Execute Faster: 6 Bottlenecks In Influencer Marketing (& How To Solve Them)
August 2, 2024
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You could pull many levers to get a competitive advantage in your influencer marketing strategy.
Here’s one that’s often overlooked, though:
Can you just be faster?
Here, we'll dig into why speed can bea competitive advantage, and look at some common bottlenecks.
Why speed is a competitive advantage in influencer marketing
Before we discuss the advantages of speed in influencer marketing, it’s important to define what we mean by “speed.”
Yes, it includes participating in fleeting TikTok and Instagram trends, but that’s not all. Speed also means moving fast in your execution of influencer campaigns in general. This means you find creators, negotiate, outreach, run approvals, etc., faster than everyone else in your space.
1: Speed eliminates fluff from your processes
You can’t move fast unless you eliminate a ton of unnecessary fat from your influencer marketing workflows. By forcing you to look at each process critically, speed will help you cut out red tape, eliminate or automate unimportant tasks, and work more meaningful hours each week.
And doing this over a long period of time will give you compounding returns over the long-term.
Speed basically forces you to strip down to the most efficient version of your processes & systems.
2: Speed helps you learn faster and become more adaptable
When you’re moving quickly, you’re partnering with more creators, experimenting with different types of collaborations, and trying out new things. You’ll notice hits and misses in your approaches and learn what works and what doesn’t.
So even if some new experiment fails, you’ll learn from it fast, get back up, and still have enough time to implement your hard-won lessons. It’ll make you more adaptable and resilient toward your strategy, market changes, and consumer behavior shifts. Dmitri Cherner agrees:
Execution speed is usually at the top of the list when it comes to influencer marketing — the more people you can partner with, the sooner you'll be able to test and understand performance.
3: Speed helps you seize opportunities
Embedding speed in your strategy allows you to seize opportunities as they come — whether it’s capitalizing on trends or partnering with fast-growing influencers in your niche.
Having this first-mover advantage sets you apart from your competitors, allowing you to gain engagement and creator relationships before others can catch up.
Creator economy expert, Lia Haberman, elaborates how the opposite (not being able to grab opportunities because you were slow) is painful to watch:
There’s nothing worse than seeing a brand participate in a trend weeks after it’s been replaced by something new, knowing that the social team wasn’t able to get approval in time to be part of the moment.
6 bottlenecks in influencer marketing (and ideas to alleviate them)
The easiest way to gain more momentum is to list out your biggest bottlenecks, and figure out how to alleviate them. Here are six common ones, with some ideas on how to tackle it each.
1: Low autonomy within a team
Things can’t move fast if a team member has to seek the manager’s go-ahead for every single step on the way. Especially because influencer marketing has a lot of moving parts. Moise put it best:
It’s usually a bottleneck when a founder or manager wants to be involved in every step of the process, vet, approve, sign everything etc. There’s just way too many steps when it comes to influencer marketing to micromanage.
The easiest way to prevent this is to give more autonomy to your team. But that’s easier said than done.
Proper systems and processes can help immensely here, according to Moise. Map out everything you need to do to take one influencer collaboration from ideation to execution and turn it into a referenceable handbook. This will help instill trust and confidence in the whole team.
I insist on training my teams to be as autonomous as possible and make 90% of their decisions on their own — that’s why having good and clear processes in place that have been proof tested is so important. It gives each team member the confidence to take action knowing they’re doing so within a proven framework.
Anna Fatlowitz, Director of Influencer Marketing at Feedfeed, also suggests a good solution: checklists.
Have information on the program ready to go when you hit start on a campaign. You can create checklists prior to launching, which eliminates back and forth and any delays.
⚡ Pro-tip: update your handbook regularly as your strategy and workflows evolve. Mark a time in your calendar to do this every six months.
2: Invest in influencer relationships to build a compounding network
If you’re building great influencer relationships from the beginning, your network of creators will compound over time. For example, a creator you worked with last Black Friday might fit your needs again a year later. Or that influencer who came to your event the previous quarter might be relevant for your next goal. By nurturing creator relationships, you'll have a bunch of doors you can knock on to quickly get going when it's time to activate.
Anna Fatlowitz does this, and it has grown into a competititive advantage in the food influencer marketing niche:
We have a robust network of influencers who we trust (and are also a good fit) to get the quick-turn programs done quickly.
