The Portfolio Approach to Marketing

Most marketing teams evaluate channels by asking one question: “What's the exact ROI on this?” And they expect to hear a clear number.

You do need to know what's working. But this framing treats every channel as interchangeable. As if they're just different machines that turn dollars into customers, and you can pick the one with the best ratio, pour money in, and scale.

What gets missed is everything that doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet.

What happens when an algorithm changes and your ads stop converting, or need more money to perform at the same level as now? How dependent are you on things you don't control? Are you building anything that lasts, or just paying for attention that disappears the moment you stop spending?

That's where it's helpful to borrow some lessons from the world of investing.

Liquidity and equity

When investors build a portfolio, they think in terms of liquidity and equity.

💰 Liquidity is cash or things that can quickly turn into cash. It's available when you need it.

📈 Equity is ownership that builds value over time. It might be slow, but it compounds.

A healthy portfolio has both. Too much liquidity and your money just sits there. Too much equity and you can't move when you need to.

Investors don't just chase the highest return. They think about what could go wrong. Or how can they spread bets across different assets so that one bad quarter doesn't sink everything?

Marketing channels work the same way. They help you spread your risk and balance for short-term and long-term goals.

The goal of this article isn't to argue that you should abandon what's already working. It's to show you a different way of thinking about your channel mix if you're debating between ads and influencer marketing.

Ads are liquidity.

Paid ads behave like liquid assets. You put money in today, and you see results this week. You can measure exactly what's working, adjust quickly, and scale up when something hits. If you need revenue fast or want to test a message before committing to it, ads are the obvious choice.

But there's a tradeoff that comes with this speed.

• You start by reaching the people most likely to buy, and as you scale, you're paying more to reach people who are harder to convert. Basically, the more you spend, the less efficient each dollar becomes.
• Costs creep up as more advertisers compete for the same audiences.
• You're renting attention from platforms you don't control. The algorithm can change, CPMs can spike, and a policy update can break what was working yesterday.

None of this means ads are bad. It means they're expensive liquidity. But the value only exists while you're paying for it. Ads let you test messages fast, capture existing demand, and scale when you find what works. The mistake isn't using them but letting them become your only growth lever.

Influencers are equity.

Influencer marketing takes longer to build momentum, and the results won't show up in a dashboard overnight. But unlike ads, what you're building doesn't disappear when the campaign ends.

👉 When a creator talks about your product, that content stays up on their profile. People discover it weeks or months later. It gets saved, shared, and referenced in comments when someone asks for recommendations. So the video a creator posted in March is still bringing people to your site in October.

👉 You're also building a library of content you can reuse. Creator videos become creative, or can be used on your landing page to show how to use your products. Influencer-generated content fills your emails and social feeds. Instead of paying a production team every time you need something new, you're pulling from an asset base that keeps growing.

None of this shows up as a line item in your weekly report. But six months in, your blended acquisition costs are lower. Your ads perform better because audiences already recognize your brand. And every new launch builds on the awareness that creators have already established, instead of starting cold with an audience that's never heard of you.

That's equity. It compounds.

Let's look at the real-world example of a brand that built equity with influencer marketing and could shut down Meta ads.

The influencer program that replaced Meta ads

Slumberkins is a kids' brand that had 70% of its ad budget living on Meta. Post-iOS 14, every metric in their funnel was declining because of CPMs rising, broken targeting, and creative fatigue. The typical story. But instead of just pouring more money in, they'd been quietly building an influencer community using SARAL as the tool to run all operations.

Then they did something most DTC brands would never consider. They shut down Meta ads completely for three months.

Revenue didn't go down. In fact, first-purchase profitability improved.

This didn't happen overnight. They spent months building their influencer community before they had the confidence to turn off their Meta ads.

What was happening behind the scenes is exactly the equity compounding effect we're talking about.

Parents discovered Slumberkins through influencers they trusted, searched the brand name, and bought through Google or direct traffic. Attribution credited Google with the sale. But influencers created the demand.

When they turned Meta back on, they did it differently.

Instead of guessing on branded creative, they looked at which influencer posts were already performing organically and whitelisted (running them as ads through the creator's own account) those. And the results were something they'd not seen before:

• $0.16 CPC from whitelisted influencer content vs. $0.56 from Google ads
• 2M+ more impressions from influencer marketing than Google search ads
• Six figures in content value generated from product gifting alone
• 99% positive or neutral sentiment across all influencer posts

The program now sustains itself. Creators post organically. Top content gets whitelisted. Meta performs better than it did before the shutdown. That's the compounding at work.

Read the full Slumberkins story →

Fragility of depending only on ads

When your ads are working, it's easy to keep putting more into them. But somewhere along the way, you end up with most of your acquisitions running through one or two platforms. And that concentration creates risk.

