Influencer Advisory™Influencer marketing strategy: how do you make influencer your main acquisition channel?
CEO · September 24, 2026 · 12 min read
- NeuroGum built a community of 500 influencers without paying for every single post.
- SugarBearHair didn't need to do hundreds of outreaches, because they had influencers coming to them.
- Bum Energy brought on one celebrity and was able to get 75% cheaper rates with every influencer after that.
- HexClad used creator ads that turned it into a $400 million brand.
I say all this because these brands had one thing in common. Most influencer programs don't compound. They don't have a flywheel.
The brands that figure it out build a compounding system, which makes influencer marketing one of their main acquisition channels, with the most profitability and the lowest CAC.
I'm going to show you how you can do this in 2026, moving into 2027. By the end of this, you'll be able to invest millions into influencers with the same confidence as paid media, and get tens of millions out.
This is for health and wellness brands doing over $100 million a year. If you're not one of them, you'll still find a lot of value here. Whatever type of influencer program you have, and wherever it's at, you'll learn how to scale it.
Why is influencer marketing still a side channel for most brands?
For most brands, influencer marketing is a side channel. Looking at the statistics, only a few percentage points of the budget go into influencer.
That's even though it's one of the channels with the most conversions, the best quality conversions and the best leads, and it's the one that builds brand value.
The most successful brands are using influencer as their main channel. Unilever is moving 50% of its media spend into social. XYXX puts 45% of its marketing budget into creators.
So we asked a ton of brands: why can't you scale your influencer marketing? These were the common answers:
- "We keep paying more for the same results."
- "A few creators bring pretty much all our sales, and everyone else is meh."
- "Influencer is still not as reliable as Meta or other ad platforms."
The typical way of doing influencer marketing was to do a bunch of outreach and onboard creators. The ones that perform, great. Most of them don't, and the ones that do, you maybe stick with for a few months before moving on.
The problem was that there was never a relationship built between the brand and the influencer.
Who are we, and why did we change how we work?
We're Influencer Advisory, an influencer ambassador agency. We take a slightly different approach from most agencies: we combine short-term media buying with long-term influencer affiliates. I'll explain what that means. We're hyper-specialized in the health and wellness space, working across Canada and the United States.
We used to be both a talent agency and an influencer agency. We switched to this new model for a reason.
When we were an influencer agency, we would reach out to a ton of influencers and get a few good responses, with decent CPMs and good value. But many creators would charge us a really high CPM, and year over year that has increased exponentially. Now it's not uncommon to see CPMs of $50 or $100, especially in educational spaces.
On the flip side, we'd find influencers whose views were too small to bother with, and who would never move the needle.
We also used to be a talent agency. We had a roster of 50 or so talent, and many agencies like Dulcedo have 71. The question is how many of those people actually like your brand and actually fit the audience you're trying to reach.
With a talent agency, you're constrained to their select talent, and of course they negotiate against you, because they represent the talent.
We used to do a lot of one-off campaigns, but we stopped, because with this new system performance increased, and that's what let us scale influencer.
We've talked with the CMO of AG1. We've talked with the CEO of Onnit, Joe Rogan's supplement company. We've done a lot of research to find what works.
And to put it first: we are a data company. We look through a ton of data points. Who's in the space? Who's sponsoring who? What's working? Which creators are performing really well?
With the right data, every decision becomes the right decision, and you make far fewer wrong choices.
Is influencer marketing the same strategy it was five years ago?
Before we dive into the system, I want to bust a myth: that influencer marketing is the same strategy it was five years ago. It has changed.
You might think AG1 is still doing the same thing. The reality is there are so many more sponsored videos now, and that's just the sponsored views on YouTube.
The space has become really competitive. CPMs are really high. It's really hard to build that relationship with influencers.
AG1 already built the relationship. So they're able to keep the same rates and the same CPMs they had five years ago, because they've been with those influencers all that time.
This system is not going to replace your existing team. In fact, we only work with brands who already have an influencer team. We install the system in 6 to 18 months, so that you can later fire us and scale it internally, as any brand should.
What is the ABC's system?
- A is for Anchor. You may already be doing this, or you may have to double down, but big celebrity associations make everything more effective.
- B is for Boxes. That's how we start relationships with creators.
- C is for Community. That's how we get influencers to post about us without being paid for every single sponsored video. It's how we get creators to invite their friends and introduce them to our brand, and to make stories about our brand whenever they feel like it.
- S is for Scale. This is the part most companies miss: they don't use paid ads, or they don't use influencer content in paid ads properly.
All of these steps compound, one into the other.
Now you might be thinking: we already do PR boxes. We already do whitelisting. We already have celebrity endorsements. Some of you might not have the community, but you might think you're already doing this.
The reality is it's not whether you're doing it. It's to what degree you're doing it, because the most successful brands do it 10, 20, 50 times better than most brands.
