Influencer Marketing: Running a Profitable Campaign in 2024
SEP 19 / 6 MIN READ
Influencer marketing. If you aren't on it already, you're behind.
~70% of companies with 100+ employees already use influencers to reach their audience. And according to the Influencer Marketing Hub 2024 State of Influencer Marketing benchmark report, 84.8% of their 3,000+ survey respondents say it's "an effective form of marketing" for them.
In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents spend up to 20% of their marketing budget on just that.
Now...respondents are only singing such praises because they've found a way to do it profitably.
In today's guide, we're teaching you how to do the same.
Influencer marketing in 2024…
...is changing. In fact, it's a completely different ballgame from what it was just 10 years ago.
Maybe you think of the "Fyre Fest" documentary when you think of influencer marketing. Or the Pepsi ad fiasco featuring Kendall Jenner. And all the "What-do-they-even-do?"-type people posting lifestyle content on Instagram.
Yeah, it's not that anymore.
Today's influencers are niche, knowledgeable, and relatable.
Thanks to TikTok (and now Reels and YouTube Shorts), people in just about every niche you can imagine have a platform to share their thoughts, experiences, and advice. They're not just beautiful people with nothing else to offer.
But what do they look like?
They're not always supermodels, actors, or pop stars. In fact, they often come from very different backgrounds than other influencers in their niche.
They're people who are passionate about something. This passion comes through in their content, making it feel more genuine to audiences and thus creating stronger connections.
They have some level of expertise or knowledge in their field. Whether it's cooking, beauty, fashion, gaming, business, finance, or anything else, these are people who have demonstrated their expertise and have authority to speak on the topic.
Or, they're the voice their audience wishes they had. Alix Earle, for instance, amassed a following by sharing "Get Ready With Me" videos and other beauty content. She was a regular student at University of Miami, but her candor and relatability drew millions of followers who felt like they were chatting with a friend.
Point is, today's influencers are authentic, not manufactured.
Why work with influencers in the first place?
There are a few reasons.
They make your product relatable.
You want to sell more of something? People need to see themselves using it. Influencers offer that perspective.
They reach your target audience in a way others can't.
When an influencer posts something, their viewers actually want to see it. This is completely different from, say, a display ad.
You can leverage their audience.
When you find the right influencer to promote your product or service (that is, they're aligned with your brand values and would actually use it), you're reaching members of your target audience in a way that even the most advanced segmentation strategies can't consistently achieve.
Plus, you're potentially getting in front of a whole new audience that may not have been aware of your brand before.
Types of influencers you can work with
Broadly speaking, there are four types of infuencers:
Nano-influencers
Micro-influencers
Macro-influencers
Mega influencers (celebrities)
1. Nano-influencers (1,000–10,000 followers)
Nano-influencers have small but highly engaged audiences. Their content feels personal because they engage deeply with their audience.
For you as a business owner, this translates to more time dedicated to each campaign and a more personal relationship between your product and their niche community. So, these influencers are best for hyper-local or niche campaigns.
You're a good fit for them if you fall into one of these categories:
Local businesses (e.g. a coffee shop looking to reach residents of their town)
One-person specialty businesses (e.g., a homemade candles company or Etsy shop)
Small businesses with limited budgets
2. Micro-influencers (10,000–100,000 followers)
Like nano-influencers, micro-influencers have high engagement rates. They're among the most authoritative people in their respective niches and generally post higher-quality content than their nano counterparts (hence why they've amassed a following in the tens of thousands).
Despite having a larger following, they're still a lot more affordable than macro or mega-influencers. And their engaged community makes them ideal for targeted campaigns.
They're good for:
Brands with niche products or services (e.g., vegan protein powders)
E-commerce businesses (e.g., a jewelry store on Shopify)
Travel brands and destinations looking to reach specific demographics
3. Macro-influencers (100,000–1M followers)
Macro-influencers have established themselves as authorities or personalities in their fields. Their large audiences mean greater reach, although that comes at the expense of engagement and personalization.
If you have a more developed product that serves a wider audience and a decently-sized influencer marketing budget, macro-influencers are a good way to balance brand awareness, targeting, and cost.
