How to Set an Influencer Marketing Budget

The short answer

There's no fixed industry rate for how much of your budget influencer marketing should get. The most reliable approach is to set the number two ways at once: top-down, as a share of your total marketing budget, and bottom-up, as the number of creators you need × the expected cost per creator. If the two numbers land far apart, that's a signal one of your assumptions is off — not a problem you can calculate your way out of using only one method.

Two methods — and when to use each

Method 1: Top-down — start with a share of your marketing budget

Start with your total marketing budget, and decide what share of it should go to influencer marketing. There's no published, reliable industry rate for influencer marketing's specific share of a total marketing budget — any source giving you one exact number is guessing. What does exist, reliably, is data on the size of the total marketing budget you're carving that share out of:

• Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey (402 marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe, mostly at large companies) found marketing budgets flat at an average of 7.7% of overall company revenue — though half of respondents reported 6% or less, so the spread is wide. Paid media accounted for 30.6% of the marketing budget, equal to 2.4% of revenue.
• The U.S. Small Business Administration's own blog on marketing budgets cites industry surveys putting average advertising spend around 1.08% of revenue, and separate research putting total marketing spend closer to 7-8% of revenue — explicitly noting there's no single right answer, and that it depends on industry and business model.

Both figures are for the total marketing budget, not influencer marketing specifically. Use them to size the whole pie you're cutting an influencer slice from — not as an answer for the slice itself.

Method 2: Bottom-up — build the budget from campaign economics

The other direction is to build the number from the ground up: how many active creators do you need, and what does each realistically cost?

Bottom-up budget = Number of active creators × Expected cost per creator

Creator count depends on the campaign's objective and your tier mix — see how many influencers do you need for a campaign for the full formula and a non-delivery buffer. Cost per creator depends on what you actually pay — fee, commission, UGC and usage rights — see how much should brands pay influencers.

Use the two methods to check each other

WORKED EXAMPLE. All numbers below are hypothetical and for illustration only. This is not a real Make Influence customer case. Replace every number with your own.

An ecommerce brand has DKK 8,000,000 in annual revenue.

Top-down

• Total marketing budget at Gartner's 7.7% average: 8,000,000 × 0.077 = DKK 616,000
• The brand chooses (an illustrative assumption — not an industry rate) to give influencer marketing 15% of the marketing budget: 616,000 × 0.15 = DKK 92,400

Bottom-up

• The brand plans a performance-led campaign weighted toward micro creators, using the same illustrative DKK 2,500 cost-per-active-creator figure as in how many influencers do you need for a campaign.
• Target: 30 active creators → 30 × 2,500 = DKK 75,000

Comparing the two

Top-down gives DKK 92,400, bottom-up gives DKK 75,000 — a gap of DKK 17,400, or about 23% of the lower figure. That's close enough to be a healthy sign: both methods point at roughly the same order of magnitude. The DKK 17,400 gap is worth roughly 7 more micro creators (17,400 ÷ 2,500 ≈ 7) and can either extend the roster or sit aside as test and buffer budget.

Add the same 15% non-delivery buffer from the sizing guide on top of the 30 active creators, and you'd recruit 30 ÷ 0.85 ≈ 36 creators to end up with 30 active — the spend itself doesn't change, since you pay for delivering creators, not everyone you contact.

If the two numbers land far apart — say, bottom-up comes out at double top-down — that's a signal one of your assumptions is unrealistic, either the share you picked or your price/count expectations. Use the gap to test the assumption, not as a reason to default to the higher number.

How to split the budget once you have it

A single influencer budget total doesn't automatically get allocated correctly. In Make Influence's experience, it's most robust to split the number into three parts before booking a single creator:

• Core roster — creators you know work, or that carry the highest odds of delivering. Usually the bulk of the budget.
• Test — new creators, formats or tiers you don't have data on yet. A fixed, smaller share set aside up front, so testing doesn't compete with the core roster for the same money mid-campaign.
• Buffer — covers non-delivery (see how many influencers do you need for a campaign) and unplanned costs, like extra usage rights for content worth reusing.

