The Complete Guide to Influencer Marketing in 2024

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“People want to do business with people they like” is a sales adage that’s truer today than ever. Customers aren’t satisfied with ads or billboards alone. They want to be heard, entertained, and supported.

That’s the promise of influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketing can help you reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and increase trust. If you know your audience, you can explore influencer marketing for your brand and products—no matter your company size. 

Learn how influencer marketing can help you meet brand goals with step-by-step instructions for setting up an influencer campaign. Discover real examples from top online brands and get advice from the pros.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing means working with influencers to promote your company, product, service, or message to their audience. These partnerships are usually paid arrangements in which influencers create content for a brand. 

Compensation can range from multi-year cash contracts to one-time product exchanges, discounts, or vouchers. 

Influencers are creators and celebrities who’ve built reputations around a specific niche or built sizable audiences around their personal brands. They create content across a number of platforms, including:

• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Facebook
• Blogs
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Twitch
• Snapchat

Instagram holds the top spot for influencer marketing in 2024 and is expected to do so until 2025. 

Benefits of investing in influencer marketing

According to one study, 49% of all participants and 87% of Gen Z participants said they choose products recommended by influencers. Influencer campaigns can help brands meet business goals like increasing sales, growing brand awareness, and building audiences. 

Here are a few other ways brands can benefit from influencer marketing:

1. Form deeper relationships

Influencers use authentic presentation and engagement to foster deeper customer relationships with brands. In recent years, this dynamic of brand to influencer to audience has become a media staple.

Of course, for deeper relationships to form, the influencer’s personal brand and your own need to match (values, industry, audience, etc.). However, for maximum impact, your business should also provide its audience value.

2. Increase reach

Another obvious benefit of influencer marketing is the potential for increased reach from tapping into a wider audience. Social media users across platforms continue to rise. TikTok, for example, is expected to grow to 955 billion users by 2025.

Despite the potential, algorithm changes, ad fatigue, and privacy concerns all contribute to lower return on investment (ROI) in some forms of social media advertising. Influencer marketing allows brands to dodge these issues by working with creators who already have organic reach.

Depending on your goals, influencers with large audiences can help you reach broad audiences, while those with small, niche followers can help you target specific ones. 

3. Boost social engagement

Greater social engagement often leads to higher brand awareness. Also, when brands communicate in their audience’s language, they’ll often garner more brand advocates.

If engagement is a goal, choose partnerships and channels carefully. Engagement rates differ across platforms. Audience size also matters, and micro-influencers typically have higher engagement rates than their mega-influencer counterparts.

4. Gain higher earned media value

The last major benefit of influencer marketing is the potential for higher ROI from earned media value (EMV). EMV refers to unpaid interactions, like when an influencer’s followers or their followers’ followers discuss and connect on your brand. Meaningful connections like this can lead to increased sales. 

By involving an influencer in your marketing, you stand a better chance of increasing your EMV. One survey found businesses make $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing examples

Explore companies that successfully work with social media influencers to reach potential customers and meet business goals. Get inspired by their tried-and-tested tactics and apply their learnings to your own influencer marketing.

Healthish

Healthish co-founders Emily Chong and Nathan Chan worked with Instagram influencers to promote the brand’s signature water bottle launch.

“We’re in a fortunate position where the product is relatively low cost,” Nathan explains. “We just send out [products] to many subsections of the market.”

Healthish’s influencer marketing strategy involves sending free products to relevant influencers, such as fitness vloggers, fashion influencers, and other groups related to its target market. These creators then share images and videos of its products online—but only if they love the product. 

“We don’t even ask people to post if they don’t want to,” Nathan says. “We just say, ‘If you love the products, we’d love for you to share it with your community or fans or audience.’” 

🎧 Listen: To learn more about the influencer marketing approach that turned Healthish into a million-dollar brand, hear from its founders on the Shopify Masters podcast.

