What percentage of marketing spend should go to influencers?

No fixed percentage. The right allocation depends on your audience, category and how well influencer marketing actually performs for you, so any benchmark figure misleads.

Allocate by evidence: run a tracked pilot, compare its ROI against your other channels and scale up or down on real cost-per-result.

Influencer marketing is a rising share of many consumer budgets, so zero may leave performance on the table but let the number be an output of testing, not a guess.

The honest answer leadership may not want but should hear is that there is no correct universal percentage and any specific figure quoted as a benchmark is misleading, because the right allocation depends on your audience, category, goals and, above all, how well influencer marketing actually performs for you. A youth-focused consumer brand whose buyers live on TikTok might justifiably put a large share into creators, while a B2B or older-demographic brand might allocate far less and both can be right. So rather than anchor on a number someone cites, the better question is how much influencer marketing earns its place in your mix relative to your other channels.

The practical, defensible approach is allocation by evidence, not by benchmark. Start with a measured pilot: put a contained amount into influencer marketing, track its ROI rigorously (using proper attribution) and compare that return against your other channels. If influencer marketing delivers better cost-per-result than, say, paid social or search for your brand, that is the case for shifting more budget toward it and if it underperforms, you have learned that cheaply. Then scale the allocation up or down based on real performance, reviewing periodically as results come in. This turns the budget question from a guess into a data-driven decision your leadership can actually stand behind, our influencer spend is X% because at that level it returns Y, which is far stronger than matching an industry average. Context to set expectations: influencer marketing has grown into a meaningful and rising share of many consumer brands budgets, so a small or zero allocation may be leaving performance on the table but the right level for you emerges from testing and measuring, not from a percentage someone read in a report. Start small, measure honestly, scale on results and let the number be an output of performance rather than an input you guessed.

The honest version of this is the same advice as proving any channel: start with a tracked pilot and let results set the allocation and I would not hand leadership a fabricated percentage. Where Flinque fits a pilot is upstream, picking creators whose audience genuinely converts, since the ROI that justifies a bigger allocation only shows up when the creators were well-chosen to begin with.