Enhancing and Broadening an Effective Influencer Marketing Initiative

Initiating an influencer marketing initiative is quite a challenge—particularly for B2B companies.

However, influencers represent a contemporary method to engage audiences, with their content significantly surpassing the performance of most brand-produced materials. This is why over 50% of marketers report already depending on influencer marketing to enhance brand visibility, engage audiences, build credibility and trust, and even boost sales, as noted in the Q1 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey.

A stat call-out that reads 77% of brands only partner with 10 influencers or less

The same survey indicated that the majority of brands concentrate their collaborations on no more than 10 influencers, with 59% planning to establish new collaborations in 2025. To grow and scale efficiently, marketing teams must tackle challenges like vague ownership, budget limitations, and ineffective processes.

In recent years at Sprout Social, we evolved a series of sporadic influencer activations into a comprehensive influencer marketing program that now stands at the core of our marketing strategy. Instead of placing the burden on the social team alone, we created a cross-departmental influencer and creator marketing engine that encompasses various departments and roles—and this has been crucial to our success.

The outcome: Collaborations with a multitude of unique creators and hundreds of content pieces that resulted in over 4 million impressions, more than 100K engagements, and a significant number of leads.

To transition from episodic collaborations to a sophisticated influencer marketing strategy that is implemented organization-wide, we had to align our initiatives with explicit business objectives, define and report on key metrics related to our primary business KPIs, and completely restructure our processes. Let’s explore how we executed these modifications and the steps you can take to establish a top-tier influencer program for your organization.

The obstacles to scaling an influencer marketing program

Internal roadblocks can hinder influencer marketing initiatives from progressing beyond the initial stages and achieving outstanding outcomes. Here are some prevalent challenges faced when scaling up:

  • Budget restrictions pose a significant obstacle. Despite 65% of marketers expressing confidence in their ability to articulate the value of influencer marketing and their leaders recognizing its business impact (Q1 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey), securing additional resources remains a challenge. Influencer ROI can often be less straightforward than that of other ROI forms, such as organic social—especially if campaigns focus on brand awareness or loyalty rather than leads, conversions, or revenue.
  • Inefficient processes hinder team productivity. The Q1 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey indicates that 39% of teams still depend on manual research to identify suitable influencers for their business. This reliance on manual research and campaign management can be tedious and slows progress considerably.
  • Most brands lack a dedicated influencer marketing team. The task of managing influencer relationships and campaigns typically falls on already overburdened social teams (or sometimes, on paid and digital teams). Even when marketing teams are unified around influencer marketing, it can create new collaborative challenges, such as inconsistent influencer communication and segmented planning and reporting.

It’s crucial to facilitate meaningful collaboration between teams and external partners by clarifying roles and responsibilities, and employing appropriate processes and tools to minimize manual tasks, enhance visibility, and uncover actionable data and insights.

Elevating your influencer strategy

In 2023, when we initiated our efforts, Sprout’s influencer marketing program primarily consisted of a few isolated activations and a small pool of talent. In 2024—acknowledging the increasing significance and advantages of cultivating a more robust influencer strategy—we advanced this initiative at Sprout. We established a strong foundation for a consistent and highly efficient program that we could scale.

A flow chart explaining how Sprout revamped our influencer marketing strategy in one year, going from a handful of ad hoc influencer activations in 2023 to influencer experiences embedded across the customer journey in 2024. We now have 32 unique creators in the program who created 125 pieces of content that drove 4 million impressions, 100,000 engagements and 500 leads.

Here are the steps you can take to scale your own program:

Embrace a center of excellence model

Prior to implementing a center of excellence model for influencer marketing activities, our activations only skimmed the surface of the possibilities. We lacked an organizational structure that connected influencer marketing to broader marketing and corporate objectives.

We consciously shifted from a disconnected effort solely managed by the social team to a comprehensive program that engages almost every area of the business. Our influencer center of excellence spans functions—from social, PR, and content to campaigns, demand, customer marketing, field, and channel. This approach allows us to integrate activations into social content, webinar programming, gifting opportunities, live events, and more. It requires complete buy-in from all teams, collaboratively supporting influencer marketing as part of each department’s core focus.

An Instagram Reel from creator Jayde Powell about being the social media correspondent at Social Media Week on behalf of Sprout

With numerous teams now involved, it became essential to define clear roles, responsibilities, and relationship management. Our influencer and creator roster grew steadily (including influencers based in Europe), necessitating a leader who could guide the initiative. Our Senior Social Media Strategist, Greg Rokisky, assumed this responsibility and elevated our influencer strategy significantly. Our new center of excellence concentrated on a core strategy permeating the marketing organization through a highly collaborative model. With everyone working in cohesion, we managed to create a 360° influencer experience—something we had never accomplished previously.