Nominal

Nominal is a jewelry brand that blends culture and fashion to create meaningful accessories. Founded by business and life partners Lena Sarsour and Akram Abdallah, Nominal quickly grew from an idea to a seven-figure business, thanks to influencer marketing.

“Influencer marketing has been huge to us,” Akram says. “From the very beginning, we, of course, had no budget at all. We couldn’t afford anybody.” So what did Akram and Lena do? They gifted influencers free jewelry. If the influencers enjoyed the products and found them sharable, they would post about the brand on social media.

Nominal would even ask influencers if they could repost their content on the brand’s feed. “Although we didn’t pay them, now we have [branded] content that a lot of people follow and see. We build that credibility through a famous person wearing our product.”

🎧 Listen: Learn more about Nominal’s marketing strategy by catching the founders on the Shopify Masters podcast.

Explore more influencer marketing examples from Shopify store owners:

Types of influencers

Definitions can vary, but social media influencers typically fall into one of five tiers: nano, micro, mid, macro, and mega. When developing an influencer marketing strategy, be sure to find the right influencer at the right level for your project.

Nano influencers (1,000–10,000)

Nano-influencers are everyday people with emerging personal brands. They often have between 1,000 and 10,000 social media followers. Their feeds aren’t glamorous or polished, and their photos typically aren’t edited. Being an influencer is not their full-time job.

However, nano-influencers are excellent allies for growing ecommerce brands for two reasons:

1. They’ve built a lot of trust with their followers, which results in high engagement rates.
2. They’re the most affordable.

Data shows that nano-influencers have noticeably higher engagement rates than bigger accounts, averaging over 4%.

Micro-influencers (10,000–100,000)

Micro-influencers are social media accounts with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. 

Micro-influencers often have more compact and targeted audiences than larger accounts, and they have a loyal following they engage with regularly. 

While micro-influencers may be more expensive than nano-influencers, they can still provide that one-on-one feeling when promoting your business.

Mid-tier influencers (100,000–500,000)

Mid-tier influencers have a community of between 100,000 and 500,000 followers across platforms. Despite the high numbers, mid-tier influencers tend to have well-segmented audiences. For example, a fitness brand could gain maximum exposure with its target audience by collaborating with a mid-tier fitness influencer. This mid-tier group is also more affordable and easier to contact than big influencers.

Macro-influencers (500,000–1 million)

Macro-influencers are individuals with between 500,000 and one million followers. These influencers make great brand collaborators because they have extensive experience in the space. They know their target audience and what they like, and they won’t jeopardize their followers’ trust by partnering with the wrong brands.

Working with macro-influencers brings a handful of benefits:

1. Their audience is highly relevant to your brand and its offerings.
2. They have massive reach.
3. They have a streamlined process for working with brands.

With all this experience comes a price tag that, depending on the platform, one source estimates to be between $1,000 and $10,000. Macro- and mega-influencers may also be harder to reach, as you typically have to contact them through representatives or agents.

Mega influencers (1 million+)

You’re probably familiar with mega-influencers. These are social media celebrities with audiences of more than one million followers.

Mega-influencers like Ryan Trahan, MrBeast, and Unnecessary Inventions can provide massive reach for your brand. These superstars also leverage their reputations to confer credibility on your brand. A single collab with a mega-influencer can run anywhere from $10,000 to six figures.

6 steps to an effective influencer marketing strategy 

Finding a social media influencer and agreeing on a collaboration with them can be a time-consuming exercise that’s challenging to scale. For best results, use this process to stay on track:

1. Do your homework
2. Set a clear brief
3. Choose relevant influencers
4. Learn how to reach out
5. Agree on a collaboration structure
6. Maximize content value

1. Do your homework

You can learn a lot from other brands’ influencer marketing approaches. Discover what works for them, get inspiration from the types of content they post, and look at which posts get the most engagement. Use a tool like Hootsuite to compare your social media metrics with those of others.