Use influencer marketing with macro-influencers to support:
Larger direct-to-consumer (DTC) product launches
Fast exposure for a broad software product (e.g., Canva or Grammarly)
Fundraising for a nonprofit
Travel or hospitality promotions targeting a large but specific audience
4. Mega-influencers (1M+ followers)
Mega-influencers are household names, with millions of followers on social media platforms. Athletes, TV stars, musicians, actors/actresses, and top YouTube creators fall under this umbrella. Think: Kevin O'Leary a.k.a. Mr. Wonderful, Lindsay Lohan, or Brett Favre.
Forming a partnership with a celebrity means tapping into a massive, broad audience. They're expensive, and engagement will be a lot lower on a per-follower basis than with other influencer tiers, but you're getting massive brand awareness, huge publicity, and potential virality.
Partner with an influencer from this category for:
Massive consumer brand advertising (think Calvin Klein or Pepsi)
Spreading global awareness about a social cause (e.g., climate change, human rights)
Luxury branding that needs "exclusivity"
Products with broad audiences and general appeal (e.g., a restaurant chain's new food item)
Influencer marketing vs. affiliate marketing vs. celebrity endorsements
Within the influencer marketing space, you have three routes you could take. Each one has a time and a place.
Traditional influencer marketing
Traditional influencer marketing is everything we've talked about above. You partner with a content creator, they promote your product, and that's essentially the end of the transaction.
Influencer marketing works well when you need someone to create content and speak about your product, but it doesn't give you any control over the distribution because the creator publishes the content to their own audience.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you partner with someone who gets compensated based on how successful their promotions are. You might pay them a % of each sale they drive or revenue share for a subscription product.
Affiliates are great when you trust their ability to convert and scale. They might be someone you've worked with in the past or whose audience perfectly aligns with your target market.
These are people you're happy with being ambassadors for your brand.
Celebrity endorsements
Celebrity endorsements are paid deals with the mega-influencers we described up there. They might be the face of a campaign, the creator/designer themselves, a spokesperson, or simply be seen using your product in public or on social media. Read our article on celebrity endorsement examples to see what this looks like in practice.
Celebs are perfect for massive brand awareness and publicity. They're also good if you want to align your brand with a particular celebrity's image or values.
They're also professional entertainers, and you have complete control over how their appearance in your ads or other content plays out. You might even get lucky and go viral as a result of the partnership.
How to create an influencer marketing strategy
Building an influencer campaign is more nuanced than it looks, but it isn't rocket science. The following steps will help you develop a winning influencer marketing strategy.
1. Set goals and KPIs.
You can't measure the success of your influencer strategy without knowing what you're trying to achieve. What you track will depend on your goals for the campaign.
For instance, if you're going after brand awareness, your #1 metric would be reach or impressions. When Chipotle used Cameo to partner with Tariq (Corn Kid), they measured their success in terms of 100M+ organic views, 1.7 billion PR impressions, and the fact that it was their top-performing content on Insta, Facebook, and TikTok.
If you're looking for sales, though, conversions and revenue growth are your primary KPIs.
Here's a list of KPIs you should look at to evaluate your influencer marketing efforts:
Engagement (likes, comments, shares)
Reach/Impressions
Traffic (e.g., to a landing page)
Conversions (e.g., leads, sales, newsletter subscribers)
Revenue attribution
Brand sentiment
When you're developing your content strategy, you need to keep in mind that influencer content is generally personal and conversational. It's not like sales-oriented or brand-driven posts. That said, you should still create guidelines for messaging, content alignment with your brand values, and important things to mention.
2. Choose the right influencer to promote your brand.
You have to collaborate with the right person if you want your campaign to have any impact at all. If you just pick a social media influencer based on vanity metrics like follower count, it'll be a waste of money (not to mention, effort).
You want to partner with influencers who are:
Relevant to your industry, product, or target market
Interested in your product
Would actually use it (or whose audience would use it)
Authentic
Aligned with your brand
For example, it made sense for Steph Curry to create a product line with Under Armour because he's an athlete and this is a sports apparel brand. And a popular travel YouTuber might partner with Capital One for a TikTok/Reel on how they maximize their travel credit card.
Hint: Look for mentions of your brand across the web. You probably have influencers who are already promoting your product simply because they use it and like it.
3. Reach out to the creator you want to work with.
You can do this the easy way or the hard way.
The HARD way
Using an influencer marketing platform, you can search for creators who are relevant to your industry or product. This will give you a list of candidates, along with some information about their audience demographics and engagement rates.
