Accelerate Your Startup With Influencer Partnerships

Accelerate Your Startup With Influencer Partnerships

The influencer marketing industry has more than tripled in market size between 2019 and 2024, reaching a record $24 billion.

So, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that nowadays, most companies allocate some portion of their marketing budgets to influencer marketing.

In fact, around a quarter of brands devote more than 40% of their marketing spend to this customer acquisition channel.

However, startups are lagging behind when it comes to adopting influencer marketing. This provides a competitive opportunity for those who are willing to embrace it!

Today, we want to discuss influencer marketing in the startup context: what it is, how it works, and how to use it to accelerate growth!

What is an Influencer?

Illustration of a woman live streaming on a smartphone screen, surrounded by social media icons. Another woman stands nearby, holding a phone.

The term “influencer” has come to be associated with lifestyle influencers like Kim Kardashian, who have massive followings on Instagram.

However, it makes more sense to define it as “someone with an online following that people trust, respect, and look up to.”

That includes everyone from anonymous Twitter “posters” to writers who have blogs and newsletters to podcast hosts to YouTubers and TikTokers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is about tapping into influencers’ audiences by persuading them to promote your offers to their followers.

There are five ways in which you can compensate influencers:

  • Discounts for your products or services
  • Free products or services 
  • Monetary payments
  • Giveaways 
  • Equity

It’s worth noting that the latter is extremely rare, though.

In the early 2020s, it was more common to compensate influencers with free products rather than money, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

According to “The State of Influencer Marketing 2025” report, 40.8% of brands now offer monetary compensation. This change may be indicative of influencer marketing maturing as an industry.

Pie chart titled "Ways To Pay Influencers": Monetary Compensation 40.8%, Free Products 30.8%, Discount on Their Product 18.9%, Giveaway 9.4%.

We recommend not messing around with discounts, free products, and giveaways but paying influencers right from the get-go instead.

That will make it much easier for you to build long-term business relationships with the influencers in your niche.

They need to make money to pay their bills, which is why brands that can offer that will always be the most appealing to them!

The Pros and Cons of Influencer Marketing

Illustration of a person on a smartphone screen holding a megaphone and shopping bag. Surrounding icons include social media, likes, gifts, and money symbols.

The main pro of influencer marketing is that it enables you to reach people you would have been unable to get otherwise while “borrowing” the credibility of that influencer.

This can be especially helpful for brand-new startups who haven’t had the time to build their own audiences yet.

However, influencer marketing also has several notable cons:

Influencer Marketing Con #1: Reputational Risk

Associating with influencers presents a reputational risk: if they get caught up in a scandal, it’s going to reflect on your company negatively.

This can be mitigated by doing your homework – you want to research each influencer before you reach out to them about a potential partnership.

It’s best to avoid individuals who are constantly embroiled in e-drama, are prone to posting inflammatory hot takes, and have controversial views that your dream customers would find unsavory.

In addition to watching out for these obvious red flags, you should also observe their behavior on social media, especially Twitter, if they have a profile there. If someone is tweeting at all hours of the day and night, it may indicate an addictive personality.

Be cautious about working with people like that because they are especially vulnerable to online radicalization.

It’s worth remembering that most influencers who now promote extreme and potentially harmful views didn’t start that way. Instead, they were gradually radicalized by social media algorithms and the perverse incentives they create.

It’s not always possible to predict this in advance. However, an inability to moderate one’s social media usage is often an early sign that the person in question may go completely off the rails.

Finally, it’s essential to look into influencers’ backgrounds and check if their stories add up. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who are willing to lie for clout, so you cannot take anyone at their word.

Know that if you catch someone in a small lie, they are almost certainly lying about other, more important things. Never do business with dishonest individuals because that’s a recipe for disaster!

Influencer Marketing Con #2: Unclear Effectiveness

It can be challenging to measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns.

While you can give each influencer a unique link for your offer, looking at the metrics associated with it may not provide a full picture.

The problem is that when people learn about an offer from an influencer, they often don’t act on it immediately and continue whatever it was that they were doing (probably doomscrolling).

Then, they remember that offer later and check it out through the company’s website instead of using the influencer’s unique link.

Visitors like that show up as direct traffic in Google Analytics, so you’d have no way of knowing where they learned about your offer.

You can address this lack of clarity by observing direct traffic and conversions across your sales funnel. If it steadily increases and converts well, continuing to invest in influencer marketing may be worth it!

Influencer Marketing Con #3: Declining Trust in Influencers

New marketing channels tend to have highly high ROIs.

