Why is most of the content on influencer marketing so vague, unactionable, and poor?

Hey, I went through this post over here and it told me everything that common sense would have told me.

If you're a brand and you want to get resources, there's no really one place to look. You can go on websites and blogs.

However, a lot of the time you'll hear the same advice.

• Don't look at follower count. Look at engagement.
• Micro influencers are better than mega influencers in 2026.
• Focus on conversions, not awareness.
• Make sure you give the influencer creative freedom, more or less.

A lot of this advice doesn't give me actionable steps on what to do, and I'm still stuck with a lot of influencers which have high CPMs.

Why is influencer marketing stuck at 5 to 10% of the budget?

It's a really time-consuming channel, and you know what? It's easier to just find an ad creative in Facebook and scale that, and that brings better yield anyways.

But we just do that to diversify. And though 90% of our marketing budget goes towards Meta ads, we still like to do a little bit of 5 to 10% influencer.

If you find yourself in this boat, well, this isn't the only way to run an influencer program.

There's many companies which have spent 90% of their budgets on influencer marketing, like AG1 and NeuroGum. However, this comes with running the program the right way.

Most brands haven't done this, and it's very evident because when you ask how much they spend, it's only 5 to 10%.

Why are most brands fishing in the wrong pond?

So the reason I write this is because after talking with many brands and seeing how influencer marketing is nice to have, it has made it very clear that the brands who compete, this is a huge pond with so many fish, the brands choose to go to another pond where it's already overfished.

Can influencers be your main way to get customers?

Now, the reality is any method can work, but it's not a matter of how it can work. It's a matter of can it reach your goals?

Most of the time, influencers don't have to be a nice to have, like just an additional channel. They could actually be one of the leading customer acquisition channels. This has been clearly proven by multiple brands.

Now the reason it works so well as acquisition channels:

1. It's decentralized in the sense that you have thousands, hundreds of micro creators posting about you.
2. You build brand and you prevent Chinese dupes, and you are able to charge a premium when you have celebrity endorsement.
3. It is not what you say about yourself, it's what other people say about you.

And this will always convert better because they're basically warm referrals at scale.

If you go ahead and hear something from someone you follow on the internet, you really trust their advice for calisthenics. You trust their advice for cooking. You are more likely to buy what they suggest in that realm because they have authority.

So that is always going to convert better than a cold ad.

What's the catch?

The reality is influencers only work with caveats, and that's you need to have a good product.

If your product isn't good and you're not investing heavily in your product, then you're going to get a lot of attention and then it's going to disappear.

And we've seen numerous cases time and time again. And this is very evident when you have a celebrity endorsement. It's less severe with micro influencers, but also happens on a longer time horizon.

So you need to be having a really good product at a premium price for this to work. If you're trying to be the cheapest, this is not the strategy to use.

Why is influencer marketing so hard to get right?

Now the reason it's so difficult is because the industry is fragmented. That's why there's always influencer marketing platforms. There's always a bunch of platforms.

It's not like Google search or ads, which is dominated by one titan. It still has not really been consolidated. There have been efforts like by TikTok Shop, but no one has really taken over the market at least yet.

So that is also where the arbitrage lies for companies. The ones who have data, the ones who have the right resources, are able to take advantage of this.

What do most brands get wrong?

Many brands will go ahead and just copy what others do. Well, that's good. Most people don't know what they're doing.

So what happens is you just end up paying a bunch of influencers one time. You maybe do a test of two posts and then move on to the next influencer.

When in reality, you're going to saturate through the best influencers very quickly, and it's similar to hiring someone, going through the process of finding them, making sure they're a good fit, and then firing them a month later.

What does building relationships with influencers look like?

The main thing people forget is building relationships with the influencers.

Take the example of NeuroGum, who actually has an exclusive Discord community with events where they invest in the influencers' education. They'll literally hire content coaches to come and help the influencer grow.

Because if the influencer grows, so does the brand sponsoring them. It's a win-win.

Then they'll go ahead and:

• bring the influencers out to a dinner with Kim Kardashian,
• send thank yous and happy birthday notes, happy holiday notes to influencers,
• send exclusive gift boxes with not just products of yours in a cardboard box, but maybe some favorite vinyl records that the influencer loved, that they mentioned in a video a while back.

Should you build this in-house?

It's not a one-man operation. This takes a whole team, team who has processes, team who knows how to do that, and it's something you should be building in-house.

Where else can you find the arbitrage?

There's a lot of other tips, nuances, and ways that you can get in touch with influencers, get in touch with the community.

And there's a lot of ways that you can use data and AI to find where the arbitrage is, whether it's:

• in an influencer already liking your product,
• using a Shopify extension to see what influencers have bought your product preemptively and then reach out to them,
• hosting a creator dinner. Shaking hands with creators, making friends, and then having them post out of pure goodwill,
• or creating a viral stunt that then makes you a go-to company like Liquid Death has done. It doesn't take much for Liquid Death to convince influencers to become ambassadors.

There's a lot of ways around it.

How long will this last?

So there's a huge opportunity right now. It's not going to last for long, and we're putting out a lot of content here on this blog post, on these YouTube videos, compiling and consolidating all the data, all the insights.

Because as an agency nowadays in 2026, we act more as a data broker, and that's really the goal of an agency.

We act as a data broker with streamlined SOPs that you can plug and play that have the highest chance of playing out. That's all it is.