From 0 to Scale – How to properly scale and work with hundreds of influencers a month

One of the things you’ll need to succeed in influencer marketing is DATA.

 

There’s millions of creators out there.

There’s billions of pieces of content.

Thousands or even more possibilities and options for working with them.

 

It’s overwhelming if you seriously think about it, and that’s why most brands and marketers find influencer to be one of the most confusing channels to get a grasp on out there.

 

Some think the key is QUALITY over everything else. Some think it’s volume at the cheapest rates and everything else be damned. Very few manage to balance the two to build a truly successful program from scratch.

 

And each approach has its problems.

 

Quality first approach is good at first sight but completely ignores a few crucial facts: quality is VERY subjective when it comes to creatives and content and in the beginning the criteria of quality shift from week to week based on new learnings and testing. 

 

There’s also a lot of biases that get introduced in the influencer/content “quality” assurance process, depending on who’s calling the shots.

 

With volume, all that matters is getting the highest number of influencers to post, month over month and it’s very similar to the spray and pay approach. One of the main downfalls of volume first is hitting ceilings FAST – how many creators do you think you can find after all to keep topping up your pipelines and also keep your team sane AND also avoid audience fatigue and ALSO keep a semblance of quality?

 

A mixed approach is generally what I recommend going for but the question is:  how do I dose volume vs quality to make the most out of scale and gather actually valuable insights?

 

The answer is different for each brand, there’s a formula that you have to find for yourself.

 

But there’s one thing that’s consistent for all of them:

It takes a TON of insights to reach that sweet spot.

So here’s how I’m going to break down this for you from my experience of scaling programs from 0 to working with 100s of influencers a month:

 

  1. What DOES scale even mean and how do I know it’s the right thing to do?
  2. How do I plan and allocate resources properly for scale?
  3. Where do I even start?
  4. How does growth and maintenance of an at scale program looks like?
  5. How do I measure the impact?

The guide is meant to give you a better understanding of what scale means in the specific context of your business, industry and available resources and provide a light framework for each step to growing your program and getting to a size that works best for you.

 

What DOES scale even mean and how do I know it’s the right thing to do?

Scale can mean a lot of things for different people, depending on different criteria.

“Thanks, Andreea that’s super helpful!” IKR?

Okay I’m gonna do my best to “categorize” scale for influencer programs so we can have something to refer to throughout this guide based on what I consider to be scale:

Tier 1 – 50+ creators/month (600+ a year)

Tier 2 – 100 – 500+ creators/month (1k – 6k a year)

Tier 3 – 500 -1000+ creators/ month (6k – 12k a year)

 

One thing I want to mention is that as soon as we go into the 2nd tier and beyond it’s usually a mixed at-scale program with both elements of volume and quality but also multi-dimensional from the point of types of collabs, creators and content created (example mix of paid, affiliates an gifting).

 

What I see a lot of people misunderstanding about an at-scale program too, is consistency in the growth of the program (I’m referring only to creator numbers here) doesn’t have to look like a traditional growth model month-to-month.

 

Below you can see a few different examples of how starting and figuring out a scale influencer program can look like, depending on various factors:

Goals – Depending on how much ROI you want to see out of the program and what you want it to do for your brand specifically, 

Resources – How much budget you have to spend and use?

You can see a few representation of how at-scale programs can look like in a month to month breakdown, for different approaches:

Here’s how to know you should aim for scale first – “quality” later:

  • You’re new to influencer marketing – you don’t know what good content, “quality” and performance looks like in a program for your specific brand. You think you do, but you don’t. So you need data and you need LOTS of it.
  • Your competitors are ahead of you and heavily invested in influencer marketing – if they’re putting out hundreds of pieces of content each month, your “10 super quality creators” won’t make a dent. Your moves should go attention first > retention second.
  • You have a short sales cycle product – that means that gifting is your best friend at this stage – run the numbers and go for the MAX number of product you can put out there for the next 3-6 months. In other words this is your chance to go CRAZY.
  • You’re leaning heavily into Paid ads – nothing burns through content faster than the Paid channel – so you’ll need a healthy pipeline of content to test every month. Depending on how much you spend anywhere from 50 to 2-300 a month.