Apply it: As you expand your influencer program, adopting an integrated approach can help address inefficiencies and unify impact. A center of excellence model centralizes strategic decision-making—ensuring teams utilize data-driven insights to invest in the most effective influencer activations, oversee influencer relationships cohesively, and optimize resources. By aligning your teams, you can shift influencer marketing from a collection of isolated actions into a powerful machine that drives broader business objectives (which, in our situation, encompasses both reach and revenue).

Simplify influencer sourcing and relationship management

There are approximately 127 million influencers (and increasing) across social media today. Manually searching through millions of accounts to find suitable influencers for your brand is not only inefficient but also practically unfeasible—especially when factoring in the additional time required for vetting influencers for brand safety compliance.

The Sprout team utilizes our own Influencer Marketing platform to quickly identify the right partners. This tool enables you to locate suitable influencers, evaluate their content and audience, and manage approvals and performance—all in one platform. For instance, we refer to the newly launched Brand Safety Report and Brand Fit Score to identify ideal partners for genuine brand-influencer collaborations.

The Influencer Marketing platform interface where you can see the performance of an influencer across social platforms, including their growth rate, engagement rate and estimated fee. Plus, examples of their content.

We also use the platform for relationship management, from scaling outreach to managing and approving content submissions. Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social enables our cross-functional team to provide all stakeholders with visibility into current activations.

Apply it: If your team continues to rely on manual processes for influencer discovery and management, you risk lagging behind and giving your competitors the advantage. AI-enhanced solutions harness data to ensure partnerships yield substantial impact and that teams collaborate effectively.

Consider unconventional partnerships

At the start of 2024, as part of our initiative to amplify our marketing efforts, I challenged my team to produce bold and unexpected activations. This entailed appearing in spaces and manners where our competitors (and even our peers) weren’t present—and this certainly applied to our influencer marketing strategies. And the results were impressive.

One activation I take great pride in was Design Miami (Art Basel) 2024. We made significant waves during a notable cultural event that echoed across social platforms. Remarkably, we were the sole tech company present at the show. Our on-site influencer activations—such as involving Maxine the Fluffy Corgi—created moments of surprise and joy for event-goers and our social media audience. This influencer content was part of a more extensive strategy that also included a VIP customer gathering featuring experts in social and influencer marketing, along with a comprehensive landing page that highlighted real-time insights and trends from our Influencer Marketing and Social Listening solutions.

An Instagram Reel from Maxine the Fluffy Corgi and her owner in Miami during Art Basel donating $2,000 to a local animal shelter on behalf of Sprout Social

From all our participation at Art Basel to inviting Corporate Erin to guest on a webinar, to asking Vin Matano to act as our on-site correspondent at Dreamforce, we took substantial risks throughout the previous year.

For all these initiatives and more, we relied on our Influencer Marketing platform to pinpoint influencers who aren’t the typical creators chosen by B2B brands. These untraditional partnerships enabled us to penetrate industry echo chambers and connect with previously untapped audiences.

Apply it: When a brand adopts an unconventional approach to influencer marketing—be it a finance influencer discussing beauty expenditures or a fitness creator promoting productivity tools—it conveys innovation and cultural relevance. For brands aiming to expand their program and achieve broader business objectives, this strategy not only broadens their reach but also fosters new consumer relationships, driving both demand and long-term brand loyalty.

Contextualize influencer performance metrics

Almost 83% of marketers state that sponsored influencer content generates more conversions than organic posts from their brand account, according to the Q1 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey. It’s not just about reach or even engagements, but rather revenue-generating conversions.

At Sprout, we have utilized our platform to create actionable social media reporting dashboards that elevate social insights to essential business intelligence. In our reporting, we focus on key metrics that link social initiatives to pipeline creation—such as Earned Media Value (EMV), Cost Per Lead (CPL), and, of course, Leads Generated.

Given the influence that influencer marketing has on these KPIs, it’s vital that they be included in our reporting. Thanks to our Influencer Marketing platform, we’re capable of calculating reach, engagements, EMV, leads, and more.

The Sprout Influencer Marketing Signals Topic Report, where you can see overall performance of an influencer campaign

Apply it: To assess impact beyond basic metrics, your team must incorporate influencer results into the performance reports they create for you and communicate with cross-functional stakeholders. Monitoring these metrics not only links influencer marketing to key business metrics like revenue but also yields insights that guide future revenue-generation strategies. By leveraging advanced reporting solutions, teams can fine-tune their strategies and stimulate business growth.

Transform influencer marketing into a revenue source

Growing your influencer marketing program involves more than simply increasing the count of partnerships.

By adopting a center of excellence model, utilizing AI-powered discovery tools, and incorporating performance data into business reporting, brands can metamorphose influencer marketing from a fragmented set of actions into a revenue-generating powerhouse.

The essential ingredient is alignment—when teams work together effectively and invest in the appropriate influencers, the effect transcends mere social engagement. With the right strategy and tools, your influencer program can become a vital driver of brand recognition, trust, and measurable business growth.

Seeking additional resources to scale your strategy? Download our influencer marketing toolkit to discover the resources your team requires to initiate, budget, and build a strategy for ROI.

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