How to Run Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign in India: A Step-by-Step Guide

Every failed influencer campaign starts with a vague objective. "We want more visibility" is not an objective. "We want 500,000 impressions among 25-35 year old women in metro cities within 4 weeks" is an objective.

Your objective falls into one of three categories:

Awareness: You want people to know your brand exists. You are launching a new product, entering a new market, or building brand recognition. Success metrics: reach, impressions, video views, brand search volume increase.

Consideration: People know you exist but have not engaged deeply. You want them to learn more, visit your website, or follow your social accounts. Success metrics: engagement rate, website traffic, social follows, saves, shares.

Conversion: You want direct action — purchases, sign-ups, app downloads, lead form submissions. Success metrics: clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend.

Pick one. Just one. A campaign trying to achieve all three achieves none effectively.

Your budget determines everything — the tier of creators you can afford, the number of content pieces, and the platforms you can activate. Here is a realistic budget allocation framework:

Component	% of Budget	What It Covers
Creator fees	70%	Payment to influencers for content creation and posting
Production support	15%	Props, products to send, location costs, travel if needed
Paid amplification	10%	Boosting top-performing creator content as ads
Tools and tracking	5%	UTM builders, analytics tools, reporting

Minimum viable budgets by tier: ₹50,000 gets you 3-5 nano influencers on Instagram. ₹1-3 lakh gets you 3-5 micro influencers with meaningful reach. ₹3-10 lakh gets you mid-tier creators or a network of micro influencers across geographies. ₹10 lakh and above opens up macro influencers, multi-platform campaigns, and larger-scale activations.

This is where most first-time campaigns go wrong. The instinct is to search for creators with the most followers. Resist that instinct.

Instead, evaluate creators on five dimensions, in this order of priority:

Cultural fit. Does the creator's content, values, and aesthetic match your brand? A luxury watch brand should not partner with a creator known for budget travel hacks, regardless of their follower count.

Audience alignment. Who follows this creator? Check their audience demographics — age, gender, location, interests. If your product is for women aged 25-40 in Tier 1 cities, the creator's audience should overlap significantly with that profile.

Engagement quality. Not just engagement rate — engagement quality. Are the comments genuine conversations or generic emojis? Are saves and shares high relative to likes? Genuine engagement indicates an audience that trusts the creator's recommendations.

Content quality. Review their last 20-30 posts. Is the content consistently well-produced? Do they put effort into captions and storytelling? Would your brand look good alongside their content?

Collaboration history. Have they worked with brands before? If yes, how did those collaborations look? Were they clearly marked as ads? Did they feel authentic or forced?

Pro tip: If you do not have existing creator relationships, working with an agency for your first campaign saves significant time. At Exif Media, we maintain a vetted network of 120+ creators across every Indian state — each already evaluated on all five dimensions above. For first-time campaigns, this eliminates the riskiest part of the process.

The brief is your contract with the creator on expectations. Keep it to 1-2 pages. No creator reads a 10-page brief — and if they do, they will find too many contradictions to follow.

Your brief should include: a brand overview (2-3 sentences about who you are), the campaign objective and what success looks like, your target audience description, key messages (maximum three — creators cannot convey more than three messages in a single piece of content), content guidelines including dos and don'ts, specific deliverables (for example: 1 Instagram Reel of 30-60 seconds plus 3 Instagram Stories), the timeline with draft submission and publish dates, the approval process and who reviews content, required hashtags, tags, and disclosure language (ASCI compliance), and usage rights specifying whether you can repurpose the content for ads or other channels.

The most important line in any brief: "We want your authentic voice, not a script. Here is the story we want to tell — tell it in your way." Creators produce their best work when given creative freedom within clear boundaries.

Always use written contracts, even for small campaigns. Verbal agreements create disputes. A basic influencer contract should cover: deliverables and deadlines, total fee and payment terms (typically 50% advance, 50% on completion), content ownership and usage rights, exclusivity period if any, revision limits (typically 2 rounds), cancellation terms, and ASCI disclosure requirements.

Negotiation reality check: Creators in India expect to negotiate. Starting rates are rarely final rates. However, do not squeeze creators to their absolute minimum — underpaid creators produce uninspired content, miss deadlines, and do not prioritise your campaign. Fair compensation produces fair results.

Once creators begin producing content, you enter the most time-intensive phase. Set up a clear approval workflow. Creators submit drafts (video rough cuts, image previews, caption drafts). Your team reviews within 24-48 hours — delays frustrate creators and push timelines. Provide specific, constructive feedback rather than vague instructions. Approve final content and confirm publish dates.

Common mistake: over-editing creator content until it sounds like your brand's corporate voice. If the final content sounds like a press release, you have failed. The entire value of influencer marketing is that the content sounds like the creator, not the brand.

Content goes live. Your job is to monitor performance in real time for the first 24-48 hours. Watch for engagement velocity — how quickly likes, comments, and shares accumulate. Monitor comment sentiment — are people responding positively or questioning the partnership's authenticity? Check that all links, promo codes, and tags are working correctly.

If a piece of content is performing exceptionally well, consider allocating your paid amplification budget to boost it as a sponsored ad. Creator content typically outperforms brand-created ads by 3-5x in engagement when boosted, because it retains the authentic feel audiences trust.

After the campaign concludes (typically 1-2 weeks after the last post goes live), compile your results against the objective you set in step one.

Calculate your cost-per-result (CPR): total campaign spend divided by total results in your primary metric. For awareness: cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). For consideration: cost per engagement (CPE). For conversion: cost per acquisition (CPA).

Compare your CPR against industry benchmarks. For Instagram influencer campaigns in India, typical benchmarks are: CPM of ₹100-₹400, CPE of ₹5-₹25, and CPA varying widely by industry (₹200-₹2,000 for e-commerce, higher for services).

Document what worked and what did not. Which creator delivered the best results? Which content format performed strongest? Which audience segment engaged most? These learnings become the foundation for your second campaign — and your second campaign will be significantly better than your first because of them.