Does it mean that if I go at scale I’ll have to compromise on quality completely?

Not at all I’m gonna walk you through how to properly set up for handling scale so that it doesn’t turn into a 100% compromise on this or that situation.

How do I plan and allocate resources properly for scale?

I’m gonna be fully honest with you – if you’re serious about scale – you are going to need resources to make that happen – and there’s no way around that.

So I’ll break this down into 3 crucial things you should be looking at: team, stack and systems.

Now you’ll see how these three things are actually very strategically and inextricably linked and highly dependent on each within a successful program.

1. Team – Building and supporting a good team   

    This is number 1 for a reason. I see this all the time – brands trying to start an influencer program with existing social media team, interns or like I’ve seen some bro marketers out there – VAs.

    “Just hire someone and train them to contact people, DUH”

    Yeah, that’s easier said than done. 

    Because if you genuinely want to go at scale, your team only has a very limited time to learn on the job until they get faced with a lot of decisions to make on a daily basis. I’m talking in the lines of hundreds of micro decisions.

    So there’s two paths you can take:

    • Either the founder or marketing head trains the team (only recommended if they HAVE experience with influencer marketing)
    • Hire someone with previous experience in influencer marketing and align on how to best work together and grow a team from there (this is my cue for a good ol’ fashioned shameless plug)

    It’s not just knowing influencer marketing  – but also having a good understanding of the industry you’re activating in and what’s a min vs max number of people you can work with every month. 

    There’s going to be a lot more people to work with in a saturated industry like beauty and gaming, compared to more niche categories like fishing and surfing.

    These values are important to know if you want to keep a high functioning team and systems because as I’ll show further on – your team will go through monthly repeating cycles to hit targets and there’s a fair amount of moving parts that you’ll have to keep track of.

    It’s not only just about hiring and training a team but also making sure that you’re setting realistic goals and playing to each of their strengths.

    You can structure your team in different ways, depending on the goals you want to achieve, the size and seniority of your team members or the different stacking within your at scale program .

    Here are a few examples:

    Traditional – each team member has a set target to reach each month

    By channel – each member owns a social channel and according targets

    By program stacking – owners of influencers, UGC and affiliates

    By affinity – an outbound and a management team/member

    What you need to pay attention to with these kind of structures is that you have to correctly gauge how the workload balance and responsibilities are distributed among your team, so you don’t end up with someone feeling like they’re drawing the short stick.

    Keep in mind that each program is different and this guide is here to give you an overview of what’s possible – these are potential pieces that you can mix and match to find the perfect fit for your brand.

    2. Systems – the cogs and pieces that keep your program running

      Ice cream is great – but have you ever had a thriving, happy and successful influencer team, ready to take on any challenge?

      Not yet? Well you achieve that by having efficient and well thought out systems that support and empower your team every single day.

      That means that besides taking all the preliminary steps to starting a successful influencer marketing program the right way, like proper ICP content research, and a clean and clear long term strategy, you’ll also have to think about how your team’s day to day activities integrate overall.

      Start with these:

      • What are their main day-to-day and weekly activities? Map them out for good measure.
      • Who do they report to and how?
      • What other departments / team members will they interact with and how? (ex. Financial, customer care etc)
      • Will they be directly responsible for onboarding creators on your product?

      This is a step that it’s CRUCIAL to do but it’s also important to not overthink. This is usually something I like to get done in a few hours max – just jotting down how all these steps will work in big lines and noting what kind of action I have to take for each, in order to be ready to go as soon as I have my first team member.

      Here’s where you decide who does what, what resources you already have that you can use (always look at your internal stack first), and decide what needs to be added.

      It can also help you identify potential knowledge blind spots you might have about influencer marketing before getting started and allow you space to address them in a timely manner – for example researching some best outreach practices, or getting some advice on how to set up performance tracking from a consultant /more experienced fellow.

