Design a referral campaign brief that tells paid social exactly which incentive and creative to amplify

Design a referral campaign for the offer below, ending specifically in a brief the paid social team can act on directly — which piece of advocate content to boost, with what budget logic, and when to stop.

OFFER AND REFERRAL INCENTIVE
Referrer gets a $50 account credit, referee gets 20% off their first order.

WHO REFERS AND WHO THEY REFER TO
Existing customers of 6+ months referring friends in similar income brackets, usually via direct message rather than public post.

CURRENT ORGANIC REFERRAL SIGNAL
Top 5% of referral posts get roughly 4x the engagement of a typical customer post within the first 48 hours.

PAID SOCIAL BUDGET AVAILABLE FOR AMPLIFICATION
$3,000/month set aside specifically for boosting top-performing referral posts.

Start from the incentive structure and check it for a specific failure mode before anything else: an incentive that rewards the referrer richly but gives the referee a weak reason to act creates lopsided sharing (people post links for their own benefit) with poor conversion on the receiving end — if offer_and_incentive looks like this, flag it and propose a rebalance before building the rest of the campaign around an incentive likely to underperform. Identify the specific handoff moment where an organic referral becomes a paid-amplification candidate — not "boost popular posts" in the abstract, but the concrete signal (a referral link crossing a share count, a specific advocate's post outperforming baseline engagement) that should trigger a media buyer to actually spend against it, using organic_referral_signal as the basis for that threshold rather than an arbitrary round number. Specify what content format is worth boosting versus what should stay purely organic — a heartfelt personal testimonial post might convert well organically because it reads as authentic, but the same post reformatted and pushed through paid social distribution can read as inauthentic once an audience recognizes it as an ad, which is a real risk specific to amplifying referral/advocate content rather than brand-made ads. Budget the amplification spend against amplification_budget with a stated stopping condition — a signal that would tell the team to cut spend on this amplification before the whole budget is used, not just a plan for how to spend all of it.

OUTPUT FORMAT
1. Incentive structure check — flagged rebalance if lopsided, or confirmation it's reasonably balanced.
2. The specific organic-to-paid handoff trigger.
3. Content-format guidance — what to amplify as-is, what to reformat first, what should never be paid-boosted.
4. Budget plan with an explicit stopping condition.