Key Takeaways
- Influencer marketing is shifting from reach-based to outcome-driven strategies, with a focus on both macro and micro creators.
- The sequencing model emphasizes anchoring cultural credibility with high-profile creators, then scaling with micro-creators for conversion.
- Many experts stress the importance of credibility over perceived coolness, especially for brands without a natural cool factor.
- Effective campaigns integrate various creator tiers rather than isolating them into separate budgets, focusing on how each contributes to the brand’s goals.
- Overall, success depends on understanding the unique value each creator brings, rather than just their tier or follower count.
Influencer Marketing is becoming more structured as brands shift from reach-based campaigns to systems designed to drive measurable outcomes. Recent data shows smaller creators often deliver higher engagement and efficiency, while larger creators remain central to awareness and brand positioning. Many marketers now deploy both tiers, using macro-creators to establish credibility and micro-creators to drive trust and conversion.
Within that shift, a more defined sequencing model has emerged: anchor with a small number of high-profile creators to signal cultural relevance, then scale through micro-creators at lower CPMs. Yet in practice, most brands still separate these tiers into distinct budgets rather than treating them as phases of a single flywheel.
To examine how this plays out, we asked 21 operators, strategists, and platform leaders how they structure creator sequencing in real campaigns, and whether the “make it cool first, scale second” model holds in categories that lack an inherent cultural edge.
Vicente Mirasol Villalobos, CEO, tumanag3r
My framework treats creator tiers as sequential phases of one flywheel, not separate budget lines. Phase 1 is cultural permission: one clear story, anchored by 1-2 creators who make the brand feel credible in the audience’s world.
Phase 2 is systemization: translate the “hero” idea into repeatable templates, then deploy mid-tier creators to build social proof and learn what actually converts (hooks, objections, CTAs). Phase 3 is efficiency: scale with micro-creators plus paid amplification, using an asset matrix (cuts, variants, formats, rights) so the best messages become performance inputs, not one-off posts. The “make it cool first, scale second” model still works for categories without a natural cool factor, if you redefine “cool” as relevance. You borrow context from creators who already own the moment (daily routines, pain points, identity, usefulness), then earn attention with a story the audience recognizes as true. Credibility first, efficiency second.
Tobias Hoss, Senior Advisor, Music & Creator Economy
“Make it cool first, scale second” is the right sequence. But most brands misread what “cool” actually means. Celebrity anchors don’t create cultural credibility. They signal that the brand deserves attention.
That signal is what unlocks micro-creator programs at efficient CPMs. Without it, you’re asking micro-creators to do persuasion work they were never designed to do. Macro and micro aren’t competing budget lines. They’re sequential phases of the same trust-building system. For categories without a natural cool factor, the framework holds. The anchor just changes. Insurance brands don’t need cool. They need authority. A respected niche voice grants the same downstream permission a celebrity would in streetwear. The micro flywheel still activates. What kills programs isn’t the wrong tier. It’s skipping the permission layer entirely and wondering why CAC stays high. The real question isn’t macro or micro. It’s: what grants this brand the right to be heard at scale? Answer that first. Then sequence accordingly.
Gabe Gordon, CEO, Reach Agency
There is no universal sequencing framework and that is exactly the point. The most effective creator strategies are built around a brand’s specific business objective, budget and the role creators play within the broader media mix rather than a predetermined tier model.
We think about creators as a system, not tiers. The right mix depends on what you are trying to unlock across the funnel. Sometimes that means a high impact cultural moment to create demand. Other times it means a dense network of creators driving consideration or sales.
The idea that every campaign needs a celebrity to feel “cool” and then scale is shortsighted. There are many ways to achieve the same outcome, but the constant is working with creators of any size who have credible relationships with their audience. In many categories, the constraint is not coolness, it is education, trust or conversion. In those cases, starting with utility-driven creators or community voices can outperform a celebrity-led approach.
The industry needs to move beyond defaulting to celebrity or micro as standalone strategies. The opportunity is in designing integrated programs where different creator roles work together against a clear objective.
Shahrzad Rafati, Founder & CEO, RHEI
Siloing macro and micro-creator budgets is a strategic mistake. They are not separate channels. They are two phases of the same operation. Our framework is simple: establish gravity, then activate the ground game. We always anchor with top-tier voices first.