The only con here is this method doesn’t help you find brand new influencers to work with.
3: Finding potential influencers in the first place
Being able to do sourcing/recruitment fast & well is always a challenge.
And by far, the easiest thing you can do to add efficiency here is to add a paid influencer search tool (if you haven't already).
It shifts the time-consuming outreach stage to after your initial quantitative checks. Basic stuff, like:
- Is the audience at least in the right country?
- Are they mostly the right gender?
- Do they meet our minimum average engagement/view requirements?
You may want to dive deeper still once you get into conversations (e.g. content style & brand fit, subjective stuff). But the key point is that you cut out any outreach & back-and-forth with people that wouldn't even meet the basic quantitative criteria.
Anna Klappenbach, Community & Brand Marketing Lead at Aumio, uses Modash and says that without it, discovering influencers becomes a tedious process:
Sourcing new influencers & vetting them is one of the biggest bottlenecks in influencer marketing. Without Modash (or similar), the process can be very lengthy. Finding emails, setting up our internal profile'where we save the influencer's details, reaching out to them, etc.
In Modash, you can apply filters to comb through every publicly available profile with 1k+ followers on IG/TT/YT (that's 250M+). Then, even before you reach out, see audience demographics, average views/engagements, past content, and more. It looks like this:
Pricing is public, and you can try for free.
4: Legal reviews, compliance, and contracts
One of the biggest pebble-in-the-shoe of influencer marketing is the unsexy but important legal sign-off. You need your legal department to approve influencer contracts before you start a creator collaboration and sometimes you even need their backing after the influencer content is delivered.
While you can’t (and shouldn’t!) eliminate the legal stuff completely, it’s possible to speed things up at least a little. Haberman advises:
There's a lot you can do to prepare beforehand and alleviate some of the strain. Getting organized and proactive, giving them as much background information as possible, and minimizing last-minute requests, can significantly reduce the back-and-forth with legal.
It goes back to mapping out every single step of your influencer collaboration. If you already have contract templates in place and the details of potential influencer partners, you make your and your legal team’s life easier.
And in some cases (like influencer gifting), you might not even need a contract. If you’re doing a small collab with a free product, the deal value isn’t high (e.g., $20–$100), and there's no unusual conditions... Why waste time creating a contract? Nobody will enforce it anyway. Having a clear written record for everyone via email is enough. Skip the friction!
5: Approving influencer content
We all want to give creative freedom, yet content approvals stll eat up a ton of an influencer marketing team's time.
While it's tricky to remove those steps entirely, if your goal is to execute faster, consider whether there might be some specifc scenarios where you have less creative input.
Here's an example flowchart for inspiration:
In the example above, you might be able to identify a few cases where:
- The influencer is a trusted long-term partner
- They're promoting a product that they know well, they're unlikely to get something wrong
- And the creative concept is relatively simple
And possibly remove approval steps in those cases, to increase speed.
And, in general, you can try to reduce the amount of time you spend here by:
a) Shooting for the general long-term goal of building long-term relationships who require less and less feedback over time
b) Excellent briefing, that provides some direction but with room for creativitiy. Klappenbach explains this one with the perfect analogy:
Imagine being given a blank piece of paper and asked to draw anything vs. something like 'a house'. Within the framework of 'a house' lie certain limitations that allow for creativity to blossom. That's how I hold it with (most) creators: tell them what the message / feeling should be, and then let them paint the picture with their own colors!
... and c) Having minimal time between briefing and posting to shorten the approval cycle. Anna also recommends this:
We usually only brief about a week before the approval or posting date, simply because we want content that's current and the briefing not to be forgotten about. That already minimizes the time. We change up briefings so frequently (monthly) that this works really well for us, and also allows for trends to be included.
6: Sending follow-ups, briefs, and performance results
Some repetitive tasks on your to-do list include the general back-and-forth with influencers throughout the relationship.
For exmple, following-up on outreach messages, sending influencer briefs, and sharing performance data.
Klappenbach recommends speeding up these tasks by setting up partial templates. She explained with an outreach example, present in her own process:
We use a template for outreach & follow-ups. They include a section where we add some personalisation to the message. There are also different versions of the outreach message, some are more expert-knowledge-based, others more casual, depending on the creator.
