Influencer Marketing Strategies: Find Your Superstars Before You Scale

Kristen Althoff, five-plus years into influencer marketing and currently leading the program at Mary Ruth's, lays out a practical framework for scaling a creator program without burning budget on the wrong people. Her core argument: start slow, identify your superstars first, then copy and paste what works rather than blasting outreach to hundreds of influencers at once.

For Mary Ruth's, niche-specific creators, dietitians, nurses, pharmacists, and health-focused stay-at-home moms, consistently outperform generalist accounts because their followers trust them for a specific reason. Kristen also makes a point worth noting: one nurse working does not mean every nurse will work, so results depend on the actual audience, not just the creator category.

Her influencer marketing strategies include running a core group of proven Instagram performers alongside a smaller test budget for new channels like YouTube and food creators. Once the formula is dialed in, she recommends handing it off to agencies to scale reach without stretching a small internal team.

Watch to see exactly how she structures that test-versus-proven split in practice.