The All-In-One Guide to Influencer Marketing

For every demanding celebrity, there are hundreds of friendly influencers whose audiences truly listen.  

In fact, a 2025 Deloitte study shows that 52% of Generation Z and 45% of millennials feel a stronger personal connection to social media creators than to TV personalities or actors. 

The key difference is that, rather than looking up to aspirational figures and trying to mimic them, people often look to influencers for genuine, trusted, and relatable advice. This means that if you can find the right way to include your business in that content, you’re reaching people who really are engaged and are more likely to take action.

And influencer marketing really pays off. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 84.8% of brands find influencer marketing to be effective. With so many influencers out there, influencer marketing may seem daunting. But fear not – with the right tools and a bit of guidance, it’s easier than ever. 

In this guide

To help you on your influencer marketing journey, we’ve created a simple guide using examples from Brandwatch’s powerful Influence tool to make things super straightforward.

Our practical guide covers: 

• Planning your campaigns and finding influencers
• Managing partnerships
• Measuring results

Planning your campaigns and finding influencers 

Setting goals 

Step one is, of course, to ask yourself what you need from a collaboration. Sounds obvious, but it’s not easy, and it’s not one to skip. Defining your marketing objectives means you can conduct smarter research and find the right influencer(s) to help you achieve your goals, rather than wasting time and money on a campaign going nowhere.

This is important because the accountability stakes are high when working with influencers (especially if you’re going to spend a lot). Different stakeholders around your business might have different ideas about the objectives, so get clarity before you get started. Once you have these objectives in place, you can better identify potential influencers and relevant metrics.  

Influencers can help generate marketing outcomes like: 

• Increasing sales 
• Driving web traffic 
• Improving brand reputation 
• Boosting engagement with a new audience 
• Growing social media following 

When putting together your key objectives, ensure they meet the following criteria: specific, measurable, accurate, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). 

As soon as you’ve identified the desired results of your influencer marketing project, it’s time to think about what type of influencer marketing campaign you'll run.

Different ways to work with influencers 

Before contacting an influencer, you need to structure your agreement and define your partnership strategy. 

Influencer agreements don’t have to be complicated and can move fast – so it’s best to have the agreement ready before you start the discussion. If you are waiting for sign-off from five higher-ups, chances are the influencer will probably have moved on to the next opportunity by the time you get back to them. 

Once your agreement is ready and your goals are clear, it’s time to choose the right type of collaboration for your campaign. 

• Sponsored content: This is effectively an advertisement the influencer has agreed to place on their stream. This could be an image or a mention, or even a sponsored unboxing. However, there is always a risk the influencer will come across as inauthentic when promoting a product in this way, which is why picking the right person is so important. 
• Gifting: This is a more authentic way to grab attention than sponsored content, but it has fewer guarantees. Gifting clothes or products to influencers can be costly too. Yet, it’s a far more “natural” way of raising awareness of your brand if the influencer genuinely starts to use one of your products. 
• Brand ambassador program: Celebrities are the usual go-to figures for brand ambassador programs. For example, athletes can make tens of millions a year acting as brand ambassadors. But in recent years, brands have realized they can get cheaper deals with influencers that have the potential for just as much reach and even better engagement.
• Competitions and offers: A quick and cheap way to get attention is through competitions. Some influencers are happy to post competitions themselves, but they often direct viewers to your accounts or website. 

Budget is an important consideration. Conducting a free influencer campaign is difficult, but for those with low budgets, gifting and competitions are often the first option. 

If you’re new to working with influencers, you should make sure to educate yourself around the law. The FTC provides a good “plain language” guide on influencer disclosures if you’re curious. 

3 popular ways to compensate influencers 

1. Commission: Promo codes are a popular way to promote sales through an influencer. The influencer receives a percentage of the sales, and you can track the amount of sales each specific influencer generated by customizing the promo codes: it’s a win-win. 
2. Flat fee: Many of the larger influencers and celebrities have established a flat fee pricing structure, with some of them charging six or seven figures per post. Be mindful that you’re not just paying for exposure. Working with smaller influencers with more engaged followers might deliver better results in line with your campaign goals. 
3. Pay-per-engagement: Some influencers are interested in receiving a fee every time a customer clicks on a link to your website or leaves a comment on a sponsored post.

Setting creative expectations 

You also need to think about the balance of creative freedom. Your boss might expect everything to be done by the book, but many influencers will be put off by overbearing guidelines from brands.

