Guide on all stages: seeding, paid, ambassador, affiliate and what is needed for each (2025)

Picture this: Your marketing team has spent countless hours scrolling through social media, searching for the perfect influencers to launch your new product. They're lost in the maze of bot-infested accounts and dormant profiles, desperately looking for authenticity.

But what if I told you that influencer marketing is more than just finding the right face for your brand? It's a mix of strategy, relationship-building, and data driven decisions that extends far beyond that initial outreach.

Think about influencer partnerships evolving from one-off posts to long-term brand ambassadorships. Where you're not just tracking likes and comments, but measuring real ROI across multiple channels.

Where your influencer program seamlessly integrates seeding, paid campaigns, and affiliate marketing into a cohesive strategy.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about in this guide.

Stages of an influencer program

Influencer marketing is an industry with multiple layers, far beyond mere product promotion. It includes identifying real brand ambassadors, nurturing long-term partnerships, and navigating the details of affiliate programs with commission structures and sales tracking.

From seeding campaigns to paid partnerships, each stage requires strategic planning and execution. This ecosystem demands brands for a delicate balance of creativity and data driven decision-making, changing influencer collaborations into powerful, multi-channel marketing engines driving measurable results and fostering genuine brand advocacy.

1. Seeding

When your brand pops up in the market, the first step is to create a buzz and let people know you exist. The seeding stage does just that. In this stage, you’ll distribute your products, services, and gifts to grab your customers' attention via influencers.

If the influencer likes your product, they’ll probably put it on their story or create a reel to share honest feedback. The influencers often call it the “Honest Review” or “Not sponsored” reel.

A survey by the fast-fashion brand Fashion Nova found that with seeding alone, they were able to generate sales worth $1.4 billion in 2021. They enlisted 5,000 mega influencers to promote their brand and triumphed among the many brands in the fashion industry.

Here’s an example of a seeding program started by a brand where they send PR packages to ideal participants.

2. Paid program

Once you entrust the social growth of your brand in the hands of the right influencers, it’s time to create a bond that brings value to both parties. Every influencer has a price to promote your brand; these prices are based on engagement rates, number of posts, or commission for sales derived from every effort.

Nowadays, the metric of pay-per-post or per-project rates is more prominent, as both brands and influencers can track the return on their partnerships better. You can use a influencer management and content tracking tool’ like MightyScout to help you pull data from different sources and display it at one place like and keep track of what’s going on in your influencer marketing campaigns.

As you understand more about paid campaigns, it’s important to understand the various compensation models available. Here are some common ways to structure payments for influencer content:

• Performance-based: Pay the influencer on each conversion or if they’re able to generate leads that advance through the sales funnel. For example, a 5% commission for each click on their associate links.

• Gifts and coupons: You can give out monthly gifts or products as payments. Additionally, you can also add app credits or discounts which the influencer can spend on in-app purchases.

• Pay-per-post: You set a fixed pay, say, $300 for each post and $150 for each story an influencer posts about your brand.

• Travel and event sponsorship: You can invite and sponsor influencers to events as a reward for promoting your brand.

Note: Unpaid influencer promotion is hard to track, and they often stop responding after receiving free products. With MightyScout, you can track influencers & their content automatically 24/7. Just enter the usernames you want to check. MightyScout will let you know who posted— and who didn't. So you can easily stay on top of your campaign.

3. Affiliate

Affiliates promote your brand in exchange for commissions, lead signups, sales turnover, or CTR. It helps drive more traffic through the means of mass promotion and use by influencers.

In today’s saturated market, new affiliate programs by companies involve influencers sending links to their interested customers through Wishlink or other link-personalizing platforms.

People comment “Link” or another trigger word, which automatically sends a product link to their DMs. It saves time for customers, and influencers can earn commissions when offline while driving your sales.

Now that you’re familiar with the stages of an influencer marketing program, let’s dive deeper—unpacking the subparts and mastering their execution for success.

4. Ambassador

Ambassador or “Face of the brand” means you enlist suitable influencers to represent your brand voice and promote it continuously through social media posts. The goal is to leverage the influencer’s credibility to promote the brand within the respective community and boost your brand’s reputation.

Sabrina Carpenter X Samsung is a great example of a successful ambassador program. Sabrina is so loyal to Samsung that she even refused to click an image with a fan’s iPhone at her recent concert!

For ambassadors, the charges depend on their popularity, the number of followers, and the commitment term they’ll make for your brand.

