10 influencer marketing tips from the minds behind the internet's biggest campaigns

TL;DR

• Investing in creators, their managers, and their agents long before a campaign brief ever enters the picture pays off in trust, speed, and better deals down the line.

• Writing an effective brief is less about what you put in and more about what you leave open. Giving creators the context they need and the creative latitude to run with it consistently outperforms over-scripted deliverables.

• When a creator organically engages with your brand, treating that moment as a starting point rather than a one-off can foster a long-term partnership with real, measurable impact.

• Pitching creative risks to leadership works best when you frame ideas as experiments with a clear hypothesis, and follow up with honest learnings whether they land or flop.

What separates an influencer campaign people remember from one they scroll past? According to the guests on our inaugural Made You Look expert session, it comes down to a handful of fundamentals that most brands still get wrong: the relationship, the brief, the creative latitude, and the willingness to say yes to a guy painted green running around LA.

Made You Look is our monthly live conversation series built for marketers who want more than surface-level trend reports. For episode one, Later's Social and Community Manager Kayla Monis sat down with two people who live and breathe this work: Hitakshi Shah, Senior Influencer Marketing Manager at Duolingo, and Sarah Whittle, founder of Unicorn Social and former head of social at brands like Crocs and Duolingo. Together, they broke down what really goes into creator marketing done right. 

Watch the full expert session on demand.

1. Treat creator relationships like the long game they are

Hitakshi's partnership with DJ John Summit started with a cold DM two years before the activation ever went live. Messaging him from the Duolingo account, in full Duo character, she opened with "Hi, king. How you doing?" Summit replied, "What's up, Duo? Are you trying to flirt right now?" She guilt-tripped him, as Duo would. "I was like, 'You've never invited me out to one of your shows,'" she recalled. Two years later, he finally did, and the resulting ClubSpace activation during Miami Music Week generated millions of views by tapping authentically into the EDM community.

Patience, it turns out, is one of the most underrated skills in influencer marketing, and relationship-building is the actual work. Packages, office invites, PR moments, and casual check-ins are the foundation that makes the eventual partnership feel earned. Sarah frames it simply: "People fundamentally like to feel special. If there's a creator you're a fan of and you can see alignment with the brand, why not slip into the DMs and build the relationship almost like you're dating?"

2. Extend your relationship-building beyond the creator

Hitakshi's point here is practical and underrated: the talent managers and agents who represent creators are relationships worth investing in, too. "A lot of times, I'll have a campaign going live in two weeks and I just need ten influencers to activate on it," she explained. "The people who are able to help me make that happen quickly are the talent managers and agents I've developed relationships with over the years. All of a sudden, they have so much trust in me and in the brand that they're like, 'You need ten influencers? We'll do this for even less than we normally would,' because of the relationship you've spent time cultivating." When you've built genuine trust with the people behind the page, they'll go to bat for you.

3. Use "story fitting" to think beyond obvious creator matches

Sarah introduced the concept of "story fitting," which is about finding creators whose content narrative, not just their audience demographics, aligns with your campaign. "A lot of our products aren't the only thing people use in their lives every day," she said. "Duolingo might be a minute or two of someone's day. Crocs might be a shoe in their closet they're not wearing every single day. So you can expand and zoom out a little bit — what fits the story? What fits the campaign outside of what just the data is telling you?"

She also offered a practical filter for creator selection: creators who only post lip-sync videos or trending audios are harder to activate from a brand POV. Look for creators who demonstrate original storytelling in their content, because those are the people who'll bring something real to your brief.

4. Build in perspectives beyond your own

Hitakshi uses burner accounts with different personas, including a 13-year-old Roblox kid and a millennial mom, to train her For You page to surface creators relevant to each segment of Duolingo's audience. Her own scroll is just one lens, and she knows it. "I want to diversify which influencers I work with by creating different burner accounts with different personas," she said. "By customizing my accounts to be from the mindset of people who could be Duolingo's audience, I'm able to find influencers that are relevant and trending in those niches. And I highly recommend getting your 13-year-old cousin or nephew to scroll your For You page for a little bit."

The underlying principle scales well for any team: ask your colleagues what they're watching, look at what younger family members are seeing, and deliberately diversify the inputs informing your creator sourcing.

5. Find the sweet spot between strategy, constraints, and passion

Sarah's Unicorn Idea Framework is built around three overlapping circles: brand strategy (what the brand needs to achieve), constraints (budget, timing, who you can realistically sign), and what the team actually wants to make. The magic, the unicorn, lives where all three overlap. "We all want to work with Zendaya, but she's not gonna fit into that circle," Sarah said. "And the last circle is what do you or the team actually want to do? Because ideas born out of passion are going to be so much stronger and more possible to achieve if you actually give a sh*t."