Then, as more and more businesses adopt them, they become less and less effective as time passes.

This is entirely normal – it has happened with email marketing, banner ads, search ads, and social media ads and is now happening with influencer marketing.

However, in addition to this predictable trend, there’s something else that you need to take into consideration: people don’t trust influencers as much as they used to.

Some digital marketers argue that we are in a “trust recession,” which may be related to the public’s increasing media literacy regarding online content.

The dark secret at the heart of influencer marketing is that it heavily depends on parasocial relationships – people who follow influencers eventually start to see them as friends and trust their recommendations subconsciously.

Except that it’s not a secret anymore: young people, who are the primary target demographic of influencer marketing, understand perfectly well how it works.

Sure, they may still develop parasocial relationships, but they know that an influencer’s product endorsement is an ad, not a recommendation from a friend. Consequently, they have their guard up.

There have been numerous scandals involving some of the biggest influencers out there, most notably the FTX debacle. All those crypto scams, MLM schemes, and overpriced online courses have contributed to the erosion of trust.

Finally, although being an influencer is now recognized as an occupation, it’s not well-regarded. There’s a common perception that influencers are a net negative on society, perhaps related to the public’s increasingly critical view of social media as a whole.

In short, influencers are losing their influence, which raises the possibility that this whole industry may be a bubble. Will it burst shortly? Frankly, it wouldn’t be surprising.

That’s why you should probably focus on social media marketing, video marketing, and email marketing as your primary customer acquisition channels. Use influencer marketing to give your startup a boost, but don’t be dependent on it for growth!

How to Design an Effective Influencer Marketing Campaign

Illustration of a woman holding makeup, standing in a smartphone with social media icons, including likes, comments, and notifications, surrounded by shopping bags and a ring light setup.

Play the Long Game: Repeated Exposure Over a Long Period of Time is the Key to Success

The Internet is extremely noisy, making it difficult to get people’s attention.

It would be naive to expect a potential customer to take you up on your offer the first time you present it to them.

Susanne Schmidt and Martin Einsend’s research suggests that approximately ten exposures maximize consumer response to an ad.

Meanwhile, Navdeep S. Sahni’s research indicates that it may be better to space ad exposure over time rather than bombard the potential customer with many ads in quick succession.

While these studies didn’t look into influencer marketing, we can probably safely assume that similar dynamics can be found in all digital marketing channels.

That’s why your approach to influencer marketing should be strategic – you want potential customers to be exposed to your offer more than ten times over several months.

That can be achieved by working with several influencers in the same niche with overlapping audiences who are likely to be followed by your dream customers.

Start at the Bottom of the Influencer Hierarchy

Data from the influencer marketing platform Upfluence shows that the smaller the influencer’s following, the higher their engagement rate on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Chart displaying social media engagement benchmarks for six influencer tiers: Micro, Regular, Rising, Mid, Macro, Mega. Metrics shown: engagement, click, and purchase rates. Data by Upfluence.

This is a well-known phenomenon, which is why brands strongly prefer working with nano-influencers and microinfluencers.

In fact, only 17% of companies surveyed for “The State of Influencer Marketing 2024” report preferred partnering with macro-influencers instead.

We recommend starting with nano-influencers in your niche with 1k–10k followers, then moving to micro-influencers with 10k–15k followers, and then eventually to the regular influencers with 15k–50k followers.

You might also want to experiment with rising influencers with 50k–100k followers, but we wouldn’t advise going beyond that. Why?

Because the more significant the following, the more diluted it becomes, you end up paying more for a less targeted campaign, which doesn’t make much sense!

Build a Sales Funnel for Your Product or Service

A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.

We believe that the best way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel:

Diagram showing a "Value Ladder" with four steps: Bait, Frontend, Middle, and Backend, illustrating increasing value. A continuity program is also suggested for additional revenue.

As the customer progresses through this sales funnel, you offer them increasingly more value and ask for increasingly more commitment in return. This gradual approach enables you to build the trust that is required to close sales.

It all starts with you offering them something valuable in exchange for their email address. This freebie is called a lead magnet. It serves as bait that you use to get the potential customer’s attention and convert them into a lead.

Then, once you have their contact details, you can email them your paid offers, starting with your least expensive and least valuable one – the Frontend Offer.

To get the most out of influencer marketing, build a Value Ladder sales funnel for your business and pay influencers to promote your lead magnet instead of your product or service.

All influencers you work with should be driving traffic to your lead magnet landing page via their unique links.