The trick for categories that lack a natural cool factor is realizing you are not paying for coolness. You are paying for permission. When a respected cultural voice validates an unsexy product, they shift the baseline perception and build trust. After that trust is built, we scale the micro tier. Those higher CPMs only become efficient because the macro anchor already did the heavy lifting. If you reverse the order or separate the budgets, micro-creators have to build brand equity from scratch. That never works. It is one continuous loop. Macro sets the context. Micro drives the conversion.
Ari Berkowitz, Head of Creator Solutions, PMG
There’s no single sequencing logic that should be applied across all programs. A formulaic approach leads to misallocated budget and force-fitting creators into roles that don’t suit them, their platform, or their audiences. Instead, understand the unique roles different creator archetypes can play within your mix and how balancing them drives your overarching goals.
Higher-tier creators are generally stronger at delivering mass reach and awareness, while lower-tier creators drive action and engagement within smaller communities. But any tier can deliver a “cool factor.” We default to celebrity-tier talent because it’s a legacy mindset inherited from TV and print, plus it’s easy to hand one big-budget creator that weight. More impactful is recognizing that even within a single digital or fan community, there are different pockets of “cool,” and developing deeper relationships with several creators is often both more cost-efficient and more resonant. That said, no framework substitutes for testing at the brand, campaign, and creator level. Every relationship yields different results, and those results evolve as the brand, the creators, and their audiences do.
Andrii Salii, YouTube Strategist, Andrii Salii Content
The real question isn’t about sequencing macro vs. micro-creators – it’s about outcomes. The core is simple: is the creator actually delivering value? That means measurable results – views, watch time, or, ultimately, conversions and revenue. Macro creators may bring reach and perceived credibility, but high cost doesn’t guarantee performance.
On the other hand, micro-creators often drive stronger engagement, niche relevance, and more efficient conversions – if chosen and managed well. So instead of a rigid “make it cool first, scale second” model, I focus on testing and validation. Start with creators who can prove performance, regardless of size, then scale what works. Even in “uncool” categories, this approach holds. You don’t manufacture cool – you find authentic voices that resonate with the audience and deliver results. The flywheel isn’t built on tier – it’s built on performance.
Rob Bocchicchio, COO and Co-Founder, 456 Growth Holdings
The best brands don’t guess which creators to work with, they use data to define each role in the funnel. At the top, creators are selected based on proven credibility and authority. In the middle, they’re chosen for audiences that consistently trust and buy from them.
At the bottom, they’re identified by repeatable conversion performance, producing content that drives sales from cold audiences. The advantage comes from letting performance data, not perception, determine who fills each role, and the determining factor of the order will be related to the budget and stage of the brand.
Sophia Trunzo, Co-Founder & CRO, Loopholes
Most brands need to stop thinking in tiers and start sequencing creators as a system: first establish signal (credibility and permission), then lock repeatable narratives, and only then scale through micro-creators as a distribution layer.
“Make it cool first” still applies in non-obvious categories, but here “cool” is engineered by reframing outcomes as status, speed, or insider advantage, and by borrowing credibility from adjacent ecosystems rather than defaulting to traditional celebrity. The real unlock is treating creators as a programmable growth engine, where top talent establishes signal, micro-creators systematically scale validated narratives, and paid media amplifies what actually drives conversion.
Jo Wong, Chief Revenue Officer, POP.STORE
That sequencing model is built around reach and perception, not actual conversion. It assumes you need a large creator to make something credible before it can perform, but that’s not what we see in practice. We consistently see smaller creators with highly engaged audiences outperform larger ones because their audience actually trusts them.
So instead of thinking in tiers, the more effective approach is to start with creators who already have strong audience alignment and intent, regardless of size. “Making it cool” is less about who you start with and more about whether the audience believes the creator. In many cases, micro-creators establish that credibility faster because they have a closer relationship with their audience.
Rodrigo Abdalla, Founder, GYST
When a celebrity-tier creator endorses a brand, they’re telling every micro-creator watching: this brand is safe to work with. CPMs drop because the trust is already there. Algorithms read the engagement signal and amplify it. It’s a compounding distribution strategy leveraging power law dynamics. For brands without a natural cool factor, this is actually good news.
Cool is just one flavor of credibility. A financial brand may not be cool, but if the most trusted voice in personal finance has publicly vouched for it, a thousand micro-creators in that space will activate with conviction. And if you’re going to run this playbook, academic research and common sense agree: start on YouTube and Instagram. That’s where the big voices have the most gravitational pull, and where the micro-creator pool underneath them is deepest.
