Influencer marketing managers plan campaigns, find and brief influencers, manage influencer relationships, and track campaign results.

(And much more besides.)

To thrive in the role, you need a well-rounded skillset. Whether you’re an influencer marketing manager looking to self-improve or you’re trying to land your first influencer marketing manager role, these 12 key skills are the ideal starting point…

Creative & briefing skills 💭

Coming up with creative angles is essential to planning influencer campaigns. Otherwise you’ll just be doing the same stuff over and over again.

But it’s not just about creativity — you need to communicate your ideas effectively to your influencer partners, too.

Sometimes, this means giving influencers a loose brief discussing the general theme and goals of your campaign, then leaving them to figure out the best way to bring it to life. Other times, you’ll want to be more prescriptive by providing specific deliverables and key talking points.

These variables can change on an influencer-by-influencer and campaign-by-campaign basis. For example:

✅ Long-standing influencer partners who are highly familiar with your brand may need less guidance

✅ Product launch campaigns might require greater detail on the specific features and benefits you want to highlight

It’s up to you to figure out the best approach in each scenario.

👉 Further reading: Influencer Briefing: 7 Things To Include (+Free Template & Examples)

Outreach 📬

Finding relevant influencers and vetting their profiles to ensure they’re a good fit for your campaign is only part of the battle — you need to get them to respond to you, too.

That’s why influencer marketing managers need to excel at influencer outreach.

Influencer outreach is the practice of reaching out to social media influencers for collaborations with your brand. It’s the first step for building new relationships, and is typically done via DMs or email.

If you don’t get your pitch right, you’ll see a low response rate, which means you risk wasting valuable weeks with zero ROI.

👉 Further reading: How To Do Influencer Outreach: A Guide For Brands

Negotiation 🤝

Influencer negotiation doesn’t come naturally to most marketers.

Do you lay all your cards on the table and share your budget? Or wait for their anchor rate? And what if the influencer refuses to engage if you lowball them?

To make matters worse, few things in the world of influencer marketing are standardized. There’s no universal rate for a product review video or a whitelisting campaign (or anything else, for that matter).

🤓 Pro tip: If you’re ever unsure how to start the negotiation process, bear in mind that over half of influencer marketers ask influencers to share their rates first.

👉 Further reading: 9 Tips To Negotiate With Influencers (Without Being Unfair)

Using influencer marketing platforms 🤓

Influencer marketing involves a lot of heavy lifting around essential tasks like:

✅ Searching for influencers

✅ Influencer outreach and follow-ups

✅ Onboarding new influencers

✅ Tracking live influencer content

✅ Measuring influencer performance

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of tools to automate influencer marketing processes.

Influencer marketing tech stacks vary from one organization to the next, so you won’t be expected to have hands-on knowledge of every platform.

But you should at least be familiar with the different categories of tools that exist and what they do.

👉 Further reading: The Top 20 Influencer Marketing Platforms: Find The One For You

Relationship-building 🤗

Every influencer marketing manager dreams of having a little black book full of talented, reliable influencers who love their brand and deliver spectacular results time after time.

But successful, mutually beneficial long-term influencer partnerships don’t happen by chance. They require a conscious effort from both parties to build and foster the relationship, from the initial outreach message to the launch of their first collaboration (and beyond).

Just like in any relationship, this process is never “finished”. You need to keep working at it to ensure everyone’s happy.

👉 Further reading: How to Build Great Influencer Relationships: 10 No-Fluff Tactics

Decision-making 🤔

Influencer marketing managers have to make a ton of decisions. Like:

✅ Is a specific influencer a good fit for our brand?

✅ What’s the best creative angle for our next campaign?

✅ Should we give whitelisting ads a try?

And lots more besides.

Trouble is, they often have to make these decisions based on data that’s murky at best (and completely non-existent at worst). So you’ll have to get good at trusting your instincts and making educated guesses.

Prioritization 🤹‍♀️

Similarly, as an influencer marketing manager, you have to keep a whole lot of plates spinning. And sometimes you just have to let one or two smash.

That’s fine — you’re not superhuman. You and your team have finite resources, so it’s not possible to accomplish everything at once.

The real challenge is in deciding which priorities to focus on and which to put on the backburner. It all ties back to the reasons you’re doing influencer marketing in the first place, which is typically to:

✅ Drive sales/conversions

✅ Build brand awareness

✅ Generate content (e.g. for paid ad creatives or other repurposing)

If a specific action doesn’t directly influence your top-level objectives, it’s probably not an immediate priority.

Audience research 🔬

The ability to understand your audience — who they are, what they engage with, and what motivates them to take action — is fundamental for any marketing role.

As with many things in the marketing world, this is part science and part intuition.

Analytics tools, feedback surveys, and focus groups can give you qualitative and quantitative data about your audience. But they can’t guarantee that your next campaign will resonate with your ideal customer profile.

👉 Further reading: 11 Influencer Analysis Tools To Check Influencer Audiences

Project management 🗓️

Influencer marketing managers often have to simultaneously act as project managers.

Like when a campaign launch deadline is approaching and you need to ensure that your product arrives in the hands of a couple dozen influencers so they’ve got time to create teaser videos.

Getting it right requires a cool head, excellent organizational skills, and the ability to clearly (and calmly) communicate expectations to various stakeholders.

👉 Further reading: 10 Influencer Management Tools to Streamline Your Work

Reporting and presentation skills 💬

Your organization doesn’t do influencer marketing for fun — they do it to make money.

As an influencer marketing manager, it’s ultimately up to you to demonstrate to senior decision-makers that your influencer campaigns are delivering meaningful results (and that they should keep investing).

This isn’t just about repeating basic data points like impressions and engagement rates.

It’s about bringing influencer marketing reports to life by adding context to all the numbers. Why did your campaign perform better (or worse) than expected? And what learnings have you drawn from it?

👉 Further reading: Influencer Marketing ROI: Proving The Impact of Influencers

(Some) legal knowledge 👩‍⚖️

To be clear, you don’t need a law degree to be an influencer marketing manager. But you should have a working knowledge of the legal and regulatory requirements around influencer campaigns in your target markets.

This includes understanding things like:

✅ Influencer ad disclosure

✅ Influencer contracts

✅ Relevant niche-specific advertising regulations

👉 Further reading: 7 Things To Include In An Influencer Contract (+ Free Template)

Trend analysis 📈

Influencer marketing is constantly evolving.

Social platforms and content formats come and go — and if you don’t move with the times, you’re gonna get left behind.

No one expects you to predict the future. But you’ll definitely need to keep an eye on the landscape and spot new trends and opportunities that naturally align with your brand and audience.

Next steps

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