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Influencer marketing is challenging enough as a team. But if you’re a one-person show… you’ve got your work cut out for you. You’re probably wondering:
👉 How do I manage all the moving parts?
👉 How do I develop and maintain strong relationships?
👉 What trade-offs do I have to make because I just don’t have the bandwidth?
The task load is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat. I spoke to influencer marketers who are (or have been) a team of one to understand how they do it all without pulling their hair out. Here are their best tips for solo success.
It’s easy to divide responsibilities when you’re working as a team. But if you’re flying solo, you’re responsible for everything: discovery, outreach, briefing, communicating, tracking content, measuring ROI, and so much more.
How do you organize your to-do list to get everything done? First, you start with the list.
You’re probably performing manual tasks that could be automated, or starting from scratch instead of working from a template. The easiest way to reduce your load is to streamline those repetitive tasks. As for the tasks you truly can’t streamline, you can always outsource them.
Here are the most common ways to reduce your workload:
Which tasks should you begin with? It depends on your budget for influencer marketing tools, the type of campaigns you’re running, and what you personally like (and don’t like) doing.
Here’s what our experts suggest:
Consider the tasks you have to do the most often. Can you add a tool or employ outside help to complete those tasks more efficiently? For instance, if you’re practicing mass outreach, free tools can help you send bulk emails and track results. And don’t be afraid to bring in freelance help during busy seasons. Michael Todner, for example, hired freelancers to help him during Christmas campaigns:
⚡ Remember: Simplifying your workload using automation or templatization often comes down to making the best of what you already have. In fact, we asked influencer marketers to tell us how long they spent each month on average on the big four tasks: campaign planning, finding/vetting influencers, outreach, and negotiation/contracting.
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Finding and vetting your influencers are likey to be the two areas that suck the most of your time. While you can't really automate that, you can find tools to help you find and vet influencers quicker – not to mention automate and templatize your other tasks as much as you can.
Andreea also encourages marketers to build a strong argument in favor of using tools and outside help:
The best (and the worst) part about being a one-person team is that you’re responsible for everything – the numbers you achieved and the goals that fell short. Set yourself up for success by employing the tools that can help you do your best work.
Hack your productivity by using time blockers or dividing your week into “themed days” to complete related tasks in one go. Andreea explains how she does this:
Similarly, Michael blocks a specific time to keep up with influencer communications:
Batch your days and/or weeks into big chunks for influencer discovery, outreach, conversation management, performance measurement, etc. This will ensure nothing gets missed, and you don’t have to keep switching focus throughout the day.
You must also remember the trade-offs you have to make yourself. Anna, for example, traded off scaling up with multiple campaigns:
When you’re working as a team of one, remember to honor your capacity and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Relationships are the heart and soul of influencer marketing. Building and maintaining communication (work-related or otherwise) is easy when you’re collaborating only with a handful of creators.
But what happens as you scale and onboard a large number of influencer partners? How do you maintain the same standard of influencer relationships as a team of one?
For starters, Andreea advises moving out of the mindset that time is the only thing you can offer to make creators feel valued:
When nurturing your influencer relationships, remember quality over quantity. You don’t have to communicate a lot – you just have to communicate well. Anna suggests standing out by showing your personality and referring to influencer-specific details:
Andreea agrees. Here’s what she recommends you do to improve your influencer relationships – even if you’re short on time:
Noor adds:
Ultimately, it’s about being human and having fun with it!
Instead of scrambling to remember when you last communicated with an influencer and what it was about, maintain a spreadsheet where you can track this info.
Michael has built a spreadsheet with “last contacted” dates and notes to have context on past conversations, their birthdays, projects they’re working on, any content ideas they shared, and other tidbits. Simply creating the tracker isn’t going to work miracles; you have to maintain it consistently to improve your relationships. It might seem benign, but it's the small, personal touches that go a long way:
Real talk: getting this detailed in your tracker might not be realistically possible for every influencer partner, especially if you have a campaign running on a wide scale. In that scenario, maintain this tracker only for the heavy-hitter influencer partners.
You have limited resources as a solo show. Despite doing your best, you can’t do everything by the book. That’s expected. What’s tricky is figuring out what trade-offs you should make. Here are some ideas from pro influencer marketers:
As you scale your influencer marketing program, it becomes impossible to approve every piece of content. The easiest trade-off you can make is offering more creative freedom to your influencer partners in order to remove this task from your plate. Noor agrees:
If you’re at a stage where you aren’t comfortable letting someone else lead the creative vision, start slowly. Michael, for instance, offers a high degree of creative freedom only to influencer partners he has worked with more than a few times.
They’ve earned his trust, and he feels more confident letting go of the reins with those influencers.
It’d be ideal if you could personalize everything in an influencer outreach email, but it’s tougher to scale that way. The solution is partially-personalized emails: personalize the details about the influencer, and templatize the rest about your brand or campaign. Here’s an example:
Michael practices partial personalization, too. If you’re not convinced it’s right for you, he suggests evaluating the ROI of the time it takes you to completely personalize your outreach:
You can still deploy fully personalized outreach for creators with whom you really want to work. However, to scale efficiently, it’s best to introduce partial templates and automated follow-ups.
Let go of the reins of how other teams use influencer content – especially once you’ve done the work upfront to educate stakeholders and adjacent teams. You don’t have to fit in their workflow once they know how to access influencer content and check for usage rights.
Michael explains how letting go of this task gave him one less thing to worry about:
Instead of feeling like you need to control the content at all times, empower other departments to take it from here.
It’s tempting to overestimate how much you can accomplish while in the planning stage – a psychological phenomenon lovingly called the planning fallacy. But setting unrealistic targets can lead to demotivation and self-inflicted pressure.
It’s also worth remembering that since influencer marketing results are solely on your shoulders, you don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver to stakeholders. Andreea agrees:
Note: This only applies in situations where you have control over your own goals and targets. If not, and you think your goals might be unattainable, speak to your stakeholders and use the timetracking you did to help negotiate either for more realistic goals or more resources.
You’re a team of one in your company. But there are tons of other influencer marketers you can ask for help – whether it’s for brainstorming, dealing with a tricky situation, or just venting. Andreea agrees:
This is not just true of outside networking, though. Anna explains why staying in a silo within your organization is also a mistake:
Influencer marketing is a rapidly evolving industry. There are new platforms, new features, new types of content, and increased scope for unlimited creativity. You always need to have your finger on the pulse of the market – especially as you shoulder the responsibility of driving success for influencer campaigns alone. Michael agrees:
How do you sharpen your knowledge game, though? One way is to stay active in marketer communities – you’ll learn from other people’s experiences and about what’s working (or not) for them.
Another way to keep your ear to the ground is by subscribing to valuable industry newsletters that collate advice from the pros – like our newsletter, Return on Influence. You get real, first-hand insights from experts who are sharing their experiences as they happen. Subscribe today for free and see for yourself!
The easiest way to become more efficient as a one-person team is to add a one-stop influencer marketing platform like Modash into your tech stack. It will help you:
Does it cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? 100 percent. To understand just how much time and headaches you will save, take Modash for a spin at no cost for 14 days. No credit card needed!