Whether you’re taking your first steps in the world of influencer marketing or you’ve been growing your influencer program for years, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why I’ve rounded up these five case studies from brands generating serious results from their influencer activity…

A note on using these case studies

Before we get started, please bear the following in mind: 

🚨 Don’t obsess over numbers in case studies 🚨

Fact is, specific figures are of limited use – because the budget, audience, and results will never be 100% relevant to your brand. Instead, use this article for inspiration. Each of the following success stories highlights a different approach and/or objective that can help guide your strategic planning and campaign ideation.

1. BURGA scales to 2,000+ content units a month

Need to know

👩🏻‍💻 BURGA has a 26-person team covering influencer marketing, affiliate, and PR, and handles all influencer activity in-house

📈 Scaled influencer output from ~300 content units per month to 2,000+

🚀 ~3,500 influencers launched per quarter

BURGA is an accessories brand that brings a fashionable touch to everyday items like phone cases and laptop sleeves. Their strategy traditionally relied heavily on product gifting with accompanying affiliate codes…

… which made it easy to measure the impact of their influencer activity.

Ieva Rees, Influencer Marketing Team Lead for Gifting Campaigns at BURGA, explained that they employ two forms of gifting: 

• Barter deals: You gift your product to an influencer and ask for content in return.
• No-strings-attached deals: You gift your product with no expectations whatsoever.

There are advantages to each approach. Arranging a specific volume of content sets a professional tone for the collaboration and allows BURGA to make more concrete projections.

That said, we also have campaigns where we send products with no strings attached. If they love it and want to share it with their followers, they also have a discount code. This helps us retain initial contacts, receive nice features, and reach out to creators with more followers.

Ieva Rees Influencer Marketing Team Lead for Gifting Campaigns, BURGA

However, over-reliance on gifting has its drawbacks. In BURGA’s case, they struggled with leaking – in some markets, an influencer’s discount code would show up on coupon sites and extensions within half an hour of going live 🤦 Not only did this encourage consumers to expect discounts, but it also made attribution unreliable.

The solution? Shifting budget away from gifting and toward brand awareness campaigns.

Investing in brand awareness has allowed BURGA to:

• Reach audiences earlier in the funnel
• Work with more diverse influencers
• Support more authentic storytelling
• Create “scroll-stopping” content that doesn’t feel like “buy now” ads

For example, they collaborated with clay sculptor Sincerely Seashell, who created a Halloween-themed phone stand that naturally integrates the product without a salesy CTA:

Rugile Paleviciute, Director of Global Partnerships at BURGA, says the goal is to create better, more engaging content.

Instead of doing pushy ‘buy now’ content, we focus on scroll-stopping content that the audience actually wants to watch, and we incorporate our product naturally and authentically.

Rugile Paleviciute Director of Global Partnerships, BURGA

When it comes to tracking performance for brand awareness campaigns, BURGA relies on the following metrics:

• Reach, impressions, and engagement
• Brand sentiment in comments (do people respond positively? Mention the brand? Notice the product?)
• Earned media value as a directional indicator, with a rule of thumb that EMV should be ~2–4X influencer cost

Most of this – and much more besides – can be tracked directly in Modash:

They also look for knock-on effects across other channels, such as an upturn in paid media performance off the back of a recent campaign.

Combining gifting with brand awareness has helped BURGA scale its influencer program, allowing them to launch around 3,500 influencers per quarter and generate 2,000+ influencer-produced content units per month.

2. Gear4music drives sales through YouTube influencer product reviews

Need to know

🛒 Gear4music has 60,000 SKUs across 1,000+ brands

🧑‍💻 Started with a one-person influencer marketing team

📈 Scaled to around 50 influencer collaborations per month (up from ~15)

Gear4music is an online musical instruments and equipment store stocking 60,000+ SKUs from over 1,000 brands, including its own in-house lines. 

With a strong emphasis on sales, its influencer program is largely focused on long-form YouTube product reviews, as Influencer Marketing Manager Michael Todner explains:

There's no better way to actually demonstrate our product quality than by getting other people to review them, demonstrating the quality and sound. Then the products market themselves.

Michael Todner Influencer Marketing Manager, Gear4music

This strategy holds various challenges for a retailer like Gear4music. 

For starters, it mostly sells high-ticket products, putting pressure on the brand to find super relevant, persuasive influencers who generate real results. And with such a huge product catalog, it can be tough to prioritize the right instrument at the right time. 

Each review is accompanied by supporting socials – typically a Reel, TikTok, or YouTube Community post – driving traffic to the main video, so there’s a lot of content to brief and track. 

To make matters even trickier, Michael started out as a one-person team – how did he have the bandwidth to get everything done?

