Influencer marketing offers a ton of benefits, from direct sales, to building brand awareness, to generating a ton of high-quality content.

But unlocking those rewards ain’t always easy.

Here, I'll address the most common challenges brands face with influencer marketing. And, of course, offer advice on how other brands solve them.

1. Getting responses to influencer outreach 📧

You’ve found a bunch of relevant influencers and sent a ton of outreach messages to ask if they’d like to work with you — yet there’s nothing in your inbox but tumbleweeds 🙁. Let’s explore some solutions to your lack of outreach responses:

✅ Solution #1: Make your offer more attractive

If your influencer outreach isn’t generating many (or any) replies, it’s a good sign that your pitch just isn’t resonating.

This doesn’t necessarily mean paying higher fees.

For starters, you might not be sharing your offer upfront. In which case it’s worth adding it into the opening message in your outreach sequence — a little transparency can have a big impact on replies.

If you are sharing your offer, it could be time for an update. For example, if you’re running an influencer gifting campaign, you could make your offer more compelling by teasing the prospect of a long-term partnership. And if it’s a paid opportunity, communicating this in your outreach messages will likely improve response rates.

✅ Solution #2: Target more relevant influencers

On the other hand, your pitch and offer might be perfect — but you could be sending it to the wrong influencers. In which case you won’t see many (or any) replies. And even if you do, the resulting campaign likely won’t produce the desired results.

Before you start building a list of target influencers, ask yourself:

🤔 What kind of person are you trying to reach?

🤔 Are they really the right fit for your brand, product, and audience?

For example, I recently heard about a brand that sells a product designed to reduce dogs shedding. So they reached out to a pet influencer with a dog. So far so good, right?

Trouble is, her dog is a breed that doesn’t shed, so the product was totally irrelevant to her — and, of course, she didn’t reply.

There was nothing wrong with the outreach message here; it was purely a case of bad targeting.

✅ Solution #3: Personalize your outreach messaging

Just like everyone else on the planet, influencers want to feel special.

So if you reach out to influencers with a generic message that’s obviously been sent to dozens of other people, there’s a good chance they’ll ignore you.

That’s why a personalized approach will always get a higher response rate (and more live collaborations) than a fully templated message.

Of course, personalizing outreach messages takes a little longer than mass influencer outreach.

To speed things up, you can use a partially-templated email, as follows:

👉 Templatize the details about you: Introduction, business info, gifting campaign details, etc.

👉 Personalize the stuff about the creator: Why you like them, why you think they’re a good fit for your brand, why you think they and their audience would love your product.

Here’s an example of how that might look:

👉 Get inspired by some influencer outreach examples!

✅ Solution #4: Send (more) follow-up emails

Influencers are busy people, so it’s easy for emails and DMs to fall through the cracks. And if you’re only sending a single outreach message to each influencer, you’re likely missing a bunch of potential replies.

To boost responses, sending three follow-ups after your initial message, spread out like this:

🗓️ Day 1: Initial outreach message

🗓️ Day 4: First follow-up

🗓️ Day 6: Second follow-up

🗓️ Day 8: Final follow-up

Luckily, you can automate most of the content of these follow-up messages with influencer outreach tools if you’ve spent enough time and care personalizing the first message.

2. Finding enough relevant influencers, consistently 🔎

Unless you only work with a handful of long-term influencer partners, you need to find a consistent stream of relevant influencers to support your campaigns.

(And even if you do plan to work with the same influencers over and over again, you still need to find them in the first place.)

Here are some solutions:

✅ Solution #1: Consider your ICP

If you’re trying to figure out which “niche” of influencer will perform best for you, try thinking beyond your immediate product category.

For example, if you’re a beauty brand, there’s a right and a wrong way to approach it:

👎 Wrong way: I have a beauty product, so I need to work with beauty influencers.

👍 Right way: My ideal buyers are women aged 35 – 45 in [location]. Who reaches those people online?

You might still land on those "obvious" choices, but regardless, it'll give you a much bigger pool of potential partners to test. Plus there’s a stronger chance of finding influencers who aren’t already collaborating with your competitors.

