How to Do Influencer Marketing: A Small Business Guide

Most small businesses learn influencer marketing by doing it badly once. They DM a handful of accounts with big follower counts, send free product, get a post that disappears into a Story in 24 hours, and conclude the whole channel doesn't work. The channel worked fine. The plan underneath it didn't exist.

This is the plan. It's the version we'd hand a friend opening their first campaign, whether that's a Toronto café or an online shop shipping across Canada.

Start with what you're buying, not who you're hiring

"Influencer marketing" is a vague enough phrase that most brands skip straight to browsing profiles. Before you look at a single account, decide which of three things you actually need, because each one changes everything downstream:

• Awareness. You want more people in your city or category to know your business exists. Reach matters more than any single post's sales.
• Direct response. You want people to click a link, use a code, or walk into a store this week. A smaller, more engaged audience beats a bigger, passive one.
• Content. You want photos and video of real people using your product that you can reuse in ads, on your site, and in your own feed. The creator's own audience is a bonus, not the point. If this is your goal, you may not want an influencer collaboration at all: see How to do creator marketing: a UGC guide for brands for the version of this guide built specifically around content-only creators.

Most first campaigns are quietly trying to do all three at once with one post from one creator, which is why they underperform. Pick one goal for the first campaign. You can layer the others in once you know what a single lane looks like.

One more decision sits underneath all three: are you sending free product with no fee and no guarantee, or paying for a post you can plan around? Seeding vs. paid: when to gift, when to pay creators breaks down which one fits which goal above, and how to use free product to find creators worth paying next.

Set a budget before you pick a creator size

Work backward from what you can spend, not forward from an account you like. A single post from a creator with a large, loyal following and one from a smaller creator with a highly local audience can cost the same money and deliver completely different results depending on your goal above.

The broad tiers worth knowing: nano creators (roughly 1,000 to 10,000 followers) and micro creators (roughly 10,000 to 100,000) are where most small business budgets land well. Larger accounts charge for reach that often extends far outside the city or niche you're actually selling to. If you want the fuller breakdown of which tier fits which goal, with a worked example, see Micro vs nano creators: which fits a Toronto brand? The logic in that post holds for any city, not just Toronto.

If you're specifically budgeting in Canadian dollars for a Toronto campaign, Toronto creator rates: what nano and micro cost in 2026 has the current rate table and two worked budgets, from $600 to $2,500.

Find creators who fit, not just ones who look right

A big follower count is the easiest thing to fake and the least useful signal for a small budget. Before you reach out to anyone, check three things: whether the comments read like real conversation rather than emoji spam, whether the audience shows any local or category-relevant signal beyond a bio line, and whether engagement holds steady across a few months of posts rather than spiking once and fading. What is a good engagement rate for influencers? covers exactly how to calculate that number and what's normal by tier.

Where to actually search, and how to write a first message that gets a reply instead of silence, is its own topic with enough detail that we wrote it up separately: How to find micro influencers and UGC creators in Toronto. The search methods there apply outside Toronto too, just swap the location tags and neighbourhood hashtags for your own city. If you're specifically hiring in Toronto, Influencers in Toronto: how to find and hire them walks through the whole local process in one place.

Brief the creator. Don't script them.

The single biggest quality killer in small business influencer marketing is an over-written brief. A page of mandatory phrases and shot lists produces content that reads like an ad, which is the one thing that defeats the purpose of using a creator instead of buying a display ad.

A brief that works covers four things and stops there: what the product or service actually does and who it's for, one or two things you genuinely want mentioned (a promo code, a specific benefit, a call to action), what's off-limits (a competitor claim, a medical claim, anything your industry regulates), and the deadline. Everything else, the exact wording, the shots, the tone, is the creator's job. Their audience follows them for their voice. Overwriting it is buying their reach and then throwing away the reason it converts.

Agree on usage rights before you agree on a price

Decide one thing before the first quote goes back and forth: are you only using this content once, for the creator's own post, or do you also want to repost it, run it as a paid ad, or keep using it after the campaign ends? Skipping this question is the most common source of after-the-fact disputes between brands and creators, and it costs two sentences to avoid. Usage beyond the creator's own organic post is typically priced separately, on top of the base rate, and reasonably so: you're buying a license, not just a post. On Sixth Degree this is handled through a standalone Ad Rights Rider so it's never assumed by either side. What is an ad rights rider? covers what to put in that agreement, whichever platform you're hiring on.

Pay in a way that protects both of you

The two failure modes are symmetrical: a brand that pays half upfront and never hears back once the money lands, and a creator who posts on faith and chases an invoice for weeks afterward. Neither is malicious most of the time. It's what happens when there's no structure holding the agreement together.

Escrow, where the money is held by a neutral third party and released once the post is confirmed live, solves both sides of that problem at once. It's standard in freelance marketplaces for exactly this reason and it's underused in influencer marketing, mostly because most of that spend still happens over DM and e-transfer with no structure at all.

Measure what you can actually prove

Likes and views feel like results and prove almost nothing about whether the campaign paid for itself. Before the campaign starts, decide what you'll actually check afterward: a unique promo code per creator, a tracked link, or a simple "how did you hear about us" question at checkout. Any one of these gives you a real number. None of them require guessing.

Be honest about what each source tells you, too. A creator's own screenshot of their reach is useful context, not proof of a sale. A code redeemed at your register is proof of a sale. Keep those two categories separate in your head, and you'll make better decisions about which creators to rebook.

The mistakes that eat a first campaign's budget

Chasing follower count instead of the goal you set in step one. A 200,000-follower account is often the wrong buy for a single-location business with a $500 budget, regardless of how good the content looks.

No usage agreement, discovered after the fact. The brand reposts a creator's content as a paid ad without asking, the creator finds out, and the relationship ends over something that a single sentence upfront would have prevented.

Paying based on trust alone. This isn't a comment on creators as a group. It's a comment on unstructured payment, which fails in both directions, at real financial cost, often enough that it's worth building a habit around escrow or a written agreement instead of hoping this time is fine.

Treating one post as the whole strategy. A single post from a single creator is a data point, not a campaign. The businesses that get real value run several smaller collaborations, see what actually moves people, and put more budget behind the creators who worked.

Where Sixth Degree fits

We built Sixth Degree around this exact plan: every creator is verified by a human before they can take a paid collaboration, rates are visible upfront instead of negotiated blind, usage rights are explicit through the Ad Rights Rider, and payment sits in escrow until the work is confirmed live. Toronto first, expanding across Canada from there.

We're in private beta, opening Fall 2026, so the marketplace isn't public yet. If you want to run your first campaign this way when it opens, join the waitlist below, or email hello@sixthdegree.app with what you're trying to sell and we'll tell you honestly whether a first campaign makes sense yet.