Your First Five Influencers

A small webshop with no influencer marketing history faces a specific version of this problem: no budget for mistakes, no internal expertise, and no way to tell a bad creator from a bad offer. This article is a sequence for the first five collaborations, written for that situation.

One framing worth accepting before you start: the first five are a learning exercise that also, if it goes well, produces revenue. Brands that run them as a revenue exercise that also produces learning tend to draw the wrong conclusion from a small sample.

Before you contact anyone

Four things should be in place. Each of them is cheap, and skipping any of them means your results will be uninterpretable.

Tracking that works. Unique links, personal discount codes, or both. Test them yourself end to end, on a phone, from a social app's internal browser. A collaboration measured by a broken link has cost you the money and taught you nothing. See how to track influencer marketing performance.

Your break-even commission rate. Work out, from your own margin, the highest commission you could pay and still make money. You cannot negotiate sensibly without it — see how much commission influencers should get.

A landing page you would bet on. Creator traffic arrives warm and leaves fast. If your product page is slow, unclear or missing the information the creator's audience will want, that will look like a creator problem in your reporting.

Stock. Running out mid-collaboration wastes the creator's work and the audience's attention.

Choosing the five

Resist the pull towards the largest accounts you can afford. At this stage you are buying information, and information comes from variety and from responsiveness — both of which are easier to get from smaller creators.

A workable spread for five:

Two selection notes that matter more than size. Check the audience is real before you pay — how to spot fake followers. And check the audience is the buyer, not just the user, which is the trap described in who uses the product vs who buys it. Finding candidates is covered in how to find Danish influencers.

What to offer

You are an unknown brand with a small budget, which limits what you can offer but not how well you can offer it.

• A small guaranteed fee. Modest but real. It changes the offer from "free work" to "paid work", and those are read completely differently.
• Commission near your ceiling. This is where you can be genuinely generous without cash risk, since it only costs you alongside revenue.
• The product, as an enabler rather than as payment. They need it to make the content. It is a cost, not a fee — the reasoning is in why good influencers say no to product-only offers.
• Two posts, not one. This is the most important structural choice you will make, and it is explained below.
• Creative freedom. You do not have a brand book worth enforcing yet, and the creator knows their audience.
• A stated path to more. Say plainly that whoever performs gets a larger guarantee next time. It is true, and it makes a small first offer credible.

What not to attach: exclusivity, long usage rights, or approval rounds. These have real value and asking for them at this budget signals inexperience. Outreach wording is covered in writing outreach that gets a reply.

Why two posts each matters more than five creators

If each creator posts once, you get five single observations, and a single post cannot distinguish a good creator from a good day. Algorithms, timing and luck all move a single result more than creator quality does.

Two posts each gives you something qualitatively different: a read on whether a result repeats. That is the signal that actually predicts future performance, and it is why the selection logic in how to identify which influencers to scale weights it above everything else.

If the budget only stretches to five single posts or three creators posting twice, take three creators posting twice.

What to measure

Record these per creator and per post, in a spreadsheet you will still understand in three months.

Also record the things that do not appear in numbers: whether they were easy to work with, whether they delivered on time, whether the content was usable as ad creative. Those determine what scaling feels like.

Reading the result

Judge the cohort first, then the individuals. Three patterns, three different conclusions.

Clicks but no orders, across most creators. The creators did their job. The problem is your price, your page or your offer. This is the most common outcome for a first cohort, and it is genuinely good news — you have found a fixable problem cheaply. Do not blame the creators, and do not conclude the channel does not work.

Almost no clicks, across most creators. Either the content did not land, or the audiences were wrong. Look at what you briefed before concluding anything about the people.

A wide spread — one or two clearly ahead. The normal and desired outcome. Now concentrate: raise the guarantee for the performers, run again with the promising middle, close out the rest properly.

What comes after five

Two sensible next moves, depending on what you found.

If the cohort showed promise, widen before you deepen. Five is still a small sample, and the next round should add creators as well as repeating winners — see how to test many influencers without big upfront fees.

If one or two performed clearly, start treating them as a relationship rather than a transaction: better terms, more frequency, and a conversation about the content rights so you can put ad spend behind what worked — which influencer content deserves ad spend.

Common mistakes

Spending the whole budget on one large creator. One observation, no distribution, nothing learned.

Judging on the first week. Let the attribution window run.

Offering product only. It filters for creators without alternatives, which is the opposite of what a first test needs.

Over-briefing. A script from a brand with no marketing history is unlikely to beat a creator's own instinct about their audience.

Concluding from five results that the channel does not work. Five is enough to find an obvious problem and not enough to rule the channel out.

Make Influence's perspective

This section is Make Influence's own operational view, not an industry standard.

The error we see most often in a brand's first attempt is spending the whole budget on one large creator, because it feels like the safest use of limited money. It is the least safe: a single expensive observation, and if it fails you cannot tell whether the cause was the creator, the content, the audience, the offer or the timing.

Five smaller collaborations with the same money produce a distribution, and a distribution is diagnosable. That is the entire argument, and it holds regardless of which platform or agency a brand uses to run it.

The second thing we would emphasise is the two-posts rule. Brands consistently prefer more creators to more posts per creator, and for a first cohort that is the wrong trade — repeat performance is the only signal that reliably predicts what happens next.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I budget for the first five?
Enough for a real guarantee to each plus product plus a reserve for content rights if someone performs. The amount matters less than that the guarantee is not insulting. See how to set an influencer marketing budget.

Should I use a platform for five creators?
Not necessarily. Five is manageable with links, a spreadsheet and some discipline. The case for tooling arrives at around fifteen to twenty.

What if nobody replies?
Usually the offer or the message. A generic message with no specific reason for approaching that creator has a very low reply rate.

Can I do this with no budget at all?
You can run genuine seeding with no obligations, and some creators will post. It is slower and much less predictable, and you should not attach deliverables to it.

How long before I know if it worked?
Allow for both posts plus the attribution window, then judge. In practice that is usually six to ten weeks from first contact.