How Much Should I Spend on Influencer Marketing?

"How much should I spend on influencer marketing?" is one of the questions we get asked most, and it's also one of the hardest to Google your way to a good answer on. Search it yourself and you'll get ranges anywhere from $100 to $1 million, which is about as useful as no answer at all.

The real number depends almost entirely on one thing: your revenue stage.

Here's the framework we use with our own clients to land on a budget that actually fits:

The #1 rule:

Match your budget to your revenue, not your ambition

A brand doing $2M a year and a brand doing $15M a year have completely different risk tolerances, cash flow, and goals. Spending the same way at both stages is how budgets get wasted. We break it into three tiers.

Under $5M ARR: Gifting Only

At this stage, skip paid partnerships entirely and focus on gifting (sending product to creators for free in exchange for potential organic content). Your budget is simply COGS × units gifted per month. We recommend 30-60 gifted products monthly. If your COGS is $15 and you gift 40 creators, that's $600/month to start generating UGC, testing which creator niches resonate, and building social proof before you spend a dollar on media.

$5M-$10M ARR: Add Whitelisting

Once gifting starts to plateau, it's time to put paid dollars behind the content that's already proven to work. Keep the gifting program running and layer in roughly $10K/month for whitelisting, running paid ads through a creator's account so it looks organic but is backed by your targeting and budget. This turns your best organic posts into a real performance channel.

$10M+ ARR: Gifting + Whitelisting + Paid Partnerships

At this level, you've got the data and brand equity to invest in larger, awareness-driven deals: think YouTube integrations and multi-post campaigns with a flat fee or commission structure. Budget $30K+/month here on top of your gifting and whitelisting spend. This is the model that's driven results like hundreds of millions of impressions at $1 CPMs for clients like HexClad.

The mistake to avoid...

Jumping straight to a $50K paid partnership before you've gifted 100 creators or tested a single whitelisted ad. No budget size fixes a strategy that hasn't been validated yet. Gifting first, paid amplification second, big awareness plays third.

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