign advertising permissions to your brand.
10. Click Save.

Sure, it’s not rocket science.

But it’s important to remember that plenty of influencers — even massive names — have never even looked at an ad account before. As such, Luke recommends a hands-on approach.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

The easiest way is to get on a call with influencers and walk them through it. I made a short onboarding doc to show the process, and I run through it verbally. If you just say, ‘Hey, we need access to your account’ and wait, you could be waiting days or weeks — because A) they're not used to it and B) they're super busy.

5. (Optional) Share multiple creatives

The more creatives you use in your whitelisting campaign, the more likely you are to find one that works.

If you’re just putting some ad budget behind an existing top-performing organic post, this step doesn’t apply — you already have the creative for your whitelisting campaign. Just be aware that, even if the content did numbers organically, there are some drawbacks to this approach, as Luke explains.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

The lifetime of the performance is very short in my experience. Say you have one Instagram Story from your influencer that you paid for a month. Let's say it works for 5 days, but on day 6, it stops working. You've then paid for 30 days for an ad that works for 5. You have to turn it off or accept higher CPAs from that ad. You're ‘stuck’ with that creative.

And that’s not the only challenge of using whitelisting to boost organic content.

Consider this scenario:

You worked with an influencer who created an Instagram Story that performed super well for your brand. So you decide to buy the content. Trouble is, it was filmed specifically for Stories — it’s vertical with a 9:16 aspect ratio. But your ad will likely appear in multiple formats.

“In terms of optimizing an ad for the ad platforms, it's really bad because you have to work with the format that you've paid for. Because it's an ad, you can just choose to say, ‘I don't want to show this anywhere other than Instagram Stories’, but then you're wasting all of the other exposure that you could get, so I don't recommend it. The only thing, in my opinion, is to just accept that it won't be 100% ideal for every person that sees it on every platform.”

All of which highlights the benefits of a pure whitelisting campaign comprising multiple, purpose-made creatives.

🤓 Pro tip: Try to create three to five versions of your whitelisting content. The more versions you have, the more chance one of them will perform. Set them live at the same time, then let the algorithm decide which works best.

6. Campaign measurement and optimization

Remember — with influencer whitelisting, you’re spending money from three different places:

• Content
• Usage rights
• Ad budget

This can pose challenges for calculating customer acquisition costs (CACs) and ROI. Does all that expenditure count toward your CAC? Or should you treat it as three separate budgets, with only part of it contributing to acquisition?

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

You can technically put some of this budget under creative production. That's something that we've started to do, where the cost to work with an influencer initially is a marketing cost that goes towards your customer acquisition cost, but the usage rights we account for under creative production.

In a small company this might not matter. In a larger company, it can make a real difference to how budgets are allocated and perceived.

Once you’ve figured out what budget sits where, it’s time to assess how well your ads are working and optimize your campaign accordingly.

While whitelisting is a form of influencer marketing, it’s best to put your paid social hat on at this point.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

Look at it from a performance mindset. Even if I paid for three months’ usage rights, if performance dips after 7 days, I'll turn it off. The money could be better spent on another organic collab, or it could go to other ads. There's always a trade-off, but the goal is to put spend behind every creative you can get, with the end goal of having one or two that perform.

A real-world whitelisting example

Case study: Parfumado

Parfumado is a subscription service that helps consumers find their new favorite fragrances and beauty products.

Here’s an example of a recent whitelisting ad it ran as part of a 30-day campaign with Dutch lifestyle influencer Josha Peeters.

Compared to other video ads Parfumado promoted during the same 30-day period, the whitelisting ads in this campaign generated:

✅ 10% lower CACs

✅ 40% better hook rates (percentage of people who watched the first three seconds of the video)

✅ 20% better hold rates (percentage of people who watched the full video)

Conclusion: start small with a handful of small creators

Ready to dip a toe in the whitelisting waters for the first time?

Luke’s advice is to start small by collaborating with three or four UGC creators with 5,000 – 20,000 followers.

Luke Raben

Growth Manager Labfresh, ex-Parfumado

It really reduces the risk for you as a brand. You can pay $/€300 to a UGC creator for X videos and get access to their page. Then you can test if the concept of running ads through another person's page works. Compare that content performance to your existing ads performance and see if there’s a difference.

If it works, great — do it some more, possibly with higher-profile influencers and/or larger ad budgets.

But if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t necessarily ditch all your future whitelisting plans. Maybe those influencers just weren’t the right fit for your brand or campaign.

Whitelisting FAQs

How much should you pay an influencer for whitelisting usage rights?

Influencer whitelisting costs vary significantly based on location, industry, and the size of influencer you’re working with. Parfumado typically pays around €1,000 for 30 days of usage rights, but in some markets and verticals, influencers might not charge a usage fee. Influencers may also request alternative/additional payments, such as a percentage of total ad spend or a cut of any sales generated through the campaign.

Which platforms can I use for influencer whitelisting campaigns?

Influencer whitelisting campaigns typically run on one or more of these platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok (Spark Ads)

Each of these platforms allows brands to gain access to the influencer’s ad account — an essential step in whitelisting.

Does influencer whitelisting improve ad engagement?

Anecdotally, yes, it can. Because your ad carries the name of an influencer rather than your brand, it can feel more engaging and authentic, which can improve engagement. However, we haven’t seen any hard-and-fast data to back this up. The only way to find out if whitelisting works for you is to try it.