When someone asks me how do I get started in influencer marketing, the first thing I’m going to tell them is to get educated. 

There’s a massive influx of brands who want to participate in the creative economy right now, because word’s out, it can be highly effective. But for every success story, there’s gonna be another brand that tells you they got burned. 

Now from what I can tell, there’s a common theme that runs amongst the brands who got burned in their efforts and that is they didn’t do their research. They didn’t understand the use cases for influencer marketing. They didn’t understand best practices for generating the best creative or how to guarantee ROI from their influencer program, which, by the way, can come in many forms and directly attributed sales is just one of them. 

So before embarking on your first influencer effort:

• Read up on the subject
• Talk to an expert
• Familiarize yourself with trends in the space 

Once you have an understanding of what you can expect to get out of an influencer marketing program — as well as its limitations — then you need to determine if you have the bandwidth.

Do you have the tools and can you put together a strategy to achieve your goals? In some cases, a self-service platform will suit your needs, but because of how fast this industry is moving and how nuanced and effective influencer marketing program can be, you may want to enlist the help of a full service partner.

Here at BENlabs. In addition to our incredible execution team, we are working with bespoke technology, advanced AI that’s helping us to drive community and content strategies at scale for our partners. If this is something you’re interested in, we’d love to help you out.