As we explained earlier, measuring the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns can be difficult, but using unique links will give you some idea as to which influencers may be producing the best results.

Focus on Building Long-Term Business Relationships With Influencers in Your Niche

Ultimately, your goal when it comes to influencer marketing shouldn’t be generating immediate sales; it should be building a brand that is trusted, respected, and recognizable. And that takes time.

So look for influencers that you can see yourself working with for years to come and focus on building long-term business relationships with them!

3 Proven Lead Generation Funnel Templates That You Can Use for Influencer Marketing

Illustration of a person holding a megaphone, emerging from a smartphone surrounded by social media icons, a marketing funnel, and a ring light with a smartphone.

A lead generation funnel is the Bait Stage of the Value Ladder sales funnel. Its purpose is to convert visitors into leads.

Here are three proven lead-generation funnel templates that you can use for influencer marketing:

Lead Generation Funnel #1: Lead Magnet Funnel

A lead magnet funnel consists of two pages:

  1. Lead a magnet landing page where you present your free offer and encourage the potential customer to provide their email address in order to gain access to it.
  2. Thank you page, where you thank potential customers, give them access to your lead magnet (e.g., a download link with instructions), and tell them what they should expect from you in the future.

Your lead magnet can be either a free product or a free service, depending on what makes more sense in the context of your business model.

Software startups often use a free trial as their lead magnet, but that only works if the potential customer is solution-aware, meaning that they know that they need that type of software.

It might make sense to cast a broader net by targeting problem-aware potential customers who know they have a problem but aren’t sure how to solve it. You can do that with an educational lead magnet.

For example, we sell funnel builder software and have a free trial, but most of our lead magnets are info products where we teach entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses with sales funnels.

Once they understand the value of having a sales funnel, the natural next step is building one, for which they need software. This is where we direct them to our free trial.

Consider creating free eBooks, video masterclasses, and online courses designed to educate your dream customers on the problem that your product addresses so that you can present it as a solution.

Lead Generation Funnel #2: Webinar Funnel

A webinar funnel consists of three pages:

  1. Webinar registration page where you introduce your event and encourage potential customers to sign up for it.
  2. The registration confirmation page is where you confirm that the potential customer has successfully registered for your event and explain what they should expect next.
  3. Webinar page where the potential customer can either attend the event live or watch the replay.

Your webinar should be a 45-minute educational presentation and a 15-minute pitch for your product or service.

Always end your webinar with a clear call to action. You can direct the attendees to the sales page for your product or service or add an intermediary step and encourage them to book a free consultation or sign up for your free trial.

Ideally, you want to do one live webinar per week for at least a year before you automate this funnel by pre-recording the event.

Also, pro tip: offer a replay only available for 24 hours. That will introduce an element of scarcity, which should increase the percentage of registered attendees who watch the webinar.

Lead Generation Funnel #3: Newsletter Funnel

A newsletter funnel consists of these two pages:

  1. The newsletter sign-up page is where you explain what your newsletter is all about and encourage potential customers to subscribe to it.
  2. Thank you page, where you thank potential customers and explain what they should expect now that they have subscribed to your newsletter.

We highly recommend starting a weekly email newsletter and modeling it after Tim Feriss’ “5-Bullet Friday”.

First, it should have a clear concept so subscribers would know what to expect right from the get-go.

Think about what kind of newsletter would appeal to your dream customers. A weekly roundup of interesting links? A weekly tip on how to do something? A weekly summary of industry news?

Secondly, each issue should follow the same template, designed to be easily skimmable. Remember that your newsletter is not the place to publish essays – that’s what your blog is for.

Finally, you should send it on the same day of the week, at the same time of the day, every week without fail, so opening it would become a part of your subscribers’ weekly routines.

As for promoting your products and services, either do it in the “P.S.” section or display a banner ad at the bottom of every issue. It shouldn’t interfere with reading the actual content!

What Should You Do Once the Potential Customer Gives You Their Email Address?

We recommend sending every new subscriber a welcome sequence designed to introduce you and your company, explain your product or service’s value, and present social proof.

Here’s a proven template that you can use:

You may need to tweak this template based on what kind of lead generation funnel you are using.

With the lead magnet funnel, you can implement this welcome sequence as is, though in some cases, it might make sense to end email #6 by encouraging the new subscriber to sign up for your free trial or book a free consultation with you (an intermediary step before closing the sale).

Meanwhile, with the webinar and newsletter funnel, you can drop email #6 altogether because the subscriber will learn about your product or service by watching the webinar or reading your newsletter.

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