She illustrated it with a Crocs dark romance campaign. The strategy was to reach the BookTok community. The constraints ruled out an A-list celebrity. Sarah's personal passions, including comedy, writing, directing, and a genuine love of dark romance, pointed toward a Twilight parody with gaming creator Valkyrae. The video earned 14 million organic views, caught the attention of the Twilight franchise itself, and eventually led to a legitimate Twilight x Crocs collaboration. The framework works at any scale, she noted, and it's as useful for a small activation as it is for a major production.

6. Tap your whole team's passions as a sourcing resource

Hitakshi's marketing team at Duolingo did a simple exercise: everyone wrote down five communities or fandoms they genuinely care about. "Everyone is a fan of something, no matter what — whether you're in social, influencer, performance marketing, whatever," she said. "So we got a list of that, and now we have this resource of who to tap into when we need to hit a certain fandom or make content about something. Passion drives a lot of the best marketing ideas. It's a great time to be a fan."

From that list, they built a resource they could pull from whenever a campaign needed to tap into a specific niche. The person who's deeply into dating reality TV becomes your asset when you're building a show-inspired campaign. The person with a background in gaming becomes invaluable for anything in that space.

7. Write briefs that set the stage without scripting the performance

Both Sarah and Hitakshi pushed back on over-engineered briefs. A well-constructed open brief gives the creator what they need to understand the context, then trusts them to do what they're actually good at. "An open brief to me — I'm an improv nerd at heart — is like an open line to a scene," Sarah said. "You provide some guidelines: what's brand safe, the legal stuff you have to communicate. But then you let them go."

Hitakshi's framing is equally direct: "An open brief is giving them just enough information and then letting them take over the idea part. Creators have built their pages and their following because of their creativity. By adding talking points that don't naturally fit into their voice, you're just taking that away from them — and as a result, it's not gonna perform." Her own version in practice: invite the influencer to the Duolingo office, ask what they want to do with Duo, and approve on the spot. No multiple rounds of revisions. No grinding a piece of content down until the spontaneity is gone.

8. Think about what access you can offer alongside your budget

Both speakers returned to access as a currency that many brands overlook entirely. Hitakshi's framing is concrete: "Figure out what the creator really values and what access you could give them that's mutually beneficial. A lot of influencers don't work in standard offices. They need a working space, Wi-Fi, snacks. Why not just book out one of your conference rooms? 'Hey, this is your space for the day. Go create content, do whatever you want.' You're not getting anything out of it in that moment, but long term, they're more likely to work with you."

Sarah points to the broader principle: "Every social media professional should sit back and think about what access they have. HBO Max has celebrities, red carpets, and behind-the-scenes moments. Valkyrae didn't have an acting reel, but we gave her access to something that looked like a film. Access is really exciting for content creators." The question to ask is what this particular creator actually values, and what you already have that you haven't thought to offer.

9. Learn to "yes and" the moments you didn't plan for

A creator dressing up as Duo for Halloween, painted entirely green and wearing a Minion mask, posted a video that earned five million views before Duolingo even knew about it. Their response was to reach out, ask if he'd do a paid version on a trending audio, and turn a one-off moment into a long-term partnership that now generates content every month. The follow-up campaign earned 15 million impressions.

Sarah calls this "yes and-ing," borrowed from improv. "It may disrupt your content calendar. It may disrupt the day-to-day. But yes-and-ing a moment is really fun," she said. "These layup moments all have an emotional truth, and your opportunity is to play — how can you take it and heighten or scale the story?" The other side of this, as Hitakshi noted, is infrastructure: "Having a stellar social listening team or tool is so important, so you can be on top of these moments as they happen online." If you're not monitoring what creators and your community are already saying, you'll miss the window entirely.

10. Pitch ideas to leadership like a hypothesis, not a permission slip

Getting leadership to say yes to creative risks is a shared pain point across every social and influencer team. Hitakshi's approach is to frame the ask as an experiment: "Say: these are the patterns I'm seeing, this is my hypothesis, and here's how I would set it up for success for this specific company. Speak with conviction. Once you get that buy-in, communicate your learnings, whether it was a flop or a win." Her team even has a term for the latter: the "favorite flop." "What leadership respects is when you own what went wrong and come back with learnings," she said.

Sarah's test is more visceral. "If you really feel that an idea is powerful, I always ask: if this does well or badly, what does my leadership meeting look like? Am I willing to defend my idea? Are you willing to sit with me in front of the CMO and defend our idea? It very quickly separates the ideas you actually believe in from the ones you don't." When something doesn't land, the learning is usually more durable than the lesson from a win. As Sarah put it: "Every post is an audition for the algorithm. Some are going to catch and some are not, but we can strategically come in with a strong POV and a strong hypothesis."

It all comes down to this:

Influencer marketing that actually works is built on the same things every good creative relationship is built on: time, trust, genuine interest, and the willingness to let go of the script. The campaigns people remember are almost always the ones where someone made room for a real human to do something unexpected.

If you want to go deeper on any of this, including building your influencer strategy, structuring your brief process, or figuring out how to measure what actually matters, schedule a strategy session with our team.