Seeding stage

Product seeding means—no strings attached. You cannot expect much in return for the seeding stage but to impress the relevant influencers with the features and authenticity of your product or service.

This is the first step to building relationships with influencers, organic brand awareness, and evaluating long-term relationships.

For example, when Selena Gomez launched “Rare Beauty” in 2019, the brand sent multiple PR packages to influencers in many countries to create awareness.

Even with Selena’s current global popularity, the brand went a step further to reach the audience. In addition to sending PR materials to different influencers around the world, Rare Beauty has also raised over $7 million through their Rare Impact Fund.

Through their Rare Beauty Mental Health Summit, Rare Beauty brings creators, community members, and mental health advocates to promote their brand goals.

The event was live-streamed to a global TikTok audience to access their community This is a good example of a long-term relationship with influencers as the brand includes them as an integral part of its brand message “Being Rare”.

Criteria for seeding influencers

For seeding influencers, you need to define your brand vision and mission first.

• Brand alignment: The influencers you choose to collaborate with should know your brand and their followers must be interested in using your product or service.

For example, if you have a lifestyle brand like “Skims”, you’ll need influencers in the fashion niche like Matilda Djerf, Caroline Daur, or Kritika Khurana. A food brand should reach out to Karissa Eats, Nicole Addison, etc.

• Engagement rates: This is the metric that defines the average number of interactions on your posts per follower. You can calculate it by:

Engagement Rate=(Total Followers/Total Engagements)×100

A high engagement rate means the influencers will reel in more attention toward a product with just a few posts. Hence, it’s important to reach out to influencers who have around 5% engagement rate. It also reflects on the authentic number of followers and minimal bot or fake following.

Remember, engagement rate is a highly relative metric which can change according to the audience and volume of the influencers’ account. For example, if you post reels regularly but have a small following, the engagement rate might still be more than an influencer with more followers who don’t post often.

• Audience relevance: Assess the interest of an influencer’s audience for your next collaboration. You have to select the influencer based on age, location, gender, interests, language, and occupation.

For example, if you choose a fashion influencer to promote your fitness brand, it will drive less sales due to the audience's need for a more relevant motive.

You can use MightyScout to scope the different metrics like gender, age, or country related to an influencer and make the right choice for your campaign.

Seeding process

Discovery and outreach

The first step in any influencer seeding program is to scout and reach the right influencers for gifting your product or service. Most of the time, micro-influencers have a high acceptance rate for the seedling stage, while macro or mega-influencers need a bit of persuasion to accept your deal.

There’s no contractual obligation to create content in the seeding process, but it’s an expectation of brands.

To find the right influencers, you can use a tool like MightyScout to help you reach out, track, and maintain relations. Cold outreach is also effective when you are new to the industry.

Here’s a quick example of a cold outreach for your next seeding campaign:

Hi [Influencer's Name], I'm [Your Name] from [Your Brand]. We love your content and think you'd enjoy our [Product]. We'd like to send you a complimentary package to try out—no strings attached. If you enjoy it, we'd be thrilled if you shared your thoughts with your followers. Let us know if you're interested! Best, [Your Name] [Your Position] [Your Contact Information]

Gifting, packaging, and shipping

In this stage, both parties know about the progress of the seeding stage. It involves a tracking link, delivery, and content linking alerts that will tell you about your product's impression on the influencer.

MightyScout’s features to track influencers and act as a CRM at this stage, help you effectively with:

• Unpaid tracking: Track influencers' activity and capture published content automatically.

You can integrate your seeding campaign tools like Shopify or WooCommerce with MightyScout, and see the progress of each influencer at different stages.

• Campaign reporting: Automatically collect content and metrics such as impressions, reach, campaign engagement, saves, and media value, and generate reports.

Learn more about how MightyScout can help you with product gifting.

Last but not least, you need to create a list of top-performing seeding influencers in your community and find the platform where your consumers spend most of their time.

• Inviting influencers

To start with a successful influencer relationship, you need to identify the top-performing creators in your industry and pique their interest in your product. MightyScout helps you find the right influencer for your program through the lookalikes of your ideal profiles.

With MightyScout you can quickly analyze influencer profiles and check statistics such as comment-to-like ratio, median number of likes, and followers. With this feature, you can segregate the top performers and reach out for collaboration.