✅ Solution #2: Recruit from your existing audience

Unless you’re just starting out, you already have a bunch of existing customers, followers, and email subscribers.

They’re people who are at least somewhat interested in your brand and products. And some of them may have large followings you can tap into. But how do you find them?

You’ve got two options:

👉 Reach out to your email subscribers and ask if any of them are influencers who want to collaborate with you.

👉 Use Modash to search your existing fans for influencers with 1k+ followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.

✅ Solution #3: Use an influencer search tool

The most efficient solution is to speed up the influencer search process and surface more relevant results by using an influencer search tool like Modash to search and filter every influencer on Earth 🌎.

For example, in the below screenshot, we’re searching for influencers who:

👉 Live in a specific country (US)

👉 Have a certain number of followers (5k – 50k)

👉 Produce content in our desired niche (skincare)

This search gives us a list of social profiles matching our criteria.

We can open any of the results to analyze the profile, as follows:

This way, you can quickly review who the influencer is reaching (locations, ages, genders), their performance (engagement rate, growth rate), their top content, past sponsored content, and more.

All without having to reach out and ask them.

👉 Try Modash for $0. You don’t even need to take out your credit card.

3. Finding the right balance with creative input ⚖️

On one hand, you want to give your influencer partners creative freedom to speak in their authentic voice — after all, they know their own audience better than you do.

But on the other, you have specific messaging you need to communicate to effectively pitch your brand and product.

Striking the right balance is tough, but here are some solutions:

✅ Solution #1: Find an authentic angle for your influencer content

When an influencer’s personal story closely aligns with your product and values, there’s less need to worry about providing a super strict influencer brief — because they already get it.

Take travel creator Aakansha Monga, who often discusses her preference for traveling light:

So she was a natural fit to partner with Air India Express and promote the launch of their Xpress Lite fares for customers who only travel with carry-on bags:

This partnership felt authentic because it aligned with the creator’s values and preferences. Aakansha had already talked about her love of traveling light, shared advice with her followers on the subject, and mentioned the advantages in her Stories.

Here are two ways you can use to find creative angles for your influencer partners:

a) While vetting an influencer, review their past content and see what aligns with your brand.

🤔 What do they talk about often?

🤔 What advice, preferences, and values do they share in their posts and stories?

🤔 What do they struggle with or dislike?

Get your research hat on and jot down some core points for each influencer that align with your brand’s features or values.

b) Arrange a call to get to know the influencer properly and find authentic ideas together.

Emails and async communication methods are efficient, yes, but they aren’t the best channels if you truly want to get inside an influencer’s head.

Getting on a call is time-consuming and unscalable, but it can help you brainstorm authentic angles to find a personal and relatable story with your brand and product at the center.

✅ Solution #2: Offer more creative freedom on simpler campaigns

If your product is highly technical, innovative, or otherwise needs a lot of explanation, it makes sense to produce more specific, detailed influencer briefs.

But if it’s simple enough that your influencer partner and their audience will immediately understand the features and benefits, loosen the reins and let the influencer take more control over the content and messaging.

✅ Solution #3: Provide more guidance on product walkthroughs

Influencers know their audience best, but you know your product.

So if you’re collaborating on content that’s heavily product-focused — like an in-depth review or a walkthrough video — it makes sense to provide stricter guidelines around the specific features and USPs you want them to mention.

(Plus you want to ensure they communicate technical specs accurately.)

4. Keeping track of live influencer campaigns 🤳🏻

If you’re working with multiple influencers on a single campaign, keeping track of all the content they’re sharing can be a real headache. Here’s how to get it right:

✅ Solution #1: Track influencer content manually by spreadsheet

To start off, you can do this without any extra tools or automation. Mike Newton, creator of Building Influence, has a free spreadsheet template that can help.

It doesn't automatically pull in live influencer posts, but it provides a good structure for tracking influencer content (plus it won’t cost you a cent).

Thanks, Mike!

✅ Solution #2: Automate live content tracking with Modash

As your program develops and tracking content becomes a heavier lift, consider automating the process using influencer tracking tools like Modash.