Consider researching non-competitors who share similar demographics. Say you run a watch brand like Shore Projects. You may keep an eye on backpack and accessory brand Herschel Supply Co. because of its similar customer base. 

2. Create a clear brief

Your campaign will be more successful if you give an influencer creative freedom to produce content their audience will love. 

It’s better to trust them—the experts of their own audience—to create an authentic and engaging campaign for you rather than assigning the exact images, captions, and hashtags you want them to use.

However, it’s also important that they represent your brand accurately. Supply the influencer with an outline of your expectations, a brand primer, or even a mood board to inspire the campaign.

3. Choose relevant influencers

Once you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, the next step is finding relevant influencers. Getting this wrong can cost you reach, engagement, and potential sales. After all, you don’t want a budget travel influencer showcasing your luxury backpack. Not only will their audience not be interested in your product, they might spite your brand for it. 

“Start by finding influencers that align with your brand values and audience. That way, your product feels like a natural progression of their content and not a forced endorsement,” says Ryan Prior, head of marketing at Modash. 

There are influencers in every market. One way to identify right-fit influencers is to do an Instagram hashtag search to find the top hashtags in your market and look for posts with high engagement.

Shopify Collabs is a great tool for starting your influencer marketing journey. There, you can search influencers by industry and other categories to find partners seeking brand collabs.

“A lot of people will make the mistake where they’ll spend money or send products to just about any influencer, anybody that has a lot of followers,” says Akram. “It’s not the best strategy, and also a waste of time and money.”

It’s not just about audience size. The influencer’s audience needs to be engaged. Genuine positive comments are a more valuable signal of a strong social following than likes alone.

To determine a fit between your brand and an influencer, ask these four questions:

1. What are this influencer’s interests or passions? 
2. Does my brand share their interests or passions?
3. If not, does my brand relate to the influencer’s interests or passions?
4. How would my brand’s message sound coming from this influencer?

The better the fit, the more authentic the endorsement will feel. And the more authentic the endorsement feels to the influencer’s audience, the more likely they are to follow the recommendations.

This creative partnership between Goya Foods and popular nutritionist Amanda Holtzer showcases the power of a good fit between brand and influencer.

4. Learn how to reach out

Learning how to reach out and effectively position your brand pitch to influencers is essential. 

For larger influencers

To set up an influencer marketing deal with a macro-influencer, you need to work with their representatives, most likely their agent and their manager.

• Agents: Agents find work for their clients and negotiate contracts on their behalf.
• Managers: Think of managers as the CEOs of their clients’ businesses—you’ll need their buy-in on any partnership.

Use celebrity contact info databases to reach influencers’ agents, managers, and publicists.

For smaller influencers

A benefit of targeting micro-influencers is you can reach out to them directly. 

But since micro-influencers aren’t as visible as macro-influencers, the challenge is finding them.

For that, try BuzzSumo, Shopify Collabs, or other influencer marketplaces, where you can search for influencers based on keywords in their social media bios, and sort potential matches by interest, industry, and audience size.

How to structure your outreach message

Reaching out to larger influencers is best done via a brief email to agents or managers. If you’re reaching out to micro-influencers, message them directly by email or their social media channel. Your goal should be to anticipate their questions in one message so they can decide whether or not to discuss the opportunity further. Limit your first email to the key details:

• Who are you interested in? (For macro-influencer agents only.)
• What do you want them to do, and on which channels?
• When do you need a response?
• Why do you think your brand is a good match?

You need to demonstrate that there’s a good fit between your brand and the influencer. Remember, managers are focused on their client’s long-term prospects, so be prepared to sell them on why a partnership with your brand is a good career move.

Following up and following through

Influencers and their representatives are busy, so if you don’t hear back right away, don’t assume they’re not interested. It’s perfectly OK to follow up. 

A good rule of thumb for following up is five to seven business days after your first email. If another week goes by and you still haven’t heard back, move on to the next influencers on your list.