Alan Kronik, VP Creators, ThoughtLeaders
I believe the “cool first, scale second” model is right in theory, but most brands overcomplicate it. The way I see it, you don’t need a celebrity creator to anchor credibility. You need someone your audience already trusts. In some categories that’s a macro-creator, in others it could be a mid-tier expert with real authority. The point is the same: use the first wave to build proof, then take that proof to unlock volume at better CPMs.
Where brands get stuck is they treat macro and micro as two separate conversations with two separate budgets. That kills the flywheel before it starts. The sequencing only works when you plan it as one program from day one. Now, for brands without a natural cool factor? That’s actually where this model works best. Because you’re not buying coolness, you’re buying trust. A supplement brand or a financial product doesn’t need to be cool. It needs one respected creator saying “I actually use this” and meaning it. That’s your anchor. Then you scale from there. The brands that struggle are the ones trying to buy culture instead of earning it.
LaTecia Johnson, Founder & CEO, Ingenius Studio
The sequencing logic holds in any category, but most brands skip Phase 2 and wonder why the flywheel never spins. For brands without a natural cool factor: you don’t need the brand to be cool. You need it to be useful to someone who is. The failure mode is casting aspirational creators and hoping credibility transfers.
It doesn’t and audiences can smell performed endorsement. The real brief isn’t “make us cool.” It’s “find where our category intersects with something people genuinely care about, then find the creator who lives at that intersection authentically.” That reframe works for any category. What changes isn’t the sequencing logic. It’s where you find your anchor.
Makenna Peach, Associate Director, Talent Relations, Open Influence
The most effective programs connect creator tiers into a single, dynamic system where each plays a role in moving audiences through the funnel. The “make it cool first, scale second” model works, but only when applied intentionally. Anchoring with a celebrity creator can help drive awareness at scale because it signals relevance. From there, layer in smaller creators, who are often more efficient from a CPM standpoint, but more importantly, drive depth: stronger engagement, conversation, and content that feels relevant to specific communities.
When sequenced correctly, celeb talent builds perception, and smaller creators reinforce it through repeated/trusted touchpoints. That said, sequencing depends on the goal. For awareness, leading with a recognizable face accelerates credibility. For engagement or conversion, smaller creators often perform better by fostering authentic dialogue. For community building, they can be the primary driver from the start. For brands without a natural “cool factor,” this model still applies, but cool becomes contextual. It’s less about celebs and more about relevance within the right niche. The creative is also critical: what makes a brand feel cool is often the storytelling, not just a recognizable face.
Paige Kelly, General Manager, Creator, Later
What we’re seeing now is brands can identify creators who speak to their specific target audience, even when those creators aren’t always talking about their particular product. If you’re trying to sell a product to 40-year-old men in America, you need to find an influencer whose audience is actually 40-year-old men in America. People would rather buy from a cool dad influencer they trust than be sold to by a corporate brand voice.
For brands that don’t necessarily have the “cool factor” to begin with, creators become the brand. We see so-called “unsexy” products go viral every day, and the common denominator is the trusted voice behind the brand. Often, it’s the everyday micro-influencer that will drive the most impact. That’s why the best creator marketing programs today run multiple tiers in parallel, not in a sequence. The starting point is identifying the creator, whether macro or micro, who resonates the most with your particular audience, then building credibility through those trusted voices and scaling what works.
Laura Mayes, Co-Founder, Mom 2.0
Our approach is always to find the right creator with the right story to tell based on the brand’s objective. The size of their following matters less. Any great piece of social storytelling can be scaled, whether en masse or in a very targeted way.
We also see, pretty consistently, that creators with smaller, more community-based followings have much stronger engagement, and are more open to negotiating usage rights terms – two critical elements brands we work with are looking for. Choosing the right creator is also critical to make that brand relevant to their audience, which I would argue is more important than cool. A creator can bring to life how a brand fits into their daily life, solves problems, or provides utility in a very real way. Ultimately we want to showcase how a brand can add meaningful value to a consumer’s life, no matter how “boring” it may seem.
Julia Pascual, Social & Influencer Strategist, AntiSocial
Hot take, but the beauty of working with creators is that they don’t have to have celebrity-tier status in order to establish cultural credibility for a brand. This is where brands who might not have the “natural cool factor” at first glance can leverage creators to ramp up the entertainment factor of their social content. For example, brands in seemingly dry categories can lean into storytelling-first micro-creators to participate in culturally relevant conversations – and that isn’t reliant on celebrity-tier involvement.