You'll have to manually reach out to them without any sort of direct relationship. The performance of your content depends entirely on the influencer’s reach. And you'll have limited licensing options because they're the ones creating the content.
Not to mention, working with them on your own can be a hassle. At the "celebrity" end of the spectrum, agents and managers get in the way. On the "nano" and "micro" end, you're usually not working with someone who's experienced in branded content creation and executions.
The EASY way
Not-so-shameless plug, here: Use Cameo.
It's better than influencer marketing tools.
Our search function makes it incredibly easy to browse from thousands of celebrities. And, since they've signed up with the platform, initiating direct contact with them only takes a few clicks.
Plus, we've just added new filtering options. You can now filter by:
Talent category
Price range
Follower count
Audience demographics
And the influencers you see on-page update in real time to reflect your choices.
Oh yeah. And you get your content in 7 working days, max.
4. Negotiate a deal.
Once you find an influencer for your brand, you have to reach out and hammer out the details. This includes:
Content specifications
Number of posts or pieces of content
Length of the partnership
Whether you're supplying the product for the shoot or not
Licensing and exclusivity terms
Payment structure (flat-rate, success-based, rev share)
Keep in mind that the cost of influencer content varies wildly. There's some transparency in the market (a nano-influencer obviously won't charge as much as an A-list celebrity), but there's no set pricing structure across the board.
Here are some best practices to live by when it comes to negotiation:
Be upfront about your budget.
Discuss your expectations for engagement and content types/quality.
Estimate the ROI based on the influencer's rate and your expected results to know if you're getting a good deal.
Verify non-disclosure.
Be clear about licensing and exclusivity terms before entering into a partnership.
After a handful of campaigns, if you're working with the same creators on a perpetual basis and they're netting you a huge return, you're better off overpaying them than underpaying.
Note: If you use Cameo, you can skip this step. All pricing is upfront and flat-rate. You can get straight to the creative process.
5. Create a distribution strategy.
For the most part, influencer marketing is limited by the creator's reach and platforms. That's why the best influencer for your campaign is someone who has lots of followers on the channels your target audience uses.
Depending on the restrictions set forth in your licensing agreement, you should strategize for other ways you're going to use the content.
Repurposing for your own social media marketing efforts
Using it for an email campaign
Running ads with the influencer's content as creative
Embedding it on your website or landing page
Re-using it for future influencer campaigns
But again, the creator is in control here. They do most (or all) of the distribution.
That's why it's a lot easier with Cameo. When you work with a Cameo celebrity, you tell them what you need and they drop you the finished product. You’re free to use it across multiple channels (social media, websites, emails, even internally) for the full length of your license.
6. Launch your influencer campaign.
You've got your branded content from the influencer. Now, it's launch time. They'll post on their social channels or send you the video file (depending on how you're working together).
Make sure you've got everything in order before the influencer goes live, though.
CTAs and important messaging for them to cover
Destination URLs working
Product inventories stocked
KPIs and attribution tracking set up
Once you (or they) hit "Post," you play a waiting game (with some engagement monitoring).
Measuring influencer marketing ROI
Depending on what you've defined as a "successful influencer marketing campaign" in Step 1, calculating the return you get from your influencer investment is pretty easy.
Keep in mind, though, that the authentic nature of influencer marketing can make tracking the direct monetary ROI an imperfect science, even though it will definitely influence purchase decisions.
If you use Cameo and manage all the content distribution, it's a lot easier.
Track impressions, clicks, interactions, and conversions on the channels you publish to.
Compare those numbers to the flat-rate cost your celebrity charges.
Factor in additional ad spend or content distribution costs (if you're using paid media to get the influencer's content in front of more eyeballs).
Track conversations on your owned channels and social listening tools. Compare sentiment before, during, and after.
Cameo: Influencer marketing on easy mode.
If you want to find influencers and celebrities, then start working with them a few minutes later, there's really only one option for you.
Having to manually reach out to creators, negotiate an influencer marketing deal, and plan out the campaign will take months. And that's before all the paperwork.
When you use Cameo, our platform cuts out all the fluff.
Browse celebs and influencers.
Apply talent and audience demographic filters.
Find someone who's a good fit for your brand.
Write your brief.
Book in a few clicks.
Get your custom content within a week.
No complicated contracts. No hidden costs. Always recognizable faces.