Personlization still takes place, but the template serves as a starting point to speed up.
In addition, Anna uses templates for briefs, sharing campaign results and a general overview of the working process.
Think: what are some repeatable tasks on your to-do list? How can you automate or templatize them?
Another example is to set up a page of FAQs for creators detailing how they'll get paid. Or, you can automate the tracking & collecting of influencer content using influencer tracking tools like Modash.
(It saves your influencer posts, even Stories, to a dashboard automatically. You can try for free!)
⚠️ Note: you don’t want to automate or templatize human touch points completely. Ultimately, carrying out these tasks with effort signals importance and seriousness to your influencer partners. Wherever possible, take the ‘partial template’ route. Templatize or automate the bulk of repeatable info to speed up, but maintain that personal & friendly human touch, too.
3 tips to move faster in influencer marketing
1: Know when it makes more sense to slow down
Moise argues speed is a huge competitive advantage, but you need to balance it with thoughtful, take-your-time campaigns.
There has to be a healthy blend of speedy response and carefully planned out campaigns, otherwise you’ll burn out yourself or your team.
Dmitri echoes the same sentiment and reminds marketers to always choose quality performance over speed:
I encourage speed as a top priority for my teams always, but balanced with careful curation of the influencers we're outreaching to and negotiating with. Ultimately, performance is more important than speed, but you can't spend 3 months getting 10 partners live and expect founding teams/leadership to be happy with those results.
Haberman also suggests that you can split your team into two where one sub-team is in charge of long-term partnerships and the other is responsible for acting speedily:
Ideally, brands are able to take a two-pronged approach to their marketing efforts, divided between the people who work on long-term initiatives with plenty of lead time and the agile trend hunters whose roles are more reactive.
If you’re well-staffed, you could have one section of reactive marketers who are responsible for participating in trends and collaborating with influencers on a tight timeline. This will allow your team to be more stable, have clearly defined roles, and not postpone your long-term plans for seizing opportunities.
2: Choose influencers who are long-term partners or can stay on top of trends
It’s easy to participate in trends if you partner with creators who are already knee-deep in a social media platform’s new features and know the talk of the town in your niche. And it’s not just beneficial for you, as Klappenbach highlights:
The content creator who is on top of the latest trends has just as much of an interest to create content with value that will be favored by the algorithm. So the marketer has to allow the creator to basically just 'do their job' and encourage them to jump on the latest trend.
But how do you identify whether or not a creator is a trend spotter? Anna recommends identifying them by their reach: Creators who create trending content usually have a huge reach since the algorithm loves their content.
You can also find these creators by vetting their profiles and seeing how much of their content timing matches the trends of the time. Are they using popular audios? Are they participating in a famous content format? Assessing all of these factors will help you find creators who stay on top of the industry’s trends.
Another way to activate fast is by having long-term influencer partners. They know your product, working process, briefs, and expectations. Even if you highlight the trends, they can turnaround content quickly because of your pre-built rapport.
3: Get comfortable with the compromises that come with speed
Speed in influencer marketing comes with sacrifices.
- You might choose to negotiate less, which can end up costing $$$
- You might choose to have less input in the creative process and what goes live
- You might choose to skip the contract if you think it isn't needed — which isn't 100% risk-free
All of these are the part-and-parcel of getting speed on your side as a competitive advantage. Yes, you can balance it with long-term campaigns, but the trade-offs still remain. Get comfortable with these factors before you start to speed things up and remember the benefits make the bargains 100% worth it in the end!
Your 3-step prompt for gaining speed in influencer marketing
Speed lets you stay ahead of the curve as you run your influencer marketing campaigns. But don’t go from 1x to 2x directly. Gradually prepare yourself for the run before you get the fast pace:
1. Begin by thinking about tasks you can automate or templatize in your workflow — without losing the personal touch in your creator partnerships. What are some time-consuming tasks? How can you do them more efficiently? Is there any software that could help?
2. Then, evaluate your content approval processes. Is there anything you can do to speed up the tasks here? Are there any influencer partners you could offer more creative freedom to?
3. Lastly, audit your internal team’s autonomy. Can you do more to ensure your team isn’t dependent on anyone for running campaigns?
It’s best to slow down the speeding-up process (ironic,I know) to ensure it’s more sustainable in the long term. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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