If you partner with a macro-influencer, their agent will handle the contract. With micro-influencers, you’ll usually work with them directly. In either case, assuming you’ve clearly communicated what you expect the influencer to do and what they’ll get in return, the paperwork should be straightforward.

5. Agree on a collaboration structure

Once you’ve found the influencers you want to work with, you’ll need to reach out to them and agree on a collaboration structure. Consider these six key aspects in your negotiations:

1. Time frame. Be upfront about the deadline and highlight that it’s imperative they meet it.
2. Output. Clearly outline what you want them to produce, for example, two pieces of content—one to be published on the influencer’s account with a mention of your brand and one to use at your discretion.
3. Content usage. Let them know what content usage rights you want. 
4. Payment. Top influencers require a fee for their services. Occasionally, they may be willing to negotiate or accept a free product/service/experience as part of their fee. When you’re negotiating a price, remember that you’re paying for multiple services: content creation, usage rights, and access to a new audience.
5. Sponsored hashtag. Regulations on sponsored content vary around the world and change all the time. Err on the side of caution and use #spon or #ad. 
6. Campaign goal. Communicate a clear goal for the influencer campaign. That could be as simple as increasing followers on your account or driving clicks from their Instagram bio to your website to increase sales. 

Protect your brand: tips for Instagram marketing campaigns

These best practices ensure you don’t get burned when working with influencers:

• Withhold the influencer’s full fee until the work meets your expectations. You can pay influencers an upfront deposit (usually 50%), with the balance due once the work is completed. This payment structure reassures the influencer you will pay them, while protecting your investment. 
• Work with influencers who are active on a marketplace or represented by an influencer marketing agency—they’ll be likeliest to deliver as promised, since bad feedback will negatively affect their future prospects.
• Before signing a contract with an influencer, look for red flags about their work on influencer marketing campaigns by speaking with former clients.

6. Maximize the content value

Get additional value out of sponsored Instagram content by repurposing it for other channels. Here are three ways to maximize influencer content value:

• Publish it on a product page. Not only does it look great, but influencer content provides social proof and can even inspire customers to submit content.
• Publish it as a Facebook ad. Add influencer content to your ads and test the results. “By using influencer content, we are now able to refresh our ad units on a regular basis,” Shore Projects co-founder Neil Waller says. “On top of that, using influencer content has improved our conversion rate by 19%.” 
• Publish it on your social media channels. User-generated content from influencers should be relatable, engaging, and shareable, so don’t forget to post it to your socials—just make sure you have the right to do so, first.

Influencer campaign payment structures

Here are the most common payment structures and considerations for influencer endorsements on social media.

Licensing and rights to content

The standard format for an influencer marketing campaign is for the influencer to post about a brand or product on their own social media account. You might think that you own the rights to that post, since your brand or product is featured in it. However, it’s actually the content creator who owns it.

If an influencer made a post on their account promoting your brand, you may have to pay a licensing fee to reuse their content on your own social media account. It may be possible to work out a deal that gives your brand ownership or unlimited use of the content.

Pay per post

The most typical payment arrangement is known as “pay per post.” With these deals, you pay the influencer a certain amount of money for a set number of posts. The pricing for these deals can fluctuate based on factors like the influencer’s follower count.

The cost per post can also vary depending on the type of post. For example, a travel blogger with more than 100,000 followers charges $1,000 per “static” (no video, no slideshow) post on Instagram and $200 for an Instagram Story.

If you’re not sure you can afford a pay-per-post deal, a temporary post can be cost effective. But you get what you pay for—since Instagram Stories only last 24 hours, your campaign will probably have less visibility.

Link in bio (add-on)

With link-in-bio deals, the influencer includes a link to your brand’s site in their social media bio, keeping it pinned to the top of their account page or profile to drive direct traffic to your site. You can set up a custom link-in-bio using Shopify’s Linkpop.

