Influencer Marketing

Follower count is the least predictive metric in the channel. We screen on audience overlap with your actual buyer, comment quality, historical brand work and — where a creator will share it — the performance of previous partnerships. A creator with fifteen thousand engaged followers in a specific niche will routinely outperform one with half a million passive ones, at a fraction of the fee.

We build tiered rosters rather than one-off casts: a small group of anchor partners who appear repeatedly and become associated with the brand, a wider testing pool refreshed each quarter, and an always-on gifting or affiliate layer for brands where the product is cheap enough to seed at volume.

Vetting includes the unglamorous parts — audience authenticity checks, past controversy, category exclusivity conflicts — because the cost of getting that wrong lands on the brand, not the creator.

The two failure modes are a brief so loose the creator invents your positioning, and a brief so tight the content reads like an advert and the audience switches off. We brief on the non-negotiables — the claim, the proof, the offer, the legal and disclosure requirements — and leave the format, tone and structure to the person who knows their audience.

Every brief includes the specific hook or angle we want tested, so the programme generates learning as well as reach. When an angle lands with one creator's audience, it gets fed straight into paid social creative and, if it keeps working, into the brand's own messaging.

Usage rights are negotiated up front. Content you cannot reuse in paid media is worth a fraction of content you can, and the difference in fee is almost always smaller than the difference in value.

We track partnerships with a combination of unique codes and links, platform-native affiliate tools, post-purchase survey data and, for larger programmes, geo or time-based holdouts. No single method is sufficient on its own — codes under-count, platform reporting over-counts, and surveys give you direction rather than precision.

For brands running influencer alongside paid social, we watch blended acquisition cost rather than channel-level ROAS, because the two channels feed each other and channel-level numbers will always show them stealing credit from one another.

Longer-term partnerships are also judged on brand metrics — branded search volume, direct traffic and repeat purchase rate — since the compounding value of a creator association shows up there before it shows up in last-click reporting.

The most underrated output of a creator programme is the creative itself. Whitelisted and boosted creator content consistently outperforms brand-produced assets in paid social, and it costs a fraction of a studio shoot. We negotiate the rights, build the boosting plan and feed winning creator assets into the paid account as a standing part of the programme.

That reuse is usually what turns influencer marketing from a line item that has to be justified every quarter into a channel finance is happy to keep funding.