However, rather than focusing on whether to sequence creators based on their follower count or perceived cultural status, take a step back and focus on how they’d bring your brand into their content. Our best practice is to use guiding questions to determine the goal of working with creators first, and the sequencing order of creators will follow. For example: What new message are we sharing with our audience? How do we want to introduce our brand’s new message into the world? What response and action are we expecting from our community? What takeaway are we expecting from our audience? How can creators help us achieve our goal?
Ritik Karanwal, Talent Agent, Clicks Talent
We don’t really think of it as strict tier sequencing like celebrity → macro → micro. It’s more about what role each creator is playing in the perception shift. Usually we start with one or two strong creators who can immediately change how the brand is perceived. This doesn’t have to mean celebrity, it just means high trust or strong authority in that niche.
The goal of that first layer is simple: make people stop and take the brand seriously. Once that signal exists, micro-creators become much more effective because they’re not introducing the brand cold anymore, they’re reinforcing something people have already started to accept. That’s where efficiency and scale really kick in. For brands without a natural “cool factor,” we don’t try to force that angle. We anchor on what actually matters in that category, usually trust, utility, or proof of results. Then creators express that consistently across multiple touchpoints until it feels familiar. So the model isn’t about “make it cool first.” It’s about establishing credibility first, then building repetition until the brand becomes normal and widely accepted.
Ashlie Finch, VP, Brand Strategy, The Digital Dept.
Sequencing creator tiers may be directionally right, but I’d challenge the assumption that “cool” has to be established by top-tier or celebrity talent first. Speaking as a consumer, many of the brands I’ve adopted have come from smaller creators whose creativity and relatability led me to trust them and take action faster. “Cool” can come from anywhere. And when we talk about scaling, I caution brands to be very intentional about this.
Oversaturation can quickly harm perception. Comment sections will tell you that. It may drive short-term visibility or sales, but without a plan for sustainability, it risks cheapening the brand over time.
Finally, if a brand does choose to anchor with high-profile talent as that’s how they’ve come to define cool, I strongly advise that partnership be meaningful. Not a one-off post, but a true collaboration – creative partners, shared values, even long-term or equity-driven relationships. That’s how “cool” becomes quantifiable.
Ultimately, I think it’s less about sequencing tiers and more about how you build trust, how you sustain trust, and how you honor the community you’ve built because of that trust.
Jessica Thorpe, CEO, partnrUP.ai
A slightly different take on the same concept across many of the clients running on the partnrUP.ai platform. Having coordinated activations with various tiers of influencers with different content briefs and compensation models can really unlock a groundswell of conversation on social around a brand. There is one watch-out and it’s a big one.
Brands should not expect to pay a $5-$10 CPM if they are going to treat it like a typical Influencer Marketing campaign with a lengthy brief and rounds of edits. This model worked and “can” work if it is approached as a passive integration and can be done casually. There are Shopify apps that helped automate UGC in this way before … however when the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) said these passive customers’ incentivized posts also needed #ad, the game changed. Creators wanted $50 not $5 for their content and rightfully so. Otherwise, stick to paying creators their rates and consider a multi-tiered approach.
Sarah McNabb, Chief Marketing Officer, GigaStar
The flywheel works, but only if the anchor creator actually believes in the product. Social proof doesn’t transfer downstream when the top of the funnel is a paid performance.
For categories without a cool factor, the anchor phase matters even more. You’re not trying to make it cool, you’re making it believable. Every niche has trusted voices. Find those first. The mistake brands make is skipping the anchor entirely because celebrity alignment feels inauthentic. But the anchor doesn’t have to be a celebrity. It just has to be someone who lowers the risk for the micro-creator who comes after them. Same flywheel. Different fuel.
Ace Gapuz, CEO, Blogapalooza
We approach creator tiers through what we call the Belief-Proof-Scale framework.
Belief: We anchor with high-impact, usually top-tier, creators to shape perception and establish credibility. Proof: We layer in mid-tier creators to validate the narrative in more relatable, everyday contexts. Scale: We activate micro-creators to drive reach, frequency, and efficiency.
In markets like the Philippines, where celebrity culture is strong, “make it cool first” often works, but it’s not just about celebrity. It’s about building relevance first.
From what we’ve seen, sequencing matters more than size. When belief is established early, the entire campaign or creator program performs more efficiently and more credibly.