Why the flat-fee post often disappoints
The usual approach goes like this. You find a creator with a big following, agree a fee, send product, approve a script, and wait. The reel goes up, gets a few thousand views, and the sales bump is too small to measure. You have spent your monthly marketing budget on one roll of the dice.
A few things work against you here. Follower count tells you little about how many people will see a given post, since reach depends on how that one video performs. Heavily scripted brand content often looks like an ad and gets scrolled past. And with one creator, you cannot tell whether the product, the hook or the creator was the problem.
A performance programme turns this around. You pay smaller amounts to many creators, and only for the posts that reach people or bring in sales.
How a performance creator programme works
The structure is simple.
- Creators sign up through a short form. Anyone who fits your basic criteria can join.
- You send them product, or a discount code to buy it, and a light brief.
- They post in their own style.
- You pay when a post crosses agreed view milestones, or a commission on sales through their code or link, or both.
- You pay fast, within days of a milestone being confirmed, not at the end of the quarter.
Avishka's founder has designed a creator programme that pays creators at view milestones. The principles carry over to a small D2C brand: pay for what you can measure, keep the brief short, and pay on time so creators keep coming back.
The light brief
Keep it to one page. Cover what the product is and who it is for, two or three things that are true and worth saying, things not to say (medical claims, comparisons with named competitors, anything you cannot prove), the disclosure rule, and how to submit a post for tracking. Leave the hook, the format and the script to the creator. They know their audience better than you do.
The tracking sheet
One Google Sheet is enough to start. One row per post, with these columns: creator name, handle, platform, post link, date posted, discount code, views at 7 days, views at 30 days, orders on their code, milestone reached, amount owed, date paid. Creators submit their link through a form that writes into the sheet. You check view counts on a fixed day each week.
A community channel
Put your creators in one WhatsApp group or channel. Share the posts that did well (with permission), announce new products, and answer questions in one place. Creators learn from each other's hooks, and you stop answering the same question twenty times.
How to pick creators
Since you are paying for results, you can be more open than with flat fees. A few filters still help.
- Audience fit matters more than size. A creator with 8,000 followers who makes cooking videos in Pune is a better match for your masala brand than a 500,000-follower lifestyle account.
- Look at their last ten posts and the views on each, not the follower count. Steady, honest numbers beat one viral outlier.
- Read the comments. Real questions and conversation are a good sign. Strings of emoji and "nice" are not.
- Check whether they would plausibly use your product. Audiences can tell.
- Look for regional language creators. Many Indian buyers respond better to content in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi or Bengali than to English.
Rules to write down before you start
Put these in a short terms document every creator agrees to on the sign-up form.
- Disclosure. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has guidelines for influencer advertising. Any post where the creator got something from you, whether money, free product or a commission, needs a clear label such as #ad near the start of the caption or visibly on the video, not buried in hashtags at the end. Check ASCI's current guidelines on ascionline.in, since they have been updated over time.
- Claims. Creators should only say what you can back up. No "cures", no "clinically proven" unless it is.
- How views are counted. Say which platform's count you use, on which day after posting (7 days, 30 days), and that you need a screenshot of insights.
- What disqualifies a post: bought views, deleted posts, missing disclosure.
- Payment timing and method, such as UPI within five working days of verification.
- Usage rights. Can you reuse their video in your own ads, and for how long?
A sample payout ladder
| Milestone | What the creator gets |
|---|---|
| Joins and posts within the rules | Free product |
| First view milestone (say, Level 1) | Small fixed payout |
| Second view milestone (Level 2) | Larger fixed payout |
| Third view milestone (Level 3) | Largest fixed payout, plus an invite to a paid repeat brief |
| Each order on their code | A fixed commission per order, on top of any milestone |
To set the levels, work backwards. Decide what you can afford to pay for a new customer. Estimate, roughly, how many views it takes your content to produce one order. Set milestones so the payout at each level stays below what those views are worth to you. Revisit after the first month with real numbers.
What to track each week
- New creators joined, and how many posted.
- Posts that reached each milestone.
- Orders on creator codes, and revenue from them.
- Total paid out, and paid out per order.
- Which hooks, formats and languages did best. Write this down. It becomes your content playbook.
- Payments overdue. Late payouts kill a programme faster than anything else.
After six to eight weeks you will know which creators to invite back on a bigger brief, which formats to copy in your own content, and whether the programme is paying for itself. You will know this from your own data, without having to bet a budget on one post.
If you are launching a D2C brand and want the creator programme, store and content system built and run with you for the first few weeks, see how we launch brands. For a related read, write your first SOP covers how to hand the weekly tracking to someone else.