Tip: Use this simple message to invite influencers for your next seeding program:

Hi [Influencer Name], Big fan of your content on [platform]! We at [Brand Name] love your take on [topic related to your brand]. We're launching our new [product type] and think it would be a great fit for your audience. Would you be interested in trying it out as part of our seeding campaign? No strings attached! We would just love to know your honest opinion about our product. [Your Name], [Brand Name]

Paid partnerships

Paid partnerships are where the formal promotion relationships between influencers and your brand kickstart. You pick the right influencers from the seeding stage and pay them per post or per click for the sales they drive to your brand.

Through paid partnerships, the influencer is under contract and has to post for your brand at decided intervals.

Be sure to be transparent about paid collaborations, the FTC has fined brands before (e.g. Fashion nova for $4.2M).

Some metrics to consider while going for paid collaborations include: - The goal of your campaign - Engagement rates - Followers - Audience alignment with the brand - Influencer rates - Your budget

Paid partnership process

1. Negotiating rates and content rights

After outreach, the next step for a paid partnership is to negotiate the price and the contract term for which you’ll hire the influencer.

Asking for their rates first is a better negotiation tactic vs first proposing a price, they should also start to get a feel for market rate as they continue to speak with many influencers. In general a $10-15/CPM based on their followers is a good rule of thumb for a collaboration.

Here is a sample message for your reference:

Hi [Influencer's Name], We love your content and would like to propose a paid collaboration for $500. The partnership involves one Instagram post and one story featuring our product. Additionally, we would like to retain content rights for promotional use. Please let us know if you’re interested. Best regards, [Your Name] [Your Company]

You need to retain the content rights to use it on multiple promotional platforms, which will reduce marketing expenses and create multi-purpose use cases for your influencer collaboration.

Make sure to put all the terms into a legal contract and sign it to avoid any future conflicts.

2. Content guidance

The next step is to direct content creation. You can ask the influencer to post:

• Haul videos

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• Showroom visit posts

• Product launches

• Routine reels and posts (using your product in their daily routine)

3. ROI and ROAs

The last step in this process is to analyze the Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAs) from your collaboration. This will give you an idea of whether to retain an influencer or find new ones to promote your brand successfully.

You can also use a Profit Calculator to compare the different metrics like revenue per month, cost per month, and time spent each month. This will free you from the complex calculations and allow you to focus more on the campaign.

After you enter the details in the calculator, it will tell you where you can save money and whether your profit is negative or positive in terms of money spent.

Once you know the metrics, analyze them and set different KPIs. Not just monetary but also use social media metrics like:

• Number of saves and shares: Shares tell you people are recommending your product, and saves tell you they like it and keep it for future reference.

• Influencer-pushed coupon codes: You can track the sales each code is bringing through the unique code and URL and understand the effectiveness of your chosen influencers.

• Follower growth: Note your followers from the start of the marketing campaign and during it to analyze the growth and interest of your audience in the brand. If you see a jump in followers, it means your brand was able to create enough awareness and attract the target audience.

• Click-through rate: The click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of users who click on a particular link compared to the total number of users who view a page, ad, or email. It indicates how effectively the influencer's recommendation prompts users to move to the next stage of your sales process.

Brand ambassadors

Brand Ambassadors extensively promote your brand by plugging your product into their daily routine and showing off the benefits to attract customers. Ambassadors are often under contract to not use competitors’ products and be loyal to their brand.

Brand Ambassadors are important because they: - Humanize your brand - Build reputation - Good word of mouth - Increase website traffic - Do positive PR for the brand

To choose the right brand ambassadors, analyze the influencer’s performance in the seeding and paid partnership stages. Consider the ones who had the highest ROI, were always ready to be creative, and deliver the content on time. It means they’re responsible and ready for a bigger responsibility.

You can track their progress and results delivered with MightyScout through metrics like media posted, reach, engagement, sales, cpm, and media value delivered.

Brand ambassadors process

You have to provide a long-term contract to your ambassador that includes details like:

• Name and contact information
• The terms of the contract
• The brand ambassador’s duties
• The brand ambassador’s compensation
• Any bonuses or incentives
• The brand ambassador’s expenses
• Confidentiality provisions
• Social media guidelines
• Termination provisions

Here is the link to a free influencer contract template which outlines all the necessary details. You can edit as per your convenience and make a copy for future.

After delivering a contract and checking the authenticity of an influencer, guide them to become an ideal ambassador for your brand.

