Overview
1stCollab campaign budgets are inclusive of our platform fee. So if you set your brand budget to $10k / month, we'd be able to allocate $8.3k / month to creators and $1.6k / month to our platform fee.
We've generally seen our brands fall into two buckets for where they are in their influencer programs.
First time / early testing. These brands have never worked with an influencer before or are in the early stages of testing out their program. This might also be a brand that wants to test out a completely new influencer marketing strategy or hasn't previously seen success with influencer marketing. We classify these brands as being in the Testing phase.
Scaling. These brands have previously had success with an influencer program and want to scale up the impact of their program.
Minimum Budgets
Our minimum monthly budget that we support on 1stCollab is $2,500 / month. That said, we highly recommend setting a minimum of at least $5,000 / month.
We don't support clients with budgets under our minimum threshold and strongly recommend brands not run influencer marketing campaigns in general unless they have sufficient budget allocated to test out influencer marketing. Some reasons for this include:
Poor performance. Being restrictive with spend can actually negatively impact overall campaign performance because:
Some of the best performing creators will cost $1,000+.
We'll be highly restricted in terms of the set of creators we can sign on to a campaign. For instance, if we have a budget of $2,000 / month, and we want to offer two different creators $900, we won't be able to do that, since giving out two $900 contracts puts us over budget (when factoring in our platform fee).
Campaign execution and evaluation being slow. As discussed later in this article, we don't see statistically significant metrics around influencer campaigns until ~$10,000 of total spend. If you're spending $2,000 / month, it'll then take you at least 5 months before you'll be able to confidently evaluate metrics for your campaign and get a good sense of whether influencers is an effective channel for your brand.
Negative creator sentiment towards brands. 1stCollab works best at scale, which is why we require brands to activate 100 creators when onboarding. If we have a very limited budget, we'll have to reject most of these creators after they submit a bid for the campaign to let them know we're out of campaign budget. This can cause negative sentiment across creators and we've seen cases where creators will notify other creators in their vertical not to negotiate with brands with too aggressive of budgets. As much as we can, we want to avoid creators viewing brands as too stingy with their campaign budgets.
Testing
If you're in the early stages of running an influencer program or testing out a completely new strategy, you likely don't have a good sense of the ROI for this program. In this case, your priority should be to quickly understand the ROI of an influencer program with minimal wasted spend. Brands typically think of this as deploying a "test" budget to evaluate a new marketing channel and only moving the channel into a "core" budget once the channel has proven ROI.
As we mention in our Running a Successful Campaign article, our recommendation is to not evaluate ROI / metrics for an ad group until there's been at least $10k of spend and 10 creators live (before that metrics will see large fluctuations from the natural variability with creator content). Given that, our typical brand in the "Testing" phase will allocate $10k / month of spend per an ad group they launch, in order to get statistically significant metrics within 1-2 months of a campaign going live. Given most new brand launches a campaign with 1-2 ad groups, our typical brand in this stage will allocate between $10-20k / month of budget for their first campaign.
Scaling
If you're seeing that a particular creator strategy is working or just want to more quickly gain signal on a creator strategy, our primary goal will then be to help you scale out the positive impact of your influencer marketing and help you learn more quickly.
That said, our process for running campaigns is unique so we cannot guarantee that we'll be able to replicate the exact same impact as your previous campaign. However, once we've verified that we'll be able to continue positive results on 1stCollab, we've historically seen brands quickly scale from there.
Our typical brand with high confidence in their current influencer program generally starts with a $30-50k / month budget and scales to $100k+ / month budgets within 1-2 months of kicking off their campaign.