Going all-in on deep partnerships with a few macro-influencers is one of the most common and costly mistakes a brand can make, especially when your product requires education. It feels like a shortcut to the trust and authenticity you need, but it often burns through your budget with little to show for it.
The thinking is understandable. You see a handful of brands that built their entire identity around a few key partners, as Michael Brandt mentioned on The Bottom Line, and it seems like the ideal path. They treat influencers as true partners, featuring them prominently across their site and marketing. Landing that one perfect, authoritative voice in your niche feels like it would solve your customer education problem overnight. It seems more like brand building and less like just buying ads, which is an appealing story to tell yourself.
But this strategy is a trap for most companies. On another episode of The Bottom Line, the hosts made the point that most brands simply can’t afford real macro-influencer partnerships. Beyond the cost, you’re placing a massive bet on a single person’s ability to represent your brand and, more importantly, to actually sell your product. As Josh Durham explained on the Up Arrow Podcast, the primary function of influencer marketing isn’t even direct sales, it’s creating brand interactions and generating content at an efficient CPM. If you spend your entire budget on one person and expect a direct return in sales, you are set up for failure.
Instead of hunting for one big fish, you should build a system to find your own best advocates. The most effective approach, echoed across multiple hosts, is to start with a broad product seeding program. As Nisarg Shah explained on Ecommerce Coffee Break, working with micro-influencers is far more affordable and can give you equivalent or even greater reach. The idea is to get your product into the hands of dozens, or even hundreds, of smaller creators in your niche. You can do this through gifting, which keeps your initial costs very low. This process isn’t about one-off campaigns, it’s about discovering who genuinely loves and understands your product enough to create compelling, educational content about it.
By seeding your product widely, you generate a high volume of authentic user-generated content that you can then repurpose for your paid ad campaigns, website, and social feeds. This is the key to creating educational content that feels real, because it is. You let the cream rise to the top, identifying the few creators who truly move the needle for you. Those are the people you can then invest in with deeper, paid partnerships. You didn’t guess who your best advocates would be, you let the data show you.