      3. Stack – choosing the right tools

        There’s a stack out there for everyone – you just have to find the right one for you. This is where the previous step of working out how we do things and what we need to get them done comes really in handy.

        Because one of the things I hear a lot talking to founders and teams behind influencer software is – most brands don’t know what they need specifically and they’re just looking for a tool to do it all.

        My favorite for at scale programs is the basic traditional influencer stack with a twist – they have to 1. Handle scale well and 2. Have great automations/integrations between them.

        Basic influencer marketing stack:

        • CRM software (I like to go for the ones that have good built in mass email features)
        • Outreach tool (if you want more control over your outreaches)
        • Doc signing tool (not necessary for gifting/seeding programs)

        My recommendation is to start with the most basic stack out there and figure out what are your biggest pain points while > then switch to something that addresses that specifically.

        Depending on how much you can spend here are a few stacks I’ve been using over the years:

        <$100-month influencer marketing stack:

        CRM: Bigin by Zoho CRM 0/$9/$15 per seat

        EMAIL: Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) free/$50 a year

        CONTRACTS: DocHub $14 per seat

        <$500-month influencer marketing stack:

        CONTRACTS: PandaDoc $35-$65/seat

        CRM: Creable starting at $99/seat

        SCRAPING: PhantomBuster starting at $69/month

        You can find a list of all the tools I use and recommend here.

        Sure if you are on a tight budget and looking to focus more on gifting/affiliates more than paid there are some pretty cheap stacks you can use to get you started.

        So – where do I start?

        Just like anything in life, you’ll start from absolute zero. But I’ll break this down into 3 simple steps as well:

        1. Planning
        2. Execution (building A-Z)
        3. Measurement

        Planning it out

        Don’t dwell too much on this one – I like to use a budgeting calculator to plan everything. That’s because how much I can spend and what my main goals are is going to be crucial to how I structure my program. Am I looking to generate sales, views, UGC primarily? How much will that cost at different levels?

        Don’t forget to take your team size into consideration and the stack you’ll be using – 6 people using an A-Z platform (like Modash) to handle collaborations will have different output from 2 using a combination of manual discovery, CRM and spreadsheets to keep track of everything. Remember when you start scaling every single flaw or bottleneck in your program is going to be amplified as well.

        Make sure to also plan the first 3 months gradually – choose a min and a maximum you want to go for initially and spread that across the first 90days. You’ll need those days to gather data about what works and what doesn’t. As you can see in the images in the first part of the guide – a program can look VERY differently depending on a variety of factors like goals, niche, seasonality etc.

        This is where you also establish team goals – weekly or monthly and decide on the best format to report on both team metrics and program performance metrics. Make sure to break each level of expectation down to your team so they know exactly what to do and be ready to make adjustments in the beginning depending on discovery volumes, response rates, opt-in rates (contracts signed) etc.

        TAKE BENCHMARKS – of everything too – traffic (direct, branded searches, social etc), social media followings, CTR% from different social channels, referral traffic, CR%, paid media CAC  etc. While you’ll be measuring direct metrics from your program (views, CTR%, Sales etc) you’ll also need to have an overview of the overall lift and impact your program is having and you won’t see that in direct metrics solely.

        I usually emphasize on not skipping this step because if you do – I’ll be very blunt here – you’ll waste time and money fixing easy avoidable things further down the line.

        Execution is the “easy” part.

        In other words just get out there and do it, relentlessly for the first 3 months. If you’re starting from scratch, going at it hard will teach your team invaluable skills and lessons. If you’re trying to scale an existing program, this is the time to break out of your comfort zone a little bit and experiment.

        There’s 2 things I keep an eye on when scaling: how the team manages to hit goals (is it easy, do they struggle, which parts go smooth and which don’t, is there rising talent that I can keep in mind to bring into senior positions etc.) and the goal completion %. If we hit over 50% in the first month (yes some you won’t hit immediately and that’s fine) then we keep going, but if not then we need to go back to the drawing board for a few days and figure out how to adjust.

        Which brings me to the last part >>

        How do we measure everything?