Payment model also affects how predictable the budget is to manage: a pure upfront fee is easy to budget precisely, while commission moves with sales — see upfront vs commission for how the two models behave differently inside a budget.

Match the budget to the campaign's objective

A budget set without an objective is hard to judge afterward. Set the objective before you set the number:

• Awareness pulls the budget toward fewer, larger creators with broader reach.
• Performance/sales pulls the budget toward more, smaller creators and more data — see influencer campaign KPIs by objective for which metrics belong to which objective.

Once the campaign has run, convert actual spend into CPM, CPE or CPA to see whether the budget bought what you expected — see CPM, CPE and CPA in influencer marketing — and finally into ROI and ROAS to see whether it was worth it — see how to calculate influencer marketing ROI and what is a good ROAS for influencer marketing. For a subscription or high-repeat-purchase business, the objective itself should also be informed by customer lifetime value, not just first-order revenue — see are influencer-acquired customers worth more: thinking about LTV for how to fold repeat purchases into that decision.

If the total is small to begin with, this three-way split matters even more — see influencer marketing on a small budget for tactics built specifically around a tight budget.

The most common mistakes

• Using only one of the two methods. A pure top-down number can be unrealistic against what you can actually buy for it; a pure bottom-up number can be larger than the business can actually afford.
• Setting the budget with no defined objective. Without an objective, there's nothing to judge the result against afterward.
• Spending the whole budget on core roster and nothing on test. Without a test budget, the roster never refreshes, and you find out too late whether a new creator or tier would have worked better.
• Treating the budget as one fixed number for the whole year. Prices, objectives and results change — the budget should be revisited, not just set once.
• Confusing cost per recruited creator with cost per active, delivering creator. The budget needs to cover the ones who deliver — not everyone you contact. See the non-delivery buffer in how many influencers do you need for a campaign.

Make Influence's operational perspective

In Make Influence's experience, the most common budgeting mistake isn't that the number is too small — it's that it's set without a test share and without a defined objective to measure against. A budget with no test share looks stable for a quarter or two, but the roster ages and results quietly decline, with nobody able to point to why. We recommend setting the test share from the start, as a fixed part of the budget, not something considered only when there's money left over.

We also recommend recalculating the budget every time a full campaign has run — using actual figures (cost per creator, delivery rate, ROI) rather than the original assumptions, so the bottom-up number gets more accurate with every campaign you run.

Checklist before you set the budget

• Have you calculated both top-down (share of marketing budget) and bottom-up (count × cost per creator)?
• Do the two numbers land within a reasonable range of each other — and if not, do you know why?
• Have you set a fixed test share, not just a core-roster budget?
• Have you built in a non-delivery buffer, so you recruit more than you expect to end up with active?
• Do you have a defined objective the budget is set against, so you can judge the result afterward?

FAQ

What share of my marketing budget should go to influencer marketing?

There's no reliable, published industry figure for this specifically. Use the bottom-up method to calculate what a realistic campaign actually costs, and compare that against what you're willing to allocate from your total marketing budget — don't treat a guessed percentage as the answer.

Should the budget be set per campaign or per year?

Both make sense, for different purposes: an annual budget helps with planning and negotiating the core roster, while a campaign budget helps hold each individual activation accountable for its own result.

What if I don't have any past campaign data?

Start with the top-down method using your total marketing budget, run a smaller test campaign, and use the actual figures from it to calibrate the bottom-up method for your next campaign.

Should the budget cover product seeding and content usage rights?

Yes — both are a real campaign cost and belong in "cost per creator," otherwise the bottom-up number understates what you actually need.

How often should the budget be revisited?

At minimum after every full campaign, and any time gross margin, cost per creator, or the campaign's objective changes meaningfully.