In Modash, all you have to do is:

👉 Name your campaign

👉 Specify which influencers you'd like to track

👉 Choose which content you want to track (e.g. posts containing specific hashtags or keywords), or just track all their content

And voila! Modash will automatically pull all the relevant content into one dashboard. Even Stories. With no need to ask influencers for authentication.

Modash also gives you an overview of individual influencer performance metrics like:

👉 Number of posts by each influencer (so you can check if they've hit their deliverables easily)

👉 Total engagements and average engagement rate of your sponsored posts per influencer

👉 Total revenue (if you connect your Shopify store to track promo codes)

5. Figuring out how much to pay influencers 💵

Working with influencers isn’t like buying a Big Mac: pricing isn't standardized.

Which means an influencer can quote one brand $500 today and another brand $1,000 tomorrow for the exact same deliverables.

This makes figuring out how much to pay influencers a bit of a minefield — but there are a few potential solutions:

✅ Solution #1: Prioritize low-cost and/or performance-based partnerships

Maybe you don’t have the budget to pay influencer marketing fees. Or perhaps you’re just getting started and aren’t sure how much you can afford to pay while maintaining a high ROI.

Either way, you might want to consider one (or both) of these influencer strategies:

🎁 Gifting, where you send influencers free products in the hope they’ll post about them

🗣️ Affiliate marketing, where you pay your partners a cut of any sales they generate (typically around 5% – 30%)

✅ Solution #2: Reach out to lots of influencers (and ask for their rates)

If you don’t know something, the simplest solution is just to ask. So find lots of influencers in your niche, reach out to them, and see how much they charge.

Worried this seems a little forward?

Don’t be, because over half of influencer marketers ask for rates before providing their budget:

After all, this is a classic best practice for any negotiation, right?

Mark Dandy, previously Head of Influencer Marketing at Ear To The Ground, recommends clearly writing down the deliverables you want first, then reaching out and asking for a price.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

You essentially want a checkout process. ‘Here’s everything I’m asking for. How much will you charge me for it?’ Once a price comes up, you can usually negotiate within a 30% range.

Likewise, Ben Williams, Senior Influencer Manager at Blast.tv, always asks for rates up front — then tries to negotiate within a similar range (up to 50% lower).

👉 Get more pricing insights in our article: Instagram Influencer Pricing: 42 Marketers Share How They Figure Out What To Pay.

✅ Solution #3: Set a budget based on customer acquisition cost

Sure, you want to keep your influencer marketing costs under control.

But results are ultimately the most important thing. After all, would you rather pay an influencer $500 to bring in one customer, or give a different influencer $1,500 to attract 10 customers?

That’s why it makes sense to consider customer acquisition costs (CACs) when deciding how much to pay.

Ben Williams

Influencer Team Manager, Blast.tv

Figure out what you can pay to acquire a customer. And try to forecast the influencer’s sales with whatever data you can get (e.g. past affiliate performance, avg views, Story clicks, etc). With that, you can estimate your maximum budget for the first collab. After you have some data, you can negotiate again.

Estimating in this way isn’t going to be precise, but if you’re feeling lost in the early days, it’s a great way to get started with paying influencers.

6. Navigating the "legal stuff" 📚

Most influencer marketers haven’t passed the bar. So how do you deal with all the complex legal stuff? Especially if you don’t have your own team of in-house lawyers to lean on.

Here are some helpful starting points…

⚠️ Disclaimer: Like you, I’m not a lawyer (although I do look fantastic in a wig and gown), and I’m not offering legal advice. You should always research specific local laws and have a legal professional look over your contracts to ensure you're appropriately protected.

✅ Solution #1: Consider whether you really need a contract

Wondering what to include in an influencer contract? Before you go any further, stop and think about whether you actually need a contract at all.

To be clear, you definitely need everything in writing, but not necessarily in contract form. It could just be an email to save everyone a little time and friction.

👉 If you need an influencer contract template ASAP, here it is. Click on “File” and “Make a copy” to edit it and send it to your influencer partners. You need to fill everything marked in yellow with your brand’s info.

