Influencers: How to Scale Your Business and Dominate the Market
If you’re wondering how to scale your business with influencers—from experimental partnerships to a core driver of sales—you’re in the right place. Influencer marketing is no longer a tactic; it’s a strategic growth channel that senior leaders recognize for its lasting impact on the bottom line. With the Creator Economy projected to reach $600 billion by 2030 and an average ROI of nearly $5.78 for every $1 spent, the opportunity to scale your business with influencers is massive. Market leaders are those who invest big, viewing this channel as a vital understanding of where consumers spend their time and what truly impacts their purchasing decisions. To effectively reach this level, brands must rethink how their teams, budgets, and technology work together.
Executive Decisions to Effectively Scale Your Business With Influencers
Scaling an influencer program is far more than just running larger campaigns or signing more creators. It demands a sophisticated new strategy coupled with enhanced infrastructure. CMOs must shift budgets to prioritize long-term results, which includes expanding internal influencer teams, incorporating specialized agencies, or investing in the right technology stack.
This investment isn’t purely financial; it’s also structural. Measurement frameworks are key to ensuring scaled partnerships remain on-brand and demonstrate tangible impact. This means implementing clear brand guidelines, streamlined approval processes, and robust risk management protocols. Ultimately, leadership must standardize how success is defined and reported, ensuring every team member knows where to focus their efforts for maximum return. True scalability comes from building a structure that protects quality as you grow.
The Human-Powered Engine Driving Influencer Scale
Despite advances in AI, the influencer industry remains heavily reliant on human effort and relationship-building. Executing a successful, full-funnel strategy involves significant behind-the-scenes work. Consider the case of Surfshark VPN, where Gabrielė Palepšaitė, Head of Influencer Marketing, built one of the world’s largest programs. Her team has partnered with 24,000 creators across 110 countries over six years, resulting in over 60,000 content pieces. This massive program was initially managed by a small team of four before scaling to ten in-house regional specialists. To justify and educate leadership on the need for a larger team, Gabrielė’s team created an eight-step process guide detailing how to build a successful campaign—a vital lesson in aligning internal efforts to support ambitious growth.
Strategy and Tech: Two Ways to Scale Your Business With Influencers
The core of scalability often lies in how you select and manage creators. Here are key areas where strategy and technology converge to drive efficiency and reach:
Test and Scale Creator Selection to Scale Your Business With Influencers
The ability to begins with an advanced creator strategy that moves beyond the obvious. While many tools exist to evaluate creators based on engagement and demographics, true scale means opening up new content verticals. Limiting partnerships to only the most direct product categories is limiting. For example, a “test and scale” approach led a tech brand to find unexpected, high-converting success with woodwork content creators on YouTube. Adobe similarly broadened its partnerships from focusing solely on design creators to include voices from beauty, food, and interiors. As Jared Carneson, Head of Global Social at Adobe, noted, growth was substantial once they saw creator-led content working in the conversion funnel. Companies should prioritize audience overlap and communities rather than surface-level brand alignment to broaden their reach and impact.
Automation and AI for Vetting and Approvals
Scaling creator partnerships introduces business-critical brand safety risks. Manually conducting background checks across multiple languages and markets can delay campaigns by weeks. AI has proven transformative here, analyzing internet history, sentiment, and historical content in seconds. While human oversight remains necessary, tools significantly reduce the manual burden. For example, Sarah Adam, Head of Marketing Partnerships and Influencer Marketing at Wix, confirmed their use of AI for discovery and streamlining workflows, but emphasized that it never replaces direct human communication with creators.
Content approvals are a notorious bottleneck, but AI tools like Google Gemini can now scan video drafts for campaign pillars, brand mentions, and coupon codes across numerous languages. This accelerates the compliance side of the process, freeing human teams to focus on messaging quality and cultural resonance.
Standardizing Pricing and Contracting
Negotiating fees is often a time-consuming back-and-forth process. Leaders should empower their brand teams with formula-based pricing models tied to creator reach and performance metrics. While these models don’t capture every nuance, they establish a fair baseline for negotiation. Additionally, standard contract templates for creators are essential for boosting speed and efficiency. Even negotiation itself can be automated, with systems allowing brands to customize communications by teaching the system their strategies and tone of voice.
Performance Tracking to Sustainably Scale Your Business With Influencers
Leaders need clear visibility into what drives conversions to justify continued investment and sustained growth. This necessitates building robust infrastructure for performance tracking. When sales can be traced directly back to an influencer program, scaling investment becomes a boardroom decision supported by hard evidence.
While most brands use Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) for measurement, a reported 80% admit they don’t incorporate influencer marketing into their MMM frameworks. This is challenging because influencer spend—which covers production, talent, content usage, and distribution—is hard to directly compare with other media channels like TV or Paid Ads. The marketer’s role is to educate leadership upfront on a measurement framework that can effectively assess the impact of influencer assets, for instance, by measuring their contribution to better paid ad results. This strategic approach ensures alignment and buy-in for future scaling.
Key Actions to Scale Your Business With Influencers
To successfully evolve influencer marketing into a growth driver that demands executive oversight and long-term strategy, leaders should:
- Align budgets with the necessary people and technology to deliver quality at scale.
- Identify where AI enhances efficiency and where human relationship-building must remain central.
- Test unexpected creator categories to unlock bigger, high-converting results.
- Encourage faster approvals and empower teams with clear guidelines.
- Invest in both the right tools and talented teams to truly scale this vital channel.
Influencer marketing has fully evolved. Scaling these programs successfully depends on leaders who invest in the right infrastructure, technology, and talent. As AI streamlines execution, the most forward-thinking executives will treat the channel as a strategic lever for sustainable business growth and competitive advantage.
