Hi SushiVidFam,
"How many influencers should we use?" is one of the first questions every brand asks — and one of the easiest to get wrong. Book too few and a reach campaign never catches fire. Book too many and an engagement play turns into expensive noise.
The good news: you don't have to guess. Across our campaigns, roster size has ranged from just 4 creators to 173 accounts — and the pattern behind that range is remarkably consistent. Roster size isn't really a budget decision. It's a direct function of what you're trying to achieve.
The range, at a glance
Here's roughly how our rosters have clustered by objective:
- 4–12 creators — engagement, credibility and niche launches
- 10–25 creators — product launches and focused awareness
- 50–100+ creators — mass reach, seeding and mega-sale hype
- 130–173 accounts — saturation plays across a whole shopping festival
Notice that the numbers don't climb with budget or brand size — they climb with how broadly the message needs to travel.
Small rosters (4–12): when depth beats breadth
If your goal is engagement, conversation or credibility, a tight roster of well-matched creators almost always outperforms a big one. Fewer creators means you can be pickier about fit, brief them properly, and let each one go deep.
The proof is striking. Just 12 nano and micro-influencers delivered a 7.03% engagement rate for the Sony ZV activation — 3.5x the platform average. 10 creators hit a 23% average engagement for the G-Shock GA-2200. And Taiwan Select drove 4,000+ clicks to livestream sessions with only 4 influencers. When every creator is the right creator, you don't need many.
Mid-size rosters (10–25): the launch sweet spot
Product launches live in the middle. You need enough creators to signal that "everyone's talking about this," but few enough that each can properly explain a new product. Ten to twenty-five is our most common launch band.
VitaHealth's Asta-Glutathione launch used 10 influencers over three months to reach 1.8M. SOFY's Maxi launch and our multi-market Athleisure Brand campaign each ran 25 creators — enough spread to cover multiple markets, tight enough to keep the story consistent.
Large rosters (50–100+): buying scale and saturation
When the objective is mass awareness or seeding a sale, volume becomes the strategy. A larger roster means more feeds, more formats and more chances to be the thing someone sees three times this week — the repetition that builds memory.
YSL Beauty's Raya campaign engaged 50 TikTokers and reached 5.8M. Touch 'n Go Digital's #EverydayCashback used 84 influencers to hit 16.4M reach. Binti's Beauty and the Shopee Raya campaign each mobilised 100+ creators to flood social feeds.
Saturation rosters (130+): owning a moment
At the very top end, the goal is to blanket a shopping festival or anniversary so thoroughly that the brand feels unavoidable. Traveloka's 8th birthday marshalled 130 influencers with 126 link-in-bio insertions. Lazada's 9.9 campaign built 173 mini-webpages driving 27,830 link clicks. These are the exception, not the default — reserved for the biggest, most competitive retail moments.
How to right-size your own campaign
A simple way to decide:
- Name the objective first. Engagement and credibility? Think small. Mass awareness or a mega-sale? Think big.
- Match roster to reach math, not ego. More creators only helps if the goal is spread. For engagement, extra bodies dilute quality.
- Weight the mix, not just the count. A "big" roster of the wrong micro-creators loses to a small roster of perfectly-matched ones — as our engagement numbers show again and again.
- Consider markets and formats. Multi-country or multi-platform campaigns need more creators simply to cover the ground.
The headline lesson from across our work is liberating: there's no magic number, and bigger is not automatically better. The best roster is the smallest one that can realistically hit your objective — no more, no less.
Not sure where your campaign should land? Tell us what you're trying to achieve and we'll size it for you.