        Remember those benchmarks we took in the first part?

        This is where we start looking at them. Measuring is fairly simple if you keep a laser focus on your goals and understand that influencer marketing’s biggest impact will happen outside of your direct metrics.

        This is why I always advise measuring performance over 30-60-90days and using benchmarks to observe areas of lift – think about it as losing weight. You won’t see much in the first 2 weeks, but when you put before and after side by side after 3-4 months, you’ll notice a staggering difference. 

        You just have to remember to take the snapshots and document what you did in between.

        If you’re going for a combination of influencer-affiliate (which I highly recommend) a good affiliate software (like Social Snowball) is going to take a LOT off your plate in terms of tracking and reporting.

        Attribution models come in handy here too – I like to build custom ones depending on the type of program and brand – and if you’re wondering what the hell is an attribution model and how to build one you can check out this podcast where I break it down step by step.

        What tools you use is less important than 1. Having the data and 2. Using the data properly. It can be a BI tool, an influencer platform, your Google analytics or a simple spreadsheet consolidating everything.

        How do I keep a good quality level at scale?

        The truth is QUALITY – is whatever helps the viewer achieve their goals in the most effective and efficient way.

        Read that 3-4 times please.

        Production value and everything else do not represent quality but rather “content features”.

        I’m gonna give you a real life example of what I mean. A few years ago I had a clothing store and a loyal client. She had impeccable taste, a LOT of money and a killer personal style – with one exception – she loved thick polyester and bandage type dresses.

        It was baffling to me that every time we met she only wanted to try on those dresses, despite me trying to push cashmere, wool and cotton on her. So I asked her: why?? Why do you go for those cheap, not “quality” materials?

        She laughed and shook her head and to this day I remember what she said to me.

        “I’m not stupid, I know this is not the best fabric money can buy. I understand the other stuff is better, but I like wearing these dresses more because I love the fact that I look and feel snatched in thick, stiff fabrics. They’re also easy to wash and maintain and they hardly ever stain when I’m running around taking care of my kids.”

        BOOM. Lady didn’t care about what other people thought was quality, but she was mainly focused on how she FELT and her GOALS for wearing that dress.

        That’s when I realised I was pushing MY IDEA of quality on her, with complete disregard of what she wanted, needed, or was a fit for her specific lifestyle. I made the assumption that a lady wearing designer bags and driving an expensive SUV, would never go for the “cheap” stuff.

        And I was obviously and very painfully…wrong.

        This is something I try to teach brands all the time – quality is subjective when it comes to everything. This is why people give wildly different opinions and reviews for books, movies, food, travel spots etc.

        So in order to keep a standard of quality the first things you must do are:

        • Throw away all your assumptions on what it means and ask your customers what they like in terms of content and what they watch. If 90% of them tell you they watch vlogs, and you don’t collaborate with vloggers because you don’t like them or TheY DoNt FiT YoUr BrANd…I can’t help you :)))
        • Create two sets of guidelines based on 1. The data you got from your customers in terms of content they like 2. Content features as a technical standard of quality (aka if you want to have high res videos or talking head videos to use in ads)
        • Using this you’ll create a topline and a bottom line of control – the first set of guidelines will be your vetting criteria – aka what do we look for in the influencers we want to work with? This will help you quickly filter out any influencers you feel don’t meet the minimal standards at a first glance.
        • The second set of guidelines is to use in your brief – deliverables and requirements, key messaging, style etc. Bonus points if you include examples of content you like or that has been produced for your brand already AND had good organic performance. Include the content based on performance, campaign goals and NOT preference.
        • Example – if you’re gonna use that content in paid ads and you have data about what works best emphasize on creating content that is very easy to repurpose, with minimal edits, and add examples from your ad library.

        What I want your to keep in mind here is that your customers are gonna watch a LOT of different content for different goals, Your main concern at scale is to 1. be in their feeds as much as possible and 2. Nail enough pieces of content so that you build yourself in their minds after they put their phone away.

        Is it easy> NO. But it is that simple.

        And this…is pretty much it.

        About the blog

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