Repeat partnerships are Michael’s biggest time-saver. He’s negotiated retainer-based deals with trusted influencers like Taylor Danley who can reliably produce high-quality, on-brief content weekly, giving him a predictable content output without forcing him to be too hands-on.

When deciding which products to focus on, Michael prioritizes those most likely to create immediate impact. To do this, he considers factors like:

• Stock coverage and allocation: Can they fulfill demand off the back of a successful campaign?
• Commercial sense: Are there any new product launches that need promoting? 
• Product-specific considerations: Do a product’s price or features make it a good candidate for a review video?
• Potential conflicts: Should Gear4music review a third-party product over an in-house one, or promote one product category over another?
• Trends: Are there any external factors or ad hoc opportunities the brand can capitalize on?

Finally, to speed up the briefing process, Michael creates brief templates spanning common categories like guitars and keyboards. These templates can be updated over time and quickly tailored to specific products as required.

🤓 Further reading: Learn more in Influencer Briefing For YouTube: Dedicated Vids, Integrations & Shorts. 

The approach clearly works. Michael points out that in one campaign, he identified a guitar with strong pricing, attractive features, a clear audience, and sufficient stock coverage. By collaborating with influencers who specialized in deep-dive reviews, he helped the product sell out in the UK in around two days.

As well as generating sales, this strategy is super scalable, allowing Michael to triple influencer collaborations from 15 per month to ~50.

3. Bolt uses influencers to expand into 50+ countries

Need to know

🌎 Expanded into 50+ markets

🤳 Up to ~100 influencers posting per month across 15+ markets

💼 Central influencer team of 1-2 people, supported by local marketing teams

Bolt, an Estonia-based rival to the likes of Lyft and Uber, has expanded to 50+ markets worldwide – and influencer marketing has been a major driving force.

As you can probably guess, the Bolt app’s various services – taxi hailing, food delivery, couriers – are highly location-dependent. In some countries, they’re only available in a single city. This presents a real challenge for finding relevant influencers, given that targeting the wrong territory = wasted spend 💸

Piia Õunpuu, Bolt’s Global Influencer Marketing Manager, explains the brand’s hyper local approach:

We make sure that the influencers we work with are as local as they can be. I try to keep it so they have at least 50% local audience in the city or country they live in.

Piia Õunpuu Global Influencer Marketing Manager, Bolt

💡 Pro tip: Piia relies on Modash’s audience and creator location filters to track down geographically relevant influencers. As well as this, she recommends using our bio search feature to track down influencers using location-specific terms, like “BCN” in Barcelona.

Because results can be pretty limited for smaller locations (typically cities with populations of <1 million), Bolt also works with UGC creators for paid media campaigns. Local audiences are less important here because paid targeting does all the heavy lifting – but Piia still prefers to work with creators who live locally so the content feels authentic.

🤓 Further reading: Learn more in How Bolt Finds Local Influencers For 100+ Collabs In 15 Markets Each Month.

Of course, influencer marketing is about more than just reaching people in the right location. Bolt has various messages and services to promote across dozens of markets, requiring Piia to develop a multi-tier strategy. It looks a little like this, although bear in mind the specific numbers vary by country:

Let’s look at some examples of how Bolt’s influencer content varies across those different tiers.

For starters, Kacie Rose – a tier #1 influencer with 670,000+ followers on Instagram – shared a top-level tip about scams to avoid for travelers visiting Budapest, including her soft-touch recommendation to book taxis through the Bolt app…

…whereas Symply Mave, a tier #2-level influencer, leveraged her loyal following to promote Bolt by sharing details of a Bolt event she attended – along with a limited-time discount code…

…and tier #3 UGC creators Mel & Shaan created a simple three-second creative about the cost of car ownership – perfect for paid media usage:

Piia says there are major benefits to this tiered approach (provided you have the money to back it up):

If you have the budget and the opportunity to go for a tiered strategy, it allows you to tap into different creators who basically have a different function in the campaign.

Piia Õunpuu Global Influencer Marketing Manager, Bolt

4. Stanley 1913 cuts CPMs with long-term ambassadors

Need to know

🤝 Working with three long-term brand ambassadors

⚽ Multiyear partnerships with Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain

👛 Brand ambassadors achieved 1/4 CPM vs regular campaigns

Influencer marketing has long been a key focus for Stanley 1913. But as authenticity becomes ever more integral to marketing success, the drinkware brand has begun shifting from one-off paid partnerships toward longer-term brand ambassadorships.

Speaking at Creatorfest London 2025, Georgia Humphries, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager EMEA at Stanley 1913, explained this new focus:

We’ve moved beyond just putting a product next to an influencer’s face. Brands that embrace this shift win deeper trust and influence because they lean into culture rather than just ‘rent’ attention.

Georgia Humphries Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager EMEA, Stanley 1913

Now, Stanley is looking for “meaningful partnerships rooted in shared values”, she added.

