How Global Brands Overcome Challenges to Scaling Influencer Marketing

As an enterprise marketer, you know that a strong creator marketing program has become the bare minimum for industry leaders. If you’re not seriously investing in creators, you’ll lose touch with consumers, and watch helplessly as nimble, creator-led brands steal the spotlight—and your market share.
But good creator marketing requires more than just adding a line item to the budget and outsourcing the hard work. It’s about fully integrating creators into your global marketing strategy, and building the infrastructure to set up your various teams for success.

Of course, scaling an organized, effective creator marketing program across all your brands, teams, and regions is easier said than done. Let’s break down the five biggest challenges that brands face when scaling their programs, and see how the top enterprise players overcome them. 

Challenge #1: Managing Your Program Across Brands, Teams, and Regions

Running a global influencer marketing program can feel like herding cats—if those cats were scattered across different continents, spoke different languages, and had different priorities. The metaphor’s breaking down a bit, but you get the point: it’s chaos.

Without a centralized system, you’re not just managing chaos—you’re multiplying it.

Now, imagine every aspect of your program centralized in one place: a shared global creator CRM, enterprise-level reporting, and a seamless communication platform that gives your international HQ complete visibility into the entire operation. 

• Unify around a single way of working: With a shared network of creators, a consistent means of communicating with this network, and a standard workflow for managing creator campaigns, you can ensure high standards and a unified approach across your organization.
• Drive consistency with standardized reporting: Compare apples to apples. A standardized way of measuring success across your enterprise is essential to understanding the true impact of your creator program.
• Customize your branding: Customize your creator onboarding, communications, and reporting for all of your sub-brands. 

Nestlé Health Science nailed these steps by rolling out a centralized platform that kept tabs on creator marketing across multiple brands and regions. The result? Boosted efficiency, consistency, and the ability to scale successes worldwide.

Challenge #2: Efficiently Growing Your Creator Community

You want a diverse, loyal, and growing community of creators repping your band. But with millions of potential voices out there, it’s a bit like dating—except you’re swiping left on thousands of profiles, hoping to avoid the one with bad vibes (or worse, bad press).

This is where AI-powered search and discovery tools come in.

• Save time and money with faster search: An AI-enabled platform can help you find the right creators quickly, via semantic search and smart recommendations based on folks you’ve already worked with and love.
• Find creators who are already talking about your brand: The most effective creator partners are usually the ones already posting about your brand organically. AI-powered software ensures that you never miss a mention.
• Protect your brand with safer search: In a world where one wrong move can spark a viral scandal, AI-driven brand safety checks act as your personal security detail, scanning a creator’s content for red flags. They also vet followers to ensure you’re not fooled by inflated numbers or bots.

Want to learn more about mastering creator search? Check out our comprehensive guide.

Challenge #3: Turning Data into Intelligence

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Most enterprise brands are drowning in data, but struggle to turn it into intelligence they can actually use.

The solution? A centralized system that not only collects data, but also makes sense of it. Here’s how the latest tech turns creator data into creator intelligence:

• Monitor community retention and loyalty: Advanced analytics platforms help you track engagement and performance over time, making it a breeze to spot trends and take action.
• Benchmark competition: Want to know how you stack up against the competition? Top brands use centralized systems to benchmark their performance against the industry leaders. With these insights, you can finally stop guessing and start setting realistic goals.
• Measure the full impact of your program: With the right tech, you can link every dollar spent to real outcomes, giving you a complete picture of your campaign’s effectiveness. 

Renowned agency Burson has used these capabilities to drive meaningful impact for their enterprise clients.

“We’re able to track everything efficiently, monitor what’s working well and what’s not, and optimize those campaigns,” Burson’s Shakira Akinjobi said. 

Challenge #4: Protecting Your Creator Data

Your creator data isn’t just sensitive—it’s the lifeblood of your creator marketing strategy. A data breach can damage your reputation faster than a TikTok craze goes viral. That’s why data security and compliance need to be the bedrock of your creator marketing operations.

Here’s how top enterprise brands are securing their creator programs with the right software:

• Implement multi-layered security strategies: It’s not enough to rely on basic encryption. You need to adopt multi-layered security approaches that include everything from advanced encryption to intrusion detection systems and secure access controls.
• Ensure compliance with global standards: Enterprise brands adhere to rigorous standards like GDPR, CCPA, and other international regulations. By integrating these compliance measures into your operations, you don’t just avoid fines—you build trust with creators and audiences alike.
• Conduct regular security audits and assessments: Regular audits are essential to maintaining the integrity of your data security measures. By continuously assessing and updating security protocols, your organization can stay ahead of potential threats. 

Ensuring your data is locked down isn’t just about avoiding a crisis—it’s about maintaining the integrity of your brand, and the trust you’ve worked so hard to build.

Challenge #5: Integrating Creator Marketing into the Rest of Your Business

Your creator marketing can’t exist in a silo. To make an impact, it needs to play nicely with the rest of your business.

That means connecting your creator marketing data and insights with everything else—your back-end system, BI tools, and entire marketing mix—so that all the pieces of your marketing puzzle fit together seamlessly.

• Export your creator marketing data: Your creator marketing data can be leveraged in tools utilized across your organization.
• Enrich your system of record: Add first-party consumer, subscription, and sales data into an owned network, so that all of your critical data is in one place.
• Enable integrations that are essential to your business: Your creator marketing software should align with the systems that you already use to conduct creator marketing, like affiliate platforms and payment providers. 

If your creator marketing is still out there on its own, it’s time to bring it into the fold. Connect the dots, integrate the data, and watch as your marketing efforts reach new heights.

Scaling an influencer marketing program at the enterprise level is a complex challenge, but when done right, it can deliver significant rewards.

As you evaluate your current creator marketing strategy, think about how these capabilities can help you overcome the obstacles that may be holding you back. With the right approach, your creator marketing can become a powerful engine for growth, and a crucial component in helping you lead your industry.