When Meta has a rough week, your numbers have a rough week. When CPMs spike in Q4 because every brand is competing for the same eyeballs, your CAC spikes with it. When a winning ad creative stops converting, you're scrambling to find a replacement before the whole month falls apart. When a platform changes its targeting options or tweaks how the algorithm works, campaigns that were profitable last week suddenly aren't.

None of this is a failure of execution. It's just what happens when your business depends heavily on things you don't control.

Influencer marketing spreads that risk out.

• Instead of relying on one platform's auction system, you're generating demand through hundreds of individual creators across different platforms and audience segments. If one creator underperforms, it barely registers.
• If TikTok has a slow month, your Instagram and YouTube creators are still posting. No single point of failure can tank your entire acquisition strategy.

The returns might be harder to track in a spreadsheet. But you've built something that doesn't break the moment conditions change.

Thinking in risk, not just return

A portfolio approach means asking different questions.

Instead of "which channel has the best ROAS," you ask: what happens if our best channel gets 30% more expensive? What's our exposure if one platform changes its algorithm? How much of our demand generation depends on things we don't control?

Ads will always be part of the mix. They're fast, measurable, and necessary for capturing demand. But when they're the only thing you're doing, you've built a business that's one platform change away from trouble.

Influencer programs don't just add another channel. They reduce your dependence on any single one.

What this looks like in practice

The right allocation depends on your brand stage and risk tolerance.

Heavy dependency on ads

Early-stage brands often need the speed and feedback loops that ads provide. You're still finding product-market fit, testing messages, and learning who your customer is. Ads give you that fast iteration.

But even at this stage, seeding products to creators and building early relationships costs very little and plants seeds for later. You're not choosing between ads and influencers. You're starting to build the equity while the liquidity does its job.

Ads + Influencers

As you scale, the balance shifts. Ad efficiency naturally declines as you exhaust your warmest audiences. The incremental cost of each new customer rises. This is when influencer programs start pulling real weight — lowering blended CAC, generating content that improves ad performance, and creating demand that shows up across all your channels.

Influencers making ads work

Mature brands often reach a point where influencer-driven awareness is what makes their ads work at all.

The creator content warms up audiences before they ever see a retargeting ad. Branded search rises because people heard about you from someone they trust. The whole system gets more efficient because you're not asking ads to do all the work.

How Spacegoods turned creators into their best ad creative

Spacegoods is a UK wellness brand. They scaled to over 1,000 active creator partnerships with a team of two, and their affiliate program now generates enough revenue to fund their paid influencer partnerships entirely.

But the real payoff is what it did to their ads.

Creator content became their highest-contributing creative on Meta. So now the affiliate program isn't just a revenue channel. It's also a content engine that keeps their ad account stocked with fresh, high-performing creative.

That's the halo effect: creators drive direct sales, generate content that improves paid media, and build social proof all at once.

Read the full story of how Spacegoods built a strong influencer community →

Get out of the attribution trap

One reason influencer marketing gets undervalued is that we try to measure it like ads. We want to see a click, a conversion, a direct line from spend to revenue.

But that's not how trust-based channels work. Someone sees a creator mention your product, thinks about it for a week, googles your brand name, and buys through a retargeting ad. The influencer gets no credit. The ad looks like a hero.

A portfolio mindset sidesteps this trap. You stop asking "which channel caused this sale" and start asking "what's happening to my overall marketing efficiency?"

Here's how to actually measure it:

Track blended metrics

Look at overall CAC across all channels, not just per-channel ROAS. Track your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) — total revenue divided by total marketing spend. When your influencer program is working, these numbers improve even if you can't attribute every conversion to a specific creator.

Use discount codes and affiliate links

They won't capture everything. Plenty of customers see a creator's post and go buy without using a code. But they give you a direct, bottom-of-funnel signal for which creators are driving purchases. Think of them as a floor, not a ceiling, for influencer-driven revenue.

Watch the branded search lift

If more people are googling your brand name after you ramp up creator activity, that's influence showing up as demand. It won't attribute back to any single post, but it's one of the clearest signs that your equity is compounding.

Survey your customers

Add a post-purchase question: "How did you hear about us?" You won't get perfect attribution, but you'll start to see the pattern. Customers who come through influencer touchpoints often have higher LTV and lower return rates — signals that don't show up in click-based attribution.

You won't get perfect attribution. But you'll see the pattern: influencer programs make everything else work better.

When you zoom out to the portfolio level, you see the compounding effects that channel-level attribution misses.

Thinking in portfolios changes how you measure. But it also changes how you communicate results internally. If you're ready to make this case to the people who control the budget, we put together a guide that translates everything in this article into the language finance teams actually respond to. Download the CFO's Guide to Influencer Marketing →

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