Influencer Marketing Strategies for Startups

If you want to scale your marketing with influencers but dont want to burn cash on bad deals, get scammed by fake bot views, or waste months listening to "gurus" who have never actually booked a sponsorship... then you might enjoy this. I work as a Marketing Director for a pretty big brand and I also run my own SaaS on the side.  Between the two, I've hired over a thousand influencers and spent millions in partnership dollars. Here is the brain dump on what actually works: YouTube longform first until you max out on youtube longform, dont do any other format. Nothing beats the power of the attention spam and the direct CTA with link in description as longform does. Ignore all the gurus telling you to hire one million micro influencers on TikTok, even if you’re target audience is on TikTok/Reels, I guarantee there are also channels on youtube with longform videos for that same audience, dont waste your time don’t lose your sanity, do longform until there’s none else to partner with on that format. You need to have a solid proven offer before you try influencers. Have scarcity in the CTA, like “First 1,000 people to click the link get this special offer” Test 60 second integrations vs fully dedicated videos (more expensive). Have them put the 60 second promo in the first 5 minutes of the video to maximize eyeballs on your offer. Beware of scammers, several channels inflate their views and engagement with bots, look for suspiciously consistent high views across all videos, look for repeated and sometimes identical comments praising the influencer, too many emojis, and celebrities in the profile pictures even. If you’re a startup strap for cash, you will want to push for commission only deals, for my startup Rebelgrowth, that’s 30% on every generated subscription for life, but in my experience most influencers don’t like performance deals even when they would be making more money in the long term, they dont know this so its your job to explain the math on why this is the case, make a simple spreadsheet, make a loom video, praise their last video, explain why you think your startup would be a great fit and explain why the commission offer is better than flat rate. However, if you’re an established startup/company with a budget, you’ll want to do flat rate deals because YOU will make more money in the long term as opposed to having to pay 30% of your revenue forever. 30% of deals will succeed, those are the channels you will want to nurture and repeat and that will carry the whole effort, another reason why you need to stay away from flat rate as a bootstrapped startup, you can’ afford to have your first 10 deals fail looking for the 3 that will work. This is a numbers game. What I look for in a channel (this is less important when doing performance deals): Audience affinity; how relevant is the topic to your business, what are audience demographics (age, location, genre), how consistent are views across the last 12 videos, how often does the channel publish, what’s the engagement rate (high engagement = high conversions), I can afford more on a channel with 7,000 views but 15% engagement rate than a channel with 10,000 views but 5% engagement rate. Engagement is comments to subs (or views) rate. On flat rates, always negotiate down aggressively, argue why with the channels using your analysis from the above paragraph. I personally look for sub $50 CPMs when doing flat rate (irrelevant when doing commission deals). To find channels, ask your favorite AI chat to do “Deep Research” and find the top 100 channels that meet your preferred criteria. If doing commissions, aim for small channels to improve your chances of getting a “yes”, so channels with under 10k subs. You can also simply search youtube, or one of the millions of apps out there that have a youtubers database. Gather the list and then it's time to find the emails. I pay a guy on upwork $50 per 100 researched channels because youtube only lets you unlock 5 emails per day. This guy has a bunch of accounts he uses to unlock emails quicker. Once you have the emails, use your favorite outreach tool to schedule 4 - 7 emails (the money is in the followups). Keep it simple, lead with “Paid sponsorhip?...” in the subject and first line of email copy so the influencer knows you’re down to business. Have dedicated landing pages per influencer or dedicated coupon codes or if you’re doing affiliate commissions it doesn’t really matter since they will have their affiliate link to your product anyways. You’ll want to stay compliant if you’re a big company, which means making sure the influencer clearly discloses its a sponsorship when the Ad begins, have them put your logo as soon as they say the video is sponsored by your company. Cheers [**Borja, let's connect i'm looking for a cofounder**](https://x.com/borja_obeso)