What should you look out for to signal that your influencer program has grown beyond the realms of in-house management? If you spend too long managing creators, are unsure about ROI, or are looking to scale with ‘always on’ campaigns, it’s worth considering. Plans to expand internationally, increasingly complex compliance, and a team stuck between growing and keeping the ship afloat are equally good signals that it might be time to change how you operate.
It’s a common assumption that managing a campaign is easier than growing it. One of the first signs that you need an agency on board is when that statement becomes untrue. When managing your campaigns becomes a struggle but the results are fantastic, it’s a key indicator that you need assistance!
Managing everything that comes with a growing program can become a matter of time instead of talent. Even the best teams simply run out of hours in the day!
Full transparency… not every brand needs the help of an agency. In-house management works perfectly fine if you’re managing up to around 15 creators, you have a clear niche and only run occasional campaigns, and your reporting is simple.
If you’ve moved on from the scenarios above, then here are 7 questions you should ask yourself to evaluate whether or not you need to bring an agency onboard.
1. Do You Spend More Time Managing Creators Than Growing the Program?
To reiterate, brands don’t hire agencies because influencer marketing isn’t working. They hire them because it’s working so well that they’ve outgrown managing it in-house. So what does it look like practically?
- If you’re juggling anything more than 15 creators.
- Product sends become more frequent.
- Contracts, approvals, and invoices start piling up.
- Reporting takes longer every month.
Even with a great roster of influencers, finding enough time to manage them all can start to feel impossible. Does this sound familiar?
Bringing in additional expertise, systems, and resources can make it much easier to scale. But first, take stock of where you’re at with your program.
2. Are You Struggling to Prove ROI?
It’s easy to report on engagement and impressions, but when reporting gets intricate, it’s quite challenging to start proving why influencer marketing is valuable to a business. As budgets grow, these are the questions stakeholders start asking about influencer performance when it comes to a crossover conversation between budgeting and reporting:
- How many sales were generated?
- Which creators are driving new customer acquisition?
- Which partnerships are genuinely incremental?
This is also where the line between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing starts to blur.
Brands are moving away from one-off sponsored posts and towards longer-term creator partnerships supported by affiliate tracking. By moving on from measuring success using engagement alone, they can see which creators are driving measurable revenue over time.
When it comes to ROI, an agency will help connect an influencer with the corresponding affiliate tracking, making it easier to understand how creators have contributed to overall performance.
3. Are You Ready to Scale?
One thing that’s often overlooked is creator recruitment. Finding one great creator is relatively straightforward. Finding another 100 creators who genuinely align with your brand can become challenging. Established agencies have existing publisher and creator relationships, which means they can often identify the right partners much faster than brands building everything from scratch.
Let’s continue to use the scenario based on an easy-to-manage model consisting of 10–15 creators. Moving to even 50 creators requires a different operating model altogether. In most businesses, efficiencies lie in automation, but when it comes to dealing with influencers, there’s only so much you can do to automate processes. Managing more creators means more communication, extra campaign coordination and increased reporting. All of which brings more opportunities for things to slip through the cracks, unfortunately.
Dealing with an agency means getting access to their established processes, relationship management, and dedicated resources to make scaling seamless. For example, PartnerCentric’s Fuse Precision connects network tracking data to your source of truth. Acceleration Partners have APVision, a proprietary reporting platform. Rather than building those systems from scratch internally, brands can often accelerate growth by using an agency that’s already managing programs at scale.
4. Do You Plan on Moving from Ad hoc Campaigns to ‘Always-On’ Campaigns?
This is one of the key differentiators between DIY and getting agency assistance. If you’re solely focused on campaign-based marketing, whether it’s for a product launch or a seasonal promotion, for example, campaigns will perform well, but it’ll often come with more demand.
Before you know it, you’ll be onboarding new creators each month, trialling new partnership opportunities and trying to maintain relationships every day. This is all besides campaign ideation and content delivery! That level of activity needs constant time and attention.
5. Are You Expanding Globally?
If you’re planning on reaching new markets, then it goes without saying that your program will become more complex. Unless you have the expertise in-house to understand varying markets, consumer behaviors, and disclosure requirements for different countries, it’ll pay to have a seasoned agency onboard.
6. Is Compliance Becoming a Headache?
Compliance becomes more prevalent and important as your influencer program matures. This comes into play when dealing with the following aspects:
- Disclosure requirements
- Usage rights
- Contracts
- Brand safety
- Content messaging
Growing your influencer marketing program will come with more responsibility to ensure compliance conditions are met, and having processes and systems in place will be critical.
