11 Things Influencer Marketers Want You to Understand About the Job
March 23, 2025
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5 mins
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Influencer marketing is always a collaborative effort – and it’s much easier to collaborate when the people you’re working with understand your challenges, goals, and pain points.
And so, in the name of strengthening relationships, I asked a ton of pro influencer marketers two important questions:
👉 What do you wish your managers understood about your job?
👉 What do you wish influencers and creators understood about your job?
Here’s what they told us…
4 Things influencer marketers wish their managers understood
1. Influencer marketing takes longer than you think
Above all else, influencer marketers want their managers to understand that influencer marketing takes a long time.
(At least, it does if you want to plan and execute effective influencer marketing campaigns.)
Some managers expect influencer marketers to do it all in a matter of days, from building a strategy and creating a brief to finding, vetting, and reaching out to potential campaign partners – never mind sending interested influencers your product, gathering live influencer content, tracking results, and more.
Of course, we know that’s unrealistic.
As Fernanda Marques notes, a great deal of work goes into managing effective influencer campaigns.
Influencer marketing requires organization, strategic thinking, and creativity at every stage, and it’s far from being a quick or surface-level task. A deeper understanding of these layers would highlight the level of effort and expertise required to make influencer marketing successful.
If only you had an influencer management tool that could save you time!
2. Not all results are measurable
Measuring the results of influencer marketing efforts is a challenge for many brands.
On the one hand, your manager expects watertight figures for the direct ROI of your latest campaign. But on the other, you know that the true impact can’t always be reported through influencer marketing KPIs and metrics.
Namrata Thakker was one of many respondents to note that influencer marketing results are more nuanced, spanning beyond mere numbers.
Managers need to understand the qualitative impact of influencer marketing, which builds brands in the long run.
Similarly, plenty of professional influencer marketers wish their managers would be more patient about generating results.
As with all promotional campaigns, the whole point of influencer marketing is to make money. But, as Lucy Sergeeva points out, influencer marketing isn’t like a button you can switch on and off.
Influencer marketing is not the same as social media targeting or Google Ads – you don’t always see immediate results.
Which brings me to my next point…
3. Influencers are real people
Admittedly, your managers are ultimately interested in driving revenue.
But they need to understand the humans on their team aren’t walking, talking Facebook Ads Manager accounts. You can’t just set your campaign objectives, type in your credit card details, and watch the results come pouring in.
To be clear, this isn’t to say that influencer marketers aren’t valuable. On the contrary, your work offers a ton of benefits social ads can’t provide – like the credibility and social proof of having a trusted expert recommending your product.
But to make that happen, you have to invest serious time and effort into building trusting relationships with your influencer partners. Greta Zacchetti explains the high level of emotional intelligence required to get it right:
This job requires a lot of soft skills, such as empathy and conflict resolution. Influencers are people, not platforms, so not everything is predictable.
Managers need to acknowledge their team’s soft skills as assets too, even if it’s tricky to assess a direct ROI from them.
4. Influencer marketing doesn’t exist in isolation
Managers can sometimes be guilty of siloed thinking. To understand what’s working (and what isn’t), they look at the direct results generated by each channel without considering what’s at play on a broader scale.
However, as Nacho Selma points out, influencer marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
I wish my managers understood that influencer marketing isn’t magic. It’s not just about sending a product to an influencer and expecting sales to come in. If you don’t handle the digital aspect well, it’s very difficult to achieve success in influencer campaigns.
For instance, you might have recruited an influencer who perfectly fits your brand and audience, and worked with them to come up with just the right creative angle. But if your brand’s website looks untrustworthy or your checkout breaks on launch day, you’re not going to hit your sales goals – and that’s not on you as an influencer marketer.
In a similar vein, Michael Todner says he wishes managers understood that influencer marketing isn’t a magic bullet.
Influencer marketing can't do it all. It should be a part of your wider marketing strategy, not your only strategy.
If only managers understood those four gems above, they’d have an easier time leading their team of influencer marketers and getting results from their campaigns.
Now let’s look at how collaboration could be improved from the influencer partner side.
7 Things influencer marketers wish influencers and creators understood
1. Deadlines matter!
As an influencer marketer, you understand that your influencer partners are busy people – but that’s no excuse when they’re late to share your content.
Fernanda Marques is one of many respondents who wishes more influencers understood the importance of deadlines.
When we agree on specific posting dates, those aren’t just placeholders – they’re part of a carefully planned schedule that aligns with other teams, like social media, marketing, and even product launches. If the agreed timeline shifts, it can cause a ripple effect across multiple departments and campaigns.
Of course, sometimes influencers can’t hit deadlines for reasons beyond their control. In that case, you’re not going to write them off as a partner – provided they keep you in the loop.
