What does an influencer marketing manager do? 8 core responsibilities & 40+ hour breakdown

“What does an influencer marketer actually do for 40 hours a week?”

You're far from alone in asking this. It's a question that Superfiliate gets from brands all the time–especially when their creator program is young.

An influencer marketing manager is responsible for sourcing, managing, and optimizing creator partnerships to drive measurable growth and ROI. They handle daily communication with creators, campaign execution, performance tracking, and long-term creator program strategy.

But founders and CMOs can be hesitant to make that first influencer marketing hire. Often, they're not sure what the day-to-day of the role looks like–or whether there's even enough tasks to fill a regular workweek.

Spoiler: there certainly is–and more.

By the time you finish this post, you'll understand why influencer marketing is a full-time role at any brand who is serious about building revenue-driving creator programs and partnership marketing strategies.

As a bonus, we're also throwing in an audit template to help you understand how influencer marketing tasks are currently being handled at your org–and how to make that first hire!

Let's jump in!

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The case for hiring a dedicated influencer marketer

When your creator program is just getting started, it feels like a manageable side project for your social team, CMO, or even a founder themselves.

A few hours spent juggling spreadsheets to manage gifting, creator outreach, and affiliate links/discount codes…that's easy enough to fit into someone's workflow, right?

But here's what business leaders overlook: As the momentum builds, so does the complexity. More creators means more deliverables, and more performance metrics to track and make sense of.

This leaves a founder trying to handle creator communications on top of an endless to-do list, and response times start slowing down.

Your social coordinator is struggling to motivate creators to drive sales, so revenue drops off.

Your CMO doesn't have hours every week to dedicate to sourcing, and program growth stagnates.

Any of these scenarios sound familiar? 😬

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“If you or someone on the team is already dedicating time to influencer marketing in general, you should be thinking about bringing on your first hire.”

Sarah Crow
Head of Creator Strategy

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Sarah explains why your first influencer marketing hire should always be a manager, not a coordinator 👇

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At Superfiliate, the biggest growth blocker we see at up-and-coming brands is the absence of a dedicated owner for influencer/affiliate marketing programs. There may be a strategy for growth, but no one has enough time to act on it.

And when nobody owns your creator marketing strategy, programs plateau at "good enough" instead of becoming the serious revenue drivers they could be.

Make no mistake: Effective influencer marketing easily fills a 40-hour work week.

It's not a side project. It's a dedicated strategy that will end up as a cost center if you don't staff it correctly.

When you break it down, a high-performing influencer marketer fills every day, week, and month with partnership marketing activities that directly impact growth.

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What does a full-time influencer marketing manager actually do?

So, what are the responsibilities that make up an influencer marketer's role? How much effort should go into sourcing creators versus planning influencer campaigns and affiliate partnerships, for example?

To answer this question from the opener, Superfiliate's Creator Strategy team has mapped out a typical full-time influencer marketing role at a D2C brand. The following breakdown shows how an influencer marketer should divide their time between tasks every month for the best results:

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Recommended monthly breakdown
of influencer marketing tasks

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A full-time influencer marketing manager divides their time across eight core responsibilities:

• Creator Relationship Management (25-30%): The largest time investment goes to daily communication, milestone celebrations, and maintaining personal connections with creators. Never forget: Influencer marketing is a relationship game!
• ‍Creator Sourcing & Vetting (20-22%): Creator discovery and partnership vetting has few workarounds; for the most part, it's a time-intensive process that consumes many hours each week–even for highly experienced marketers.
• Performance Analysis & Reporting (15-18%): Robust tracking and data storytelling transforms boring metrics into insights that justify program value to C-suite, who often lack influencer marketing context. Time spent on reporting will fluctuate, depending on what data you need to pull and whether you are using an influencer/affiliate platform that offers in-depth analytics.
• ‍Campaign Planning & Execution (12-15%): High-performing influencer campaigns and ****partnerships require deep understanding of both brand objectives and creator strengths to ensure that the right partnerships receive budget to drive measurable business results.
• Affiliate Program Management (10-12%): The oversight of discount codes, affiliate links, and program hygiene might not sound glamorous, but it's the operational foundation that keeps creator programs running smoothly.
• ‍Cross-Team Collaboration (8-10%): Strong internal communication with other teams is key for influencer marketers to plan and optimize major campaigns, such as the summer season or Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
• ‍Strategic Planning (6-8%): While formal planning might only happen on a quarterly basis, it requires constant mental bandwidth from the influencer marketer to optimize program performance in real-time.
• ‍Administrative Tasks (4-6%): Essential operational work like payments, contracts, and tech management will scale significantly as programs grow from dozens to hundreds of creators.

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Now that we’ve done a high-level overview, let’s dive into each of these task categories in more depth to understand what’s really involved to move the needle.

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8 influencer marketing responsibilities—broken down

Creator Relationship Management

This isn't just about answering a few quick messages here and there–creator communications are the backbone of any influencer marketing role.

Picture this: Every morning on the job brings with it a flood of DMs and emails that accumulated overnight or over the weekend. These messages range from:

• Creator outreach inquiries
• Contract questions and negotiations
• Content submissions requiring approval
• Program-related queries
• Technical issues and troubleshooting

And honestly, that's just the very basics to keep your program running.

A skilled influencer marketer thinks of your creator program as a brand within your brand. This means putting ongoing effort into maintaining engagement across the entire creator network to maximize revenue–not just your top performers.

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Key relationship-building activities include:

• Creating regular newsletters for creator updates
• Sharing product updates and launches
• Rewarding high-performing creators with bonuses
• Scaling relationships across the entire network
• Retaining top talent through strategic incentives

Regular 1:1 check-ins with key partners help influencer marketers to focus on strategic relationship building, addressing concerns, and identifying opportunities for deeper collaboration. Personal touches, like celebrating major life milestones like weddings with flowers or gifts, are what turn transactional deals into long-term partnerships that drive serious revenue for your brand.

It's not just about "showing up". It's about showing in the right time, the right place, and in the right way for your creators to show them how much you value them.

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Creator Sourcing & Vetting

Frequency: Daily inbound reviews, ongoing strategic sourcing campaigns

Although we think of creator sourcing as manually scrolling on socials or using discovery tools or databases to find creators, there's a serious feedback loop at work that determines the success of these efforts.

Your influencer marketer's weekly sourcing activities include:

• Tracking brand mentions across platforms
• Identifying potential partnership opportunities
• Discovering UGC opportunities
• Informing immediate outreach strategies
• Planning long-term program development

And if there's a particular creator in your program that's performing really well, a skilled influencer marketer will try to understand what traits, content styles, or niche is behind this success. They will know what type of profile to look for and where to focus their efforts, rather than mindlessly sending outreach and hoping for the best.

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"You should go to [a creator's] Instagram and try and determine what traits are performing well for them. Is it because they are always posting Stories, or is it because they're in a certain niche, like a yoga instructor? It's not all creator sourcing; it's also really analyzing these creators to find out what's working and why they're performing."

Kaitlyn Tarr
Creator Program Strategist

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It's common for brands to underestimate just how much time they need to invest in creator sourcing for their program. In fact, it's the #1 reason why fledgling programs abandon influencer marketing altogether. Even for brands with mature programs that field a lot of inbound requests, creator sourcing and vetting is still essential to ensure ongoing program growth.

Remember: If you're a small brand with less recognition, you aren't going to benefit from inbound requests at first. This means you'll need to invest a LOT of time early on in finding and reaching out to appropriate creators–some would call it a full-time job!

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Performance Analysis & Reporting

Frequency: Weekly tracