If the answer is no, the problem isn't who sits in the seat. It's how the work is organized.
Whoever Runs Your Instagram Also Runs Your Influencers
In many companies, the person who manages the influencers is the social media manager. The same person runs the company's own social account and the influencer channel.
I run into this a lot. On paper it looks efficient, because both jobs are about content.
In practice they are two different jobs. The brand account is about what goes out today. The influencer channel is contracts, payments, scripts, approvals, corrections, and dozens of conversations running at the same time.
The account has a deadline every day. The influencers get whatever time is left.
Most of the Week Goes to Operations
Look at what that week is made of. A script waiting for approval, a correction that has to be sent, a receipt that hasn't arrived, a file sent to the wrong thread.
All of that is operations, and today it can be automated.
What doesn't get done is the part the company actually needs: looking at what each influencer gives the brand.
A Marketing Manager Is There to Decide, Not to Guess
A marketing manager's job is to decide where the budget goes and to move it from one place to another.
To do that, you need information. Which influencer is worth renewing, on what terms, and what each one actually brings.
When the team is buried in operations, nobody gathers it. The decision gets made on a feeling.
A marketing manager should be deciding where the budget goes, not chasing receipts.
When In-House Is the Right Call
I'm not against in-house teams. In some cases they are the better choice.
One is when the company brings in a real professional who understands this field, and the budget to match. Someone whose work gives the company a clear and complete picture of the activity, in an organized and easy way.
The other is a large organization with many departments. There, someone from inside, who talks to finance, legal, and marketing as a colleague, can move things faster than an outside agency can.
The setup that works best for us is when the company has a marketing manager, or a dedicated influencer manager, who owns the channel.
They hand the work itself to the agency, and they keep the big decisions: where the budget goes and where the channel is heading.
That is a better use of an in-house person than answering emails, and it keeps the decisions with someone who knows the business.
Ask Any Agency Where the Money Goes
In many agencies the budget is a black box. The brand doesn't know how much of it reached the influencers, at what price, or how big the agency's cut was.
I grew up in agencies, and when we opened ours, we wanted to do it differently.
Our pricing is fully transparent. The brand sees exactly what it pays each influencer, and our fee follows from that.
That fee is for management. It isn't tied to results, and it isn't tied to hours.
What a Takeover Looks Like
When we replace an existing team, we start with a deep and organized handover.
If a person stays at the company, they become our point of contact. We work together as one team, and they connect us to the departments that matter.
The goal is to bring the whole organization into our system. We adjust it to each company, but the work always runs in one place, not across emails and unrelated spreadsheets.
That is what gives the marketing manager the full picture and the time to make the decisions that are theirs.
A marketing manager should be deciding where the budget goes, not chasing receipts.
Now tell me: who in your company can answer, in one minute, what each influencer costs, what they delivered, and whether you'd renew?
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 influencer campaigns without waiting until they fail to find out why.