You need to be their creative support and provide resources that make them fully aware of the potential of your brand. You can do so by:

• Creating a content creation tool kit with do’s and don’ts
• Providing a product feature list to the creator
• Scope of deliverables (Duration, color scheme, media required)
• Hiring a creative team of content writers and video editors to ensure high-quality content

Affiliates

When an influencer moves up the ladder of marketing for your brand or client, they become the center for your marketing efforts. Once they’ve proven their worth during the seeding and paid campaign stage, you can trust their audience will follow their recommendations.

Influencers usually specialize in certain niches or areas of interest, allowing you to customize the influencer affiliate program marketing strategies to specific demographics and preferences. The goal here is to create a scalable affiliate program that incentivizes good performance and focuses on high-quality content.

Criteria for affiliates

To select affiliates, you need to assess:

• Strong performance as brand ambassadors: If you see consistent growth of an influencer in all stages, invite them to your affiliate program. They’ve already been in your paid campaigns and know what appeals to the audience. Hence, they can drive more sales with their content and profile. Butter Me Up, a self-care brand, offers a 10% discount and 10% commission for every sale their ambassadors generate through their promo code.

• Ability to drive conversions and sales: Go back to your seeding stage, and see which influencer drove more sales with each reel and was consistent with posting, even when there were no strings attached. If they have a good track record of conversions, consider them a pillar of your affiliate program.

• Set up a limit: Influencers can apply to the Amazon affiliate program only if they have an organic following of 500. In MightyScout you can sort your applications that come in via an invite form so you only accept those with good enough followings/stats.

Process of affiliate program

To start an affiliate program, you should set up commissions like 10% commission on each purchase or $1,000 on every 1,000 clicks on ads. The more an influencer earns, the more sales you get.

To achieve this, you need to: - Set up a form for affiliates to fill out - Assess eligibility criteria(No. of followers, niche, engagement rate) - Previous partnerships and their success - Tax no. and other legal information

You’ve set up a budget, timeline, and progress chart for this affiliate program. Now, all you need to do is monitor the progress and find a scope for improvement to get more profits.

Building and scaling your influencer program

For each stage of your influencer program, you’ll need to use some tools to track and record success.

Tools for each stage

• MightyScout helps you collect sales, impressions, reach, and ROI data to track the sales each affiliate is bringing in for your brand. We can help you track influencers and their content automatically 24/7.

• UpWork is a talent marketplace where you can analyze influencer marketing projects and choose marketers from around the world to manage your influencer programs.

For example, if you search “Influencer Marketer” on the platform, you’ll get results starting from $20. If you click on one, you’ll find details like ratings, portfolio, service tiers, target audience, and platform type.

You can determine the scope of work and reliability of marketers by using reviews from their previous clients.

Here’s a rundown of our highly structured project delivery process, which ensures quality and financial assurance for both parties.

• Loom is the video messaging app you can use to streamline communication with your influencer marketing team and to update them on any changes. It’s easy to use and allows you to keep transcripts of your content for future reference.

Use this tool to automatically generate titles, video summaries, and messages. Record multiple videos to help influencers understand your program. Create engaging videos to share your story and amplify your product's voice and simplify complex processes for your influencers and team.

Budgeting for each stage

You have to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your influencer marketing programs such as engagement rates, conversion rates, ROI, and more. Start by asking yourself these questions:

• Do you want to create awareness?
• Drive sales?
• Boost engagement?

Allocate a budget based on these objectives: hire micro-influencers for niche engagement, enlist macro-influencers for brand visibility, and allocate a smaller portion to mega-influencers to build credibility and trust.

Timeline for building and scaling the program

There’s no fixed rule for choosing the timeline for your influencer program. Use this example to set up the timeline:

• 3 months: Test compatibility with selected influencers and analyze initial performance.
• 6 months: Analyze progress and select ambassadors for the next stages.
• 1 year: Reach peak performance, build long-term relationships, raise awareness, and drive sales.

You also have to set a turnaround time for the deliverables from influencers. For example, 5-6 days for approval and edits.

Manage your successful influencer program with MightyScout

With all these resourceful tools and features, you should now have regular content to post on your different social media and advertising channels, increase efficiency with your ads, a recurring loop of more interested influencers, larger community of brand ambassadors and fans, etc.

Platforms like MightyScout can help you with overall relationship management whether you want to:

• Discover the influencers in your niche
• Send them relevant outreach messages
• Ship, gift, and track products; or
• Track unpaid mentions

Want to see how MightyScout can help you? Book a demo with us.