Influencer Marketing Examples: 25 Campaigns by Budget (Including Small Brands)

The most useful influencer marketing examples for a small brand are the cheap ones. This guide sorts 25 real campaigns by the budget you need to copy them: nine for under $1,000, nine for $1,000 to $10,000 and seven big-brand plays whose idea scales down. Brands rarely publish what a campaign cost, so the tiers show what each play costs to run at a small brand’s size. Every example names the brand, what it did with creators, the publicly reported result and one line on what to copy.

Under $1,000, the plays run on product and postage. Graza sent more than 100 gifted packages before its January 2022 launch, asked for nothing in return and sold out, Marketing Brew reported. Tower 28 mailed 200 hand-picked packages, and one post brought 150 orders overnight, according to Beauty Independent. Jolie sends free showerheads every month with no script and reported $28 million in revenue for the prior year. Daniel Wellington gave watches to thousands of bloggers and took in $70 million in 2014, Bloomberg reported. Olipop gifts hundreds of 12-packs a month.

Several of the best results belong to established brands. Stanley backed the bloggers who already loved its Quencher, and Retail Dive later reported Quencher sales up 275% year over year. Clinique partnered with fans posting about Black Honey, a 1971 lipstick that sold out at Sephora and Ulta Beauty in 2021. Abercrombie & Fitch rebuilt around creators at its customer’s life stage and posted decade-high first-quarter sales in 2023. Chili’s asked creators assigned to a burger to post about its Triple Dipper instead, and comparable sales rose 31% in the quarter that ended December 25, 2024.

From $1,000 to $10,000, the examples use a small paid cast. Gymshark gave free gear to fitness influencers, then paid creators as little as $500 a month, Forbes reported. Sephora opened applications for its Squad program, received approximately 16,000 and chose 24 people. Liquid I.V. put ad money behind creators’ own posts, and TikTok’s case study reports a 48% increase in return on ad spend. Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 planning ranges put one TikTok video at $50 to $200 from a nano creator and $200 to $800 from a micro creator.

The 25 campaigns share five moves. They started with people who already liked the product, cast for fit before follower count, asked for one simple thing, gave creators room and repeated what worked. Each example maps to one of seven plays, such as seeding before a launch, gifting every month and paying the best, running creator videos as ads, or putting one hero product in a set window. Pick one play from your budget tier and run it with 10 to 20 creators.

On Aurelia, any of these campaigns is one post. Choose a campaign template for your industry and goal, or drop in the brief you already have. The campaign goes live in the Aurelia creator marketplace, creators apply, and Aurelia’s picks rank them by fit with the brief. The agreement is written from the campaign, product ships only to creators who have signed, drafts get comments at the exact second, and creators are paid once the brand approves their work. The workspace is free, with one platform fee on top of the creator budget.