The Basic Steps to Launching a Campaign
- Define your objective. Before anything else, get clear on why you're engaging influencers in the first place.
- Build and post your campaign. A detailed campaign brief posted to a marketplace lets influencers apply directly.
- Widen your prospects. Invite additional influencers directly if you want more options beyond who applies organically.
- Make your hiring decisions. Use a budgeting tool to finalize which influencers fit your campaign and your spend.
- Review content for approval. Every piece of content should go through an approval step before it goes live.
- Watch it go live. Content publishes across the platforms included in your campaign.
- Review insights and ROI. Analyze the results against the objective you set at the very start.
What's a Good Budget?
Testing an influencer marketing strategy doesn't require a massive budget, but it can't be done on a shoestring either. Like most marketing, it's a numbers game, and it often takes testing a few strategies and influencers before finding the right fit for your brand.
Several factors shape how much you should realistically spend on a campaign:
- Size of the influencers involved (micro, mid-tier, or large)
- Number of influencers in the campaign
- Total deliverables required
- Length of the campaign
- Amount of product gifted alongside any paid compensation
Because these variables shift so much from brand to brand, a personalized conversation about your specific goals is usually more useful than a generic number.
Why Campaign Length Matters
One-post campaigns are increasingly falling out of favor across the influencer marketing industry, and for good reason. Multi-post campaigns consistently perform better. It takes an average of seven interactions between a potential customer and your brand before they convert, so a single post rarely has the chance to do that work on its own.
Campaigns longer than three months tend to perform best. A solid baseline structure is three months, three in-feed posts, and six total Story slides, giving your message enough repetition across enough time to actually build toward conversion.
Setting Clear Campaign Goals
Being explicit about your objective matters more than it might seem. Influencer campaigns are started surprisingly often without either the brand or the influencer having a clear, shared sense of what success actually looks like.
As a general rule, aim for one goal per campaign. Some goals pair naturally, like generating content while also building awareness, but stacking too many competing goals, like driving both broad awareness and direct sales in a single short campaign, tends to dilute the outcome. When multiple goals genuinely exist, a longer campaign that focuses on one goal per post tends to work far better than trying to accomplish everything in a single piece of content.
The Four KPIs Worth Understanding
- Awareness — an especially important first step for new brands or new product launches.
- Consideration — once people know about your brand, this phase gives them the information and reasoning to choose you over competitors.
- Conversion — the actual action you want, whether that's a purchase or a newsletter sign-up.
- Production — generating content itself, since influencers are one of the most cost-effective ways to produce high-quality visual content at scale.
Make Your Goals SMART
Whatever objective you land on, run it through the SMART framework: specific (exactly what you want to happen), measurable (how you'll track it), achievable (does your team agree it's realistic), relevant (does it fit your actual parameters), and timed (does it have a clear end date).
How Monetary Compensation Typically Works
Influencer rates vary significantly from project to project, shaped by the specific product, deliverables, and the influencer's own audience. Two creators might charge very different rates for the exact same deliverables simply because of how their specific audience responds.
Rather than fixing a set rate upfront, most platforms leave compensation to be negotiated once both sides have expressed genuine interest. Influencers typically list a standard rate on their profile as a starting reference point, but that number often shifts depending on the specifics of each campaign.
Choosing Your Campaign Type
Paid Plus Product
This is generally the strongest approach for most campaigns. Gifting the product, which is often necessary for the influencer to genuinely try it, combined with a set paid rate, tends to produce the most reliable results.
Product Only
Gifted-only campaigns remain a genuinely debated topic in influencer marketing. Product or experience compensation alone can be enough to attract creators, particularly smaller or newer ones building a portfolio, but it increasingly falls short of what more established creators need. As the saying goes, a mortgage can't be paid with makeup.
Gifted campaigns aren't without value. They can work well for smaller brands or in-demand, high-value products. But in practice, paid collaborations tend to produce noticeably stronger results, since compensation-only creators may not put in the same level of effort as those being paid directly for their work.
Paid Only
For high-value products, services, or experiences, a paid-only structure without gifted product is also a reasonable option. This tends to work particularly well with creators who are already customers or already familiar with the offering.
Choosing the Right Content Mix
Influencers are content creators in the truest sense, producing images, Stories, in-feed video, and blog content, often from very little starting material. Campaigns don't always need every format. More often, they focus on a combination of feed posts and Stories.
Images and Stories tend to be the most commonly used formats, but the right mix depends on your specific budget and content needs. Stories disappear after 24 hours, but many brands still prefer them for their direct link capability, generally available to creators above 10,000 followers. Larger creators, especially those above 30,000 followers who also maintain a blog, can be a strong fit for high-traffic, long-form blog content as part of a campaign.
Content-only campaigns, where the goal is simply generating usable images or footage rather than direct promotion, can also be a cost-effective way to build out your own marketing materials, and many creators genuinely enjoy this kind of purely creative work.
Measuring Success by Campaign Objective
Knowing your goal is one thing. Knowing how to actually measure it, especially something less tangible like a newsletter sign-up, takes a bit more thought. The right metric depends entirely on which objective you set at the start of the campaign.
Campaign Objectives and How to Measure Them
The Rule of 7
The Rule of 7 is one of the oldest principles in marketing: consumers typically need an average of seven touchpoints with a brand or product before they convert. Both brands and creators should keep this firmly in mind when planning a campaign.
For brands, this means favoring longer-term campaigns over one-off posts. For creators, it means weaving a product into content more than once, and ideally across different formats, like a feed post, a Story, and a longer video, rather than a single mention and moving on.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Running one-post campaigns and expecting strong conversion. A single touchpoint rarely does enough to move someone toward a purchase.
- Starting a campaign without a clear, shared objective. Ambiguity between brand and influencer leads to diluted, unfocused results.
- Stacking too many competing goals into one short campaign. Spreading focus too thin weakens the outcome for every goal involved.
- Measuring every campaign the same way. An awareness campaign and a conversion campaign need entirely different success metrics.
- Underbudgeting a test campaign. A shoestring budget rarely gives you enough data to make a confident decision about what's working.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should an influencer marketing campaign run? Longer than three months is generally the strongest baseline, given how many touchpoints it typically takes to convert a potential customer. A structure like three in-feed posts and six Story slides over three months is a reasonable starting point.
Should I always gift product in addition to paying influencers? Paid plus product tends to produce the strongest results for most campaigns, since it gives creators genuine hands-on experience with the product while still compensating them fairly for their work and reach.
How many goals should one campaign have? Ideally just one. When multiple goals genuinely need to be pursued, a longer campaign that dedicates each individual post to a different goal tends to work better than combining everything into a single piece of content.
Ready to Build Your Next Campaign?
Running a high-performing influencer campaign comes down to clear objectives, realistic budgeting, sufficient campaign length, and measuring the right metrics for what you're actually trying to achieve. Getting these fundamentals right from the start makes every campaign after it easier to plan and evaluate.
momfluence is built to make every step of this process easier, from building your campaign brief to reviewing insights once it's live. If you're ready to launch your next campaign, book a call with momfluence and let's talk about what's next for your brand.