✅ Solution #2: Be strict on ad disclosures

This one’s a non-negotiable:

Always make sure you encourage influencers to clearly disclose ads.

Yep, even if you’re just doing no-strings gifting, you should still tell influencers to disclose your relationship.

Here’s an example of how NARS Cosmetics do it, as spotted by the eagle-eyed Alice Bull:

Please note: you are under no obligation to post, but if you feel inclined, please ensure that you include #ad clearly [and tag] @narcissist. These products have been gifted for your use and are not for resale.

💡Tip: Modash's influencer campaign tracking feature has an alerts tool. If a disclosure isn't detected (using common text like #ad), you'll get an alert to check it out.

7. Measuring the impact of influencer marketing 📈

Ahhh, the eternal question of how to measure influencer marketing ROI 🤯

First off, it’s worth stressing that nobody has this completely figured out, so don’t beat yourself up. However, there are some potential solutions…

✅ Solution #1: Pick one clear goal for each collaboration

Even though influencer collaborations achieve multiple goals, it’s important to have a primary goal in mind for each campaign. This makes it easier to determine success.

For example, if your goal is to build brand awareness, your primary success metrics should be views and reach.

Or if you’re targeting sales, promo codes and links can help you figure out things like:

👉 Number of sales

👉 Revenue

👉 Average order value

The humble promo code is easy to set up and powerful in its simplicity.

The idea is to create personalized codes for each influencer. They share the code with their audience, then customers enter it at some point in the path to purchase — typically during the checkout process.

Now, promo codes on their own won’t tell you how a customer arrived on your site, but you’ll know exactly who sent them. For example, when Rothys partnered with writer and creator Olivia Muenter, they used the personalized promo code OLIVIA20.

Simple and memorable!

If you look carefully, you’ll see they also used a UTM link, which tells Google Analytics (and other tools) four pieces of information: source, medium, campaign, and content. This allows you to track user behavior across those categories.

Using ‍UTM links can help you:

👉 Compare sales across different influencers to find your best and worst performing influencers. That way, you can decide who to work with long-term, and who to train up (or ditch).

👉 Compare sales across campaigns. This will help you discover the types of campaigns that work best for your brand (e.g. do discount codes work better than product placements?).

👉 Compare sales from influencer campaigns with other mediums. This will help you understand how influencer marketing stacks up against other marketing channels.

👉 Compare content type. You could discover that educational content performs better than entertaining content. Or that videos work better than in-feed posts.

✅ Solution #2: Analyze impact on other channels

Influencer marketing isn’t just a performance channel — it’s the tide that lifts all ships.

For example, say your latest influencer campaign has increased awareness around your brand. In turn, this could also result in:

👍 More search volume around your brand name

👍 More search queries including your brand name

👍 More direct traffic

👍 Lower CPCs on ads for your brand name

But how do you attribute these positive results to influencer marketing?

Try looking out for spikes in brand searches correlating with days influencers post, and comparing baselines before/after launching campaigns.

🤓 Pro tip: Depending on your product, you may need to look at the numbers over a longer period. If it’s low-cost, you could see an immediate impact, but for higher-priced products you might need to look over 30, 60, or even 90 days to get a true picture of what’s going on.

✅ Solution #3: Measure value of content produced

Influencer partners create content around your brand and products. Content that you might otherwise have had to produce in-house.

So, for another way to measure the impact of influencer marketing, try calculating how much it would have cost you to create that content in terms of business hours and productivity.

Also, don’t overlook the value of negotiating influencer whitelisting and partner ad arrangements. These ads often end up as top performers, and influencer marketers play a key role in making it happen by:

👉 Recruiting the right influencers

👉 Helping to develop the narrative and content

👉 Delivering high-performing ads

All of which means that judging solely on last-click revenue isn’t an effective way to assess influencer marketing performance.

What’s next?

If you want bite-sized influencer marketing tips like these in your inbox, try our newsletter, Return on Influence.

It's read by 40k+ influencer markters. Totally free. Once per week (ish).

Enjoy!