Since a link in an influencer’s bio increases the visibility of your campaign, most influencers charge up to 40% more to include one as an add-on.

Multiplatform influencer campaign

If you’re targeting an influencer with a large following on multiple social media platforms, you should consider a multiplatform campaign with posts on each of the influencers accounts, to increase visibility. Many influencers offer bundled pricing for multiplatform campaigns.

Free product as payment

Paying with products takes effort since you need to find an influencer who’s a good fit and who genuinely likes your products. Larger influencers typically expect payment and will not accept in-kind offers.

“A very popular strategy is gifting. You send out free products to influencers, either [with] no strings attached and hope that they post, or you take a barter deal in exchange for deliverables,” says Ryan of Modash. “This is generally a very high-volume strategy, meaning you can send out a thousand packages, and the cost is just the product and shipping.” 

But this breaks down if your product value is too high. For high-value products, consider long-term partnerships or paid collaborations to ensure a worthwhile return on investment. Another strategy involves performance-based payments, where influencers earn based on their sales, tracked through promo codes or affiliate links.

Commission

Commission is offering payment for each sale, lead, or engagement. In this model, you only pay influencers when their endorsement leads directly to your chosen success metric(s).

The commission structure ensures brands pay only for results, but most influencers prefer flat fees. The way they see it, why put in the effort to endorse a brand without guaranteed compensation?

Influencer marketing platforms

Finding the right creator partners remains one of the biggest challenges for brands that run influencer marketing campaigns. As influencer marketing becomes more popular, companies and apps that simplify the process continue to pop up.

Many offer campaign-enhancing features like affiliate program management, marketplaces, analytics, and relationship management software.

Here are some of the best platforms for finding influencers:

Shopify Collabs

Shopify Collabs is an influencer marketing platform offering ecommerce brands access to creators across social media channels. 

The platform offers a range of tools to help you build authentic relationships with creators. You can send them products and discounts directly from your Shopify store and create unique discount codes and referral links to track creator-driven sales.

Shopify Collabs helps you to find creators who are aligned with your brand and invite them to apply to your affiliate program. Creators can also apply directly from your application page. With easy-to-understand analytics, you can track the performance of your affiliate program and keep tabs on the creators and products that are driving sales.

Grin

Grin is a highly rated influencer marketing software for ecommerce brands. It offers 37 million influencers across social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitch.

Grin provides tools to nurture authentic relationships and track success, from reporting and analytics to content management and payments. It also integrates with Shopify to handle shipping logistics for sales made through influencers.

Upfluence

Upfluence is a self-serve platform for finding influencers, and is used by brands like Amazon, Verizon, Universal, and Zappos. Set your own prices and find influencers to fit your criteria with more than 20 advanced search filters. The platform provides access to influencers’ performance stats by analyzing audience size, engagement rates, posting habits, and more.

Upfluence also helps you identify influential customers and fans. When a visitor shops on your site, it analyzes their social data and adds them as affiliates for your campaigns. Whether you’re a large or small business, Upfluence helps you run campaigns efficiently and maximize your influencer marketing ROI.

Creator.co

Creator.co is a new influencer marketplace with more than 500 million influencers. Its automation software helps young brands connect with the right influencers.

Creator.co offers a self-service option where you can find influencers manually. It also offers a “hands-free” option where you define your ideal influencer and campaign so its automated system can find the best fit.

Tagger by Sprout Social

Tagger by Sprout Social is an influencer marketing platform integrated with Sprout Social’s social media management solution. It combines influencer search features with management tools so you can switch from finding influencers to negotiating contracts in a single tool. 

Improving your social media marketing with an influencer strategy

Influencer marketing can help you find customers and influence their purchasing decisions, ultimately driving sales for your business. Influencers can also build your brand image and make your products desirable to a target market.

With this guide in hand, you’ll be well on your way to growing your follower count across social networks, building traction for your brand, and growing your business online.

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