Software and SaaS brands put almost all of their technology effort into the product.
The product team uses modern tools, automates what it can, and measures every release. Then the same company starts working with influencers, and the process goes back to the old way.
Budgets are not organized, and the people working with them end up confused. Account management is chaotic. A lot of time goes into negotiating each deal on its own.
That is what I see in the software and SaaS brands I meet and work with.
Budget in a Spreadsheet, Contract in an Inbox
One person holds the budget in a spreadsheet. Another holds the creator list in a different spreadsheet. The contract is in an email thread from three months ago, the brief is in a shared document that has two versions, and the payment is waiting for someone to confirm that the video was actually delivered.
Nobody did anything wrong. Each person is doing their part. The problem is that no one can see the whole picture, so every question turns into a full investigation: how much is left, who is signed, what was promised, what is still missing.
This is expensive in a way that doesn’t show up on any invoice. It is hours of work by capable people on things a system should answer in seconds.
$1.2M a Year, and Still 6% of the Budget
I meet brands that spend $1.2M a year on influencers, and that is still about 6% of their total marketing budget.
It’s a shame, because I see in one of our client’s monthly reports that we present every month that influencer activity brings a lower cost per MQL than paid campaigns on LinkedIn. Yes, really, when it is managed properly.
“Managed properly” is the part that matters. When the process is chaotic, the results are scattered across files and inboxes. Nobody can put one clear report in front of the CEO, and moving the budget away from a channel that feels safe is already a hard sell for a marketing lead.
So the channel stays at 6%, not because it doesn’t work, but because it can’t be proven fast enough.
Every Teenager With an iPhone Is a Creator
Influencer marketing used to be a world of people. Personal relationships, connections in the industry, someone who knew someone.
Today every teenager with an iPhone is a content creator. The number of creators is nothing like it was, and you can’t run that on personal connections.
A marketing lead who still works the old way has two choices: spend all day on messages or stay with the same few creators they already know. Neither one scales.
Managing influencers is no longer managing people. It’s managing an operation.
One System, Seven Things That Stop Getting Lost
When we work like a machine, the tracking of deliverables doesn’t get lost, and nothing falls through the cracks on the way, because we manage everything in one system.
Software teams already know this logic. You wouldn’t track bugs in an email thread, and influencer work deserves the same treatment.
This is what I mean by one system. Each of these has one place, not three:
- Budget and approvals. Who approved what, and what is left.
- Contracts, rates and usage rights. So nobody searches an old thread to find what was agreed.
- Creators and their status. Who is in negotiation, who is signed, who is waiting for a brief.
- Briefs and script approvals. With the date and the version that was approved.
- Deliverables. What was promised, what was delivered, and the link.
- Data collection and analysis. Performance data gathered and analyzed in one place, so decisions on budget and creators rest on data, not on feel.
- Payments. Matched to the deliverable they belong to.
The first benefit is time. The people on the team stop chasing and start deciding, and negotiation gets shorter because the history of each creator is in front of you.
The second benefit is the report. That is also why I can show a report every month and compare the cost per MQL of influencer activity to paid campaigns on LinkedIn. The comparison only works when the data is in one place.
Trust Shortens a Slow Sale
In the combination between B2B and SaaS, nobody clicks a link and buys the same day. Sales take months and run through a sales team.
That is why the real work happens before the sales conversation, in awareness and preference. Being top of mind (TOM) matters, but in SaaS the potential customer is rarely starting from zero. They are probably already evaluating several services and already know your competitors. The question is not who they have heard of. It is who they prefer.
This is where professional creators succeed in creating preference. A creator with real credibility, whose audience trusts them, shows the product helping them: they demonstrate it on their own business, on a real workflow. The audience watches it work for someone like them. That is what turns a product on the shortlist into the preferred one.
Preference built this way pays off later. More of the right people arrive as MQLs, already leaning your way, and the sales process, which in software is slow anyway, moves faster.
One thing to set before the campaign starts is a branded search baseline. It is usually the first place preference shows up, so it is worth saving before launch, even though the history can be pulled later.
A Report You Can Explain in Two Minutes
When everything sits in one system, the monthly report stops being a project. It becomes a view.
The marketing lead can show what was spent, what was delivered, and what the creators moved, in the same format every month. Month over month, they see which creators are worth another round and which are not, and they don’t need to rebuild the story from scratch each time.
That is the report that makes a CEO comfortable with a bigger share of the budget. Not a bigger promise, a clearer picture. A channel that can be explained in two minutes gets approved faster than one that needs a long meeting.
Choosing Creators by Feel Doesn’t Scale
There is one more reason the old way breaks. When the number of creators was small, a marketing lead could choose by feel and by who they knew.
With thousands of creators in every niche, choosing by feel means choosing the loudest, the most familiar, or the one who answered first. The data to choose better exists, but only if the history of past work, the rates and the results live somewhere you can search.
This is also where the operation matters most. A good system doesn’t replace the marketing lead’s judgment. It gives the information to use it faster.
Three Questions Your Team Should Answer in Minutes
Ask your team three questions.
- What did we spend on influencers this quarter?
- Which deliverables are still outstanding?
- Which creator brought us a qualified lead?
If any of them takes more than a few minutes to answer, you are still working the old way.
The fix doesn’t have to start with a big project. Pick the one piece that costs you the most time, put it in one place, and add the next piece after that.
Swipe Right on a Creator
Imagine a world where marketing leads choose creators the way people choose on Tinder. Swipe right, swipe left.
We’re on our way there, faster than you think.
Details soon.
Managing influencers is no longer managing people. It’s managing an operation.
I’m Nitsan Landman, CEO and founder of Creator Lab, an agency that plans and runs influencer campaigns for brands around the world. I write about how to run creator campaigns without waiting until they fail to find out why.