Striking a middle ground and smoothing out these potential clash points is a must before moving forward. Often influencers need complete creative freedom, so you need to trust that they’re going to be getting your message across, even if it’s not in the way you would have done it. 

Influencer discovery

Now that you’ve got your objectives in place and agreements ready to go, it’s time to begin searching for the perfect influencer for your brand. 

There are many things to consider. Marketers have to think about not only the size of an influencer’s following but also the type of influencer they’re getting, any potential controversies, past work with competitors, and which platforms their content will appear on.

The right tool will make your hunt for the best influencers much easier. For example, you can use Brandwatch Influence to search a database of over 50 million global creators, filtering out irrelevant influencers and zoning in on specific individuals who can help push your campaign forward. 

There are plenty of ways you can break down the pool of influencers. This includes the basics, like follower count and using filters for both the influencers and their audiences by age, gender, location, language, and interests. 

You can run analysis on the influencers you find to check out their profiles – is their following growing? How’s their engagement rate? Are there any “account lookalikes” (similar accounts that might be helpful for my campaign)? 

To help keep your brand safe, your report will include recent mentions of potentially controversial or risky topics like alcohol, drugs, or profanity. You can also add custom topics – for example, to find mentions of keywords that are sensitive for your brand. You might also want to avoid influencers who’ve worked with competitor brands, for example. 

Managing the partnership

Making contact

Influencers are far more easily reachable than traditional celebrities. But making a strong first impression is key to starting a relationship off well. 

The best move is to bring your research into the conversation. If you can show an influencer you’ve done the in-depth analysis of their audience and can demonstrate how a partnership would benefit them, they’ll be more likely to collaborate on your terms. 

Often, there’s no need to be totally formal at the start. Many influencers did not start out as businesspeople, and they pride themselves on being approachable, so coming in cold with a brief and a proposition may not be the best way to get their attention.

Send a message complimenting what you like about their content and set up a call or meeting.   

What if I’m ignored? 

If you can’t get through to an influencer, then there are ways of getting heard.

Direct messaging can get lost among the many DMs influencers receive, and if phone calls aren’t working, then consider: 

• Contacting their agent 
• Emailing from an individual work account (generic marketing email accounts often fall into spam folders) 
• Approaching them in person at events 

Again, being armed with your research will help convince any unsure influencer or agent that the collaboration is good for everyone. 

Once you’ve got an influencer on board, it’s time to sign the agreement you crafted before you began your search.  

Of course, there may be some negotiating involved, but using the Brandwatch Influence platform should help you find the right type of influencer – which will help reduce negotiation time.  

Prepare to be flexible. You might have been looking for an influencer to promote your entire product range, but they may prefer to highlight just one item they genuinely recommend – perhaps with a unique offer code.  

Consider: What alternatives do you have in case your number one choice of influencer rejects your offer? With Influence, you can keep a list of your researched choices in ranked order. 

Make managing your partnership easier

Brandwatch Influence lets you manage your directory with ease and streamline your workflows. You can record individual contact details and payment information, store contracts, and capture additional first-party data with custom fields.  

The messages feature is particularly helpful for teams working with influencers. Here users can access both their own messages and all company-wide conversations with influencers. This ensures continuity, even if a team member is on leave or leaves the company. 

Other time-saving functionalities include: 

• Reply to influencer messages directly from email alerts 
• Create and use message templates 
• Reach multiple influencers simultaneously with mass emailing 

Influence’s all-in-one approach gives you the power to prepare campaigns and streamline post-approval processes before they go live. This is particularly useful if you’re dealing with multiple influencers at once or engaging in multi-level, cross-channel promotion with a sole influencer. 

Measuring the results 

The monitoring and review process can be tiring unless you have the right tools to condense the data. This is where many campaigns lose momentum – but Brandwatch Influence can help you see the impact.  

In Influence, you can link actual payments to influencers’ campaigns for a real-time overview of spending and performance. This way, you’ll gain deeper insights into your budget, marketing results, and ROI. 

How to end or renew an influencer deal 

Walking away from an influencer deal isn’t always easy, and nor is telling your bosses about it. But if the data shows the partnership is not working, then the best course of action is to be active in your decision making. 

Using Influence, you can keep track of all the relevant ROI data points from your campaigns – from audience interaction, brand awareness, and positive response rates to direct sales. 

From here, you can use your data to make decisions on the next steps. Do you: 

• Maintain the same relationship and content structure with your influencer(s)? 
• Pivot to a new structure? 
• End the agreement altogether? 

You can access all influencer documents and contracts within Influence, which makes it easier to renew agreements if you decide to move forward.