You might say: I really like the community part, I just want help putting that in. We can do that. But we first start with an audit to see where your brand is at and what actually makes sense, and then we go from there.
Step 1: why does a celebrity anchor make everything easier?
When you have a celebrity endorsement, everything becomes easier, because people trust your brand more. You might already be running celebrities, or it might be your first time. Either way, there's merit in learning more about the system.
To give you a very practical example: Chris Bumstead, with 25 million Instagram followers, was the celebrity Bum Energy brought on. When they first started talking with influencers, those influencers would charge $6,000 to $10,000 a month.
After they partnered with Chris Bumstead and it was made public, a lot of those influencers saw the endorsement, went back to Bum Energy and said: "Hey, we're willing to do this for way cheaper."
That's because creators are not just financially motivated.
If there's one thing the ABC's framework works on, it's how to incentivize creators beyond just paying them. Paying them is superficial, and it's not the way to scale a compounding system.
When you have a celebrity endorsement, you create a brand mission, and that brings people in, because people love working on big missions together.
We specialize in headhunting celebrities. If you're going to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a celebrity, you want to make sure they fit your brand, they have a clean history, and it's the right partnership with the right structure.
Get this wrong and it could be like the Adidas and Kanye collaboration, which cost them not millions but billions of dollars in enterprise value. A lot could have been done to prevent that. Nike and Michael Jordan, however, created billions in enterprise value from a multimillion-dollar investment.
So now you have leverage when you go to every influencer. You'll have leverage in the negotiation. You'll have trust. You'll have built connection and rapport. And you can start getting in front of more influencers.
Step 2: how do you make a PR box stand out?
PR boxes are one of the best ways to do it, but companies all too often don't get the results they want, because they don't execute properly.
The creators you want to target are getting so many packages that if you don't know how to stand out, you'll simply become another cardboard box they get.
The first thing is learning how to personalize your gifts. That comes down to having a team that can find what an influencer said maybe five years ago. Maybe they really like vinyl record players, so you include one in the gift, next to your own products, of course.
SugarBearHair is one of the best brands at this, and they did it so well that influencers were jealous of each other. If you received a PR box from SugarBearHair, you really felt special.
A lot also goes into finding the creators' addresses, making sure they receive the gift, and making sure you have the right handwritten letter and the right gifts.
That's what gets you from a 5 or 10% post rate to a 50%+ post rate, and has influencers remembering your brand forever.
As an agency, that's something we handle end to end: coordinating, finding the influencers, getting their information and getting the boxes out, in close collaboration with your brand.
Now you have a shortlist of influencers who really like you, and you've started building connections with them. This is done over a few months, which is why the whole system takes 6 to 18 months on average.
Step 3: how do you build a creator community that isn't dead?
Most brands try this, but they end up with an empty Discord chat. Crickets, no one saying anything. It has to be done properly.
Done properly, a community has influencers going out of their way to post content promoting your brand without even being asked, and without asking for a fee per video.
First, why does it work? The snowball effect. If you get a few really good influencers into the community, which you do with a good PR box, more influencers see those good influencers in the community, and they want to come in as well.
NeuroGum made its community so good that influencers fought each other to get in. Here's how:
- Exclusivity. There was a cap of 500 influencers.
- Growth. They invested in the education and growth of their influencers. They put them up on Times Square, so the influencer got more following and more views. Guess what? The brand grew too, because if they're sponsoring an influencer and the influencer grows, so does the brand.
- Trips and dinners with other creators, fully covered, plus the chance to meet celebrities like Kim Kardashian. They gave these to the top performers in the community, and entered community members into a giveaway.
- Content coaches, consultants, videographers and photographers. A lot of influencers grow maybe 5% month over month. An influencer growing 10, 15, 20% month over month goes a long way. Some brands that partner with influencers capture all the upside, like Gymshark did in the following years, when an influencer catches a viral trend and really takes off.
- Production studios. They even gave them access to production studios.
- Commission. They even gave 100% commission on a first purchase instead of 10%. That works well for subscription products, and there are ways to negotiate around it.
- The CEO on calls. NeuroGum's CEO held quarterly calls with creators, where he learned about them and heard their feedback. Creators didn't just get the product and have to promote it. They learned about the brand, got to ask questions, and built rapport.
What I just described is a lot, and it's not something one or two people can do. You need a whole team if you want to do it to the right extent and really scale it.
But this is how you get creators to grow much quicker, post more, and stop asking for flat fees. They go on a hybrid deal, with a lower retainer or maybe commission only. A lot of macro creators who would charge you $10K, $20K or $50K are willing to do this, because they love your PR box, they love being part of your community, and they love how you invited them to meet Kim Kardashian.
Most communities are dead, so you need to do this properly. The most important part is keeping the community a community, otherwise it dies down. That's something we handle end to end, with a whole team dedicated to managing and coordinating the logistics.