Which brings me to the next point…
2. Proactive communication helps everyone
Clear, proactive communication is an essential element of any high-performing influencer campaign. It keeps projects on track and ensures everyone is on the same page.
So it’s no surprise that plenty of respondents – including Leslie Belen – wish influencers understood the value of a timely email or phone call.
I wish influencers knew how crucial clear and timely communication is. When there are delays or misalignments, it can create challenges on both ends. Ensuring that both sides are on the same page helps the campaign stay on track and meets everyone’s expectations.
Cheyanne Pettyjohn adds that it’s always better to talk through a problem or challenge – even if it’d be easier for the influencer to bury their head in the sand.
I would rather have a hard conversation with a creator who was upset or struggling with something so we could resolve it, rather than have someone ghost our relationship and choose to not work with us again.
Similarly, even if a creator simply doesn’t want to work with a brand, influencer marketers would appreciate a quick email saying “thanks but no thanks.”
Even though influencers may receive tons of emails every day from brands, it would be great if they could at least respond. As influencer marketing specialists, we reach out because we believe they are a good fit for our campaign. Ultimately, we are offering them work, even if they’re not interested at the moment.
So, better to take two minutes to respond with “thanks but not right now” and leave the door open for a future collaboration.
3. Influencer marketers work hard, too
Influencers and creators might get to travel the world for free and receive a constant stream of gifts, but the trade-off is often a serious lack of work-life balance.
Sure, your job as an influencer marketer might not be quite as intense – but it’s certainly not easy, and as noted above, your work takes time. To that end, many of the influencer marketers we surveyed say they wish creators would appreciate just how hard they work.
For instance, Zuzana Jiříčková says influencers sometimes forget that marketers have a wide range of priorities.
Our job is not just to reply to influencers’ emails and negotiate prices with them. This is just a fraction of what we need to do for a successful campaign. There’s a lot of administration behind it, plus figuring out the best strategies and more.
Several respondents also note that whereas influencers are always on, being an influencer marketer is more of a 9 – 5 job. Ultimately, creators should remember that influencer marketers are working hard for everyone’s mutual benefit.
4. Brands care about results
With a regular paid partnership, influencers earn their fee whatever happens with the campaign – which means they might feel somewhat disconnected from how the content actually performs.
On the other hand, influencer marketers always care about the results because they’ve got targets to hit!
Again, many respondents say they wished influencers would be more understanding about the importance of results. For instance, Lucy Sergeeva has noticed that influencers can get a little prickly when it comes to sharing campaign stats.
When we request statistics, it’s not to place blame on the influencer – it’s to gain a clear understanding of performance and explore opportunities for long-term collaboration.
If you don’t want to have to reach out to influencers for campaign stats, effectively bypassing the prickly convo, Modash has this cool thing called Event Mode, you’ll love it.
Event Mode captures every piece of content an influencer posts during your campaign period. So if they forget any tags or use the wrong ones, we’ll still automatically add it to your campaign. No need to worry about under-reporting!
(You can even try it for free by creating a Modash account.)
5. Every brand has a chain of command
Even if you’re a one-person influencer marketing team, you rarely have full control over every decision affecting your campaigns.
Often, you’ll have to run decisions past multiple internal stakeholders. And even if you don’t agree with their decision, you still have to find a way to make it all work.
That’s fine – it’s your job, right? But some of our respondents feel creators don’t always understand that an influencer marketer is part of a wider organization, and that there are factors they can’t control. Fernanda says:
I wish influencers and creators understood that many aspects of my job, like budget and calendars, are not within my control. The budget is determined by higher-level decision-makers, and I work within those constraints to create the best possible collaborations.
So say it with me once more, with feeling: “every brand has a chain of command!”
6. Brands don’t have unlimited budgets
In an ideal world, brands would have the money to pay whatever the influencer wanted – just think how easy negotiations would be!
But this isn’t an ideal world, and you don’t have an unlimited budget to work with. Many of the influencer marketers we surveyed, including Valerija Somi, say influencers don’t always appreciate their budgeting constraints.
Lower fees have nothing to do with an influencer’s personal value or talent, but rather are shaped by a variety of factors, including our budget constraints, campaign objectives, and the potential value we believe their content can bring to our brand. We do our best to be fair, but we have to work within limits.
Generally speaking, our respondents wish influencers would be more open to negotiating fees – such as accepting a hybrid influencer and affiliate marketing model, in which they earn a lower flat fee plus performance-related bonuses.
7. Creativity isn’t the only consideration
Creative control is another common influencer marketing challenge.
You’d love to give your influencer partner the freedom to express themselves creatively. But, as Athira Aravind notes, it’s not your only concern.
As a brand representative, while we encourage creative freedom, we also need to ensure brand safety.
Want the inside scoop on influencer marketing in 2025?
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