A prime example is their ongoing partnership with football freestyler Lirian Santos, one of Stanley’s first three long-term brand ambassadors, is a prime example. Initially, the collaboration was born out of necessity; Stanley 1913 had launched two huge multiyear partnerships with Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain, but realized there was a clear divide between fans of the football clubs and Stanley’s typical customer.

Or, as Georgia put it: “Our audience didn’t know football, and football didn’t know Stanley.”

The solution was obvious – warm up fans ahead of the first Arsenal drop by recruiting an Arsenal-related Stanley brand ambassador.

But they weren’t just looking for any old Arsenal fan. They wanted someone who lived and breathed football, whose audience trusted them to speak on anything football-themed, and who would resonate with potential Stanley customers.

Sounds like a tough brief. But it soon brought them to Lirian – in fact, she was one of the first results that came up through Modash’s hashtag search when they typed in “Arsenal”:

Stanley secured a deal with Lirian comprising an eight-month multiphase content plan. This was about way more than just a few Stories and a couple of Reels – they wanted to integrate her into anything Stanley-themed that would appeal to her audience.

It all started with product seeding. Georgia’s team sent Lirian some samples of Stanley’s core product line to see how her audience reacted. Did it feel believable and authentic that someone who wasn’t the typical “Stanley girl” would be working the brand?

Not only was the sentiment overwhelmingly positive, but Lirian was using the products super organically in her training sessions and everyday life. “So it was easy to integrate her into our bigger campaign moments that were focused on sports and lifestyle,” Georgia explained.

To date, this includes:

• Featuring in Stanley’s Arsenal campaign launch video
• Appearing in the brand’s newsletter
• Attending Arsenal games and events with other Stanley influencers
• Creating content for Stanley_Europe social channels
• Becoming the face of Stanley’s biggest lifestyle campaign of 2025 

Working with brand ambassadors like Lirian has delivered impressive results. Not only have Stanley’s ambassadors produced almost three times more content than contracted, but they’ve also generated on average one-quarter of the CPM of the brand’s regular campaigns 👏

As far as Georgia’s concerned, this all demonstrates the value of working with the right influencers, even if they don’t completely align with your traditional audience.

Getting products in the hands of the right people always makes sense. Over time, Lirian’s community has come to associate Stanley with her brand identity.

Georgia Humphries Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager EMEA, Stanley 1913

5. Deeper Sonar recruits 7,000+ brand ambassadors 

Need to know

🌍 Works with 7,000+ ambassadors in more than 30 countries

💵 Ambassador programs are Deeper’s #1 revenue driver and represent ~70% of marketing spend

🧑‍💼 Five-person in-house team manages three separate ambassador programs

Deeper Sonar sells a portable sonar that helps avid anglers track down fish from the shore, on ice, or from a small boat. 

The brand’s biggest revenue driver is its three ambassador programs, accounting for 70% of Deeper’s marketing spend and comprising 7,000+ ambassadors across more than 30 countries – all managed by a team of just five marketers.

Why do they need three separate ambassador programs? Because each recruits from a slightly different pool:

• Deeper Squad: An open community for hobbyists and fans of Deeper.
• Deeper Heroes: Pro (or near-pro) anglers who use Deeper sonars.
• Paid partnerships: Bigger influencers with separately negotiated long-term deals.

While Deeper Squad signups are almost entirely inbound and self-serve, Deeper Heroes and paid partnerships are largely recruited via outbound.

Searches for those higher-tier collaborations begin in Modash, which has a database of every influencer on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with 1,000+ followers – that’s 350+ million influencers. Valeriia Chemerys, Head of Media Partnerships at Deeper, explains that she and her team narrow down their search using filters like:

• Follower count
• Minimum engagement rate
• Content topics and/or hashtags
• Audience location
• Fake followers

🤓 Further reading: Learn more in How To Recruit Brand Ambassadors (& Make Your Program Irresistible). 

The next step is to check out each profile to see what content they post – and, importantly, whether it’s any good.

Again, Modash makes this easy by surfacing an influencer’s previous collaborations and most popular posts, so Valeriia can quickly get a feel for whether they’d be a strong brand fit.

If everything looks good at this point, the influencer’s profile is saved to a shortlist ready for outreach via DMs and/or email. Simple, huh?

🤓 Further reading: Check out the full story in our case study How Deeper Sonars Recruited 7k+ Brand Ambassadors In 30+ Countries.

What’s next?

One thing unites the brands in this article – they’ve all chosen Modash as their influencer marketing software. 

From finding influencers to tracking results to streamlining product gifting and handling payments, Modash does all the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to focus on managing your influencer relationships, plan future campaigns, and drive better results.

But don’t take my word for it – see for yourself by starting your free Modash trial 😎