This is overwhelming for most brands. But get it right and you have one of your biggest customer acquisition channels, growing month over month as more influencers bring in their friends and keep posting. It's a lot of work, and it's one of the biggest rewards we've seen any marketing channel bring.
Step 4: why does whitelisting fail, and how do you scale it?
Great, we've got something that works. Now we need to pour gas on the fire and double down on what works. That brings us to step four.
This is the part most brands whitelist, but they don't have enough volume. They use maybe 50 or 100 pieces of influencer ad creative, and then they wonder why it doesn't perform much better than their regular ads.
When you get this right, you can put 90% of your marketing budget into Meta ads with creators. Creators not only know how to make content, they also convert better, because people recognize that creator more than a random UGC creator.
So step four is feeding all the content you're now getting from your community, at much lower cost, with discounted usage rights, sometimes free, and with way more hooks and CTAs, into your ads.
Very few ads become real winners, because most brands don't have enough volume.
Put this in place and you can scale your whitelisting to a much higher ROAS, reinvest more into your influencer program, and create that flywheel.
How does the system fit your company's goals?
Now that you have the ABC's system, let's apply it to the goals you've set for your company.
- Just landed a major retailer? You can increase shelf velocity by running targeted whitelisted ads in the regions you're now in.
- Targeting a new customer avatar, through a product launch or a repositioning? You can reach completely new audiences, because you'll have access to influencers who hold the exact audience you need.
- Signing a celebrity? You'll have a system that de-risks the process and helps you make the best choice possible. We didn't cover much on celebrities here, and we have other videos for that.
- Expanding into a new region, whether North America, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America or South Africa? You'll get a huge jump start, because we can find influencers in those regions, nurture them quickly and make them ambassadors of your company.
Who is this for, and who is it not for?
This is for you if you are a health and wellness brand doing over $100 million a year, you spend a million or more on marketing, you sell a consumable subscription product, and you already have an influencer program with an influencer team running it.
This is not for you if you are under $100 million a year, this is your first time doing anything with influencers, you look at things solely from a performance marketing perspective, or you only have one-time products with no subscription or recurring component.
Why Influencer Advisory?
Beyond the ABC's system, we focus on building relationships, especially when it comes to celebrity endorsement deals. We have parts of our team in LA, Miami and NYC, a lot of talent hotspots, and we regularly meet with CAA, WME and plenty of other talent agents. That lets us spin up deals quickly, understand which celebrities bring which results, and secure the right celebrities at the right time.
We're also a data-first company, like you saw before. We've built a lot of internal tools, and that's what lets us make the best possible campaigns.
Step by step, here's how it works:
- We learn your goal. What you've done, which steps of the system you've covered, and which influencer campaigns you've run.
- We audit your program using all of that information.
- We send a proposal with a test. We always believe in testing before committing.
- We install the system, running every part of the ABC's system and the influencer work around it, working closely with your team to make sure it's working the way you want.
- We hand it off. After 6 to 18 months, most of the time, there's a solid enough foundation that your team can handle it fully.
How much does it cost?
To bring a celebrity partner on board, send thousands of PR boxes, build and maintain a loyal community of hundreds of influencers, run paid ads with influencer content, and make this channel add tens or hundreds of millions in enterprise value, it will be an investment.
Paying the celebrities, the creators and the PR boxes comes to at least $250,000 to $500,000. That said, it has huge upside when done correctly.
We ask you to take the audit first, for free, because it will show the details of which steps you need to take next.
What do brands usually ask us?
"We already have an influencer team and a paid team." That's actually the only type of client we take. You need to have an influencer program in place.
"How are you different from other agencies?" Most agencies will get you some influencers and be a nice-to-have. We used to be like a lot of other agencies, bringing in a little bit of result. With this new offer, we can bring a ton of value to your brand in a low-risk way.
"What about health claims and the FTC?" Billy Anderson, a lawyer on our compliance team, goes through everything, and we use a lot of other resources to make sure everything is compliant, not just this year but for the years that follow.
"What is creative control like?" You know your brand best, which is why we collaborate closely with your creative team.
"Do we need every step?" You might just want the community. Take the audit first, because it will show which steps you really need, but yes, that's possible in some cases.
"What KPIs do you measure for success?" That depends on your goals in the short term and the long term. After the audit we can give you a much clearer answer.
How do you get the free audit?
Apply for your free audit. Before we get on a call, we check whether your brand qualifies. If it does, we have a call and ask you a short list of questions. Then we put together a proposal and an audit, and we meet again to go through everything we found in depth.
If you want to scale your existing influencer program and everything you've already done with influencers, and turn it into a big, reliable marketing channel, book the audit.
Worst case, you find something you didn't know before. Best case, you implement this risk-free system.