For brands managing hundreds of partnerships each year, those processes often become difficult to maintain without additional support.
7. Is Your Team at Capacity?
We’ve all seen this play out. Teams are stretched and feel pushed to their limits—there is a fine balance between having the right amount of resources and becoming overstaffed. This is not a question about capability but capacity.
Hiring an influencer agency doesn’t replace your in-house expertise, it just allows your team members to focus on high-level work and growing the brand without compromising on quality or feeling like they’re constantly under the pump.
What to Look For When Hiring an Influencer Agency:
- Measurement
This is one of the more crucial points to base your judgement on. If your measurement requirements are simple and clearcut, then you may not need an agency to help you. However, as your program matures, you’ll become more reliant on measurement tools that track incrementality, revenue and acquisition accurately and are easy to understand.
The way you measure success also changes as your program matures. Early on, impressions, clicks and engagement are often enough. As budgets grow, leadership teams start asking tougher questions around customer acquisition, revenue, incrementality and return on investment. That’s where more sophisticated measurement becomes essential.
Fuse Incrementality is a great example of a measurement tool created by PartnerCentric that uses session-level data to score publishers based on their ability to drive new customers rather than simply taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway.
- Influencer and affiliate capability
A close second consideration to measurement is to look for an agency that combines influencer management with affiliate expertise and performance measurement to help you understand how creator partnerships contribute to overall program growth. The line between influencer and affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly blurred, so now more than ever, brands are building long-term creator partnerships supported by affiliate links rather than treating it as an entirely separate channel. An agency should be responsible for understanding and working through these nuances and delivering ongoing optimization.
- Dedicated account management
Consistency is the key to building a great relationship with an agency. You’ll more than likely get a feel for whether an agency is the right fit straight off the bat by your first few conversations.
Getting to know an agency’s products and services are important, but you should also ask about who exactly will be managing your account. Do they have dedicated strategists available? How often will you meet? Who’s responsible for campaign optimization? For instance, Gen3 Marketing has a team dedicated to evolving trends, and feeds this back into your campaigns.
An agency’s client list can look impressive but ultimately, a dedicated, consistent client/agency relationship has a bigger impact on your results.
- Reporting
Ask a prospective agency for examples of what their reporting looks like. Data can be represented beautifully, but if it doesn’t clarify what’s going on then it’s really no use to anyone. An example of a good report should explicitly tell you what the results show, why those results were garnered and what actions should be taken next. You’re looking for a certain level of transparency when dealing with an agency.
Transitional Steps When Bringing an Agency Onboard
The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. The transition processes at notable agencies like PartnerCentric are designed to be gradual and seamless. Existing creator relationships can often remain in place while the agency takes over campaign management, reporting and optimisation behind the scenes.
Expect to spend time during onboarding sharing historical campaign data, introducing your brand guidelines and agreeing on reporting expectations. The more context you can provide upfront, the easier it is for an agency to build on what’s already working rather than reinventing your program.
A good agency won’t change your strategy overnight, but they will spend time understanding your business before recommending improvements that support your long-term goals.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire an Influencer Agency?
This is one of the biggest reasons why brands are hesitant to hire an agency. There is a perception that agencies come with a big price tag because there are overheads to cover. Of course, if you’re just looking at expenses, then managing influencer marketing internally will appear cheaper.
Just like any business model, you have to consider the full picture. Here are a few things that in-house management companies are most likely covering:
- Internal salaries
- Creator management software
- Reporting tools
- Training
- Recruitment
- Opportunity cost
An agency can replace most of these costs. You’re investing in expertise, tools, established processes, and additional capacity for a growing program.
For some brands, that investment isn’t justified. For others, it creates enough operational efficiency and performance improvement to outweigh the cost. There will always be trade-offs when it comes to in-house overheads and time-saving.
The decision should always come back to your business goals rather than agency fees alone.
Should You Hire an Influencer Marketing Agency?
Now that we’ve covered all the necessities, it’s worth to note that bringing an agency onboard doesn’t mean you’re giving up control of your program or your internal team. Partnering with an agency will give your team better visibility and more time to focus on strategy and growth rather than admin.
Remember, making the move isn’t when you feel like your influencer marketing efforts are failing; it’s the opposite… make the move when your results are great, and it’s clear that you’re ready to scale. The goal isn’t to outsource influencer marketing. It’s to build a program that’s capable of growing alongside your business, with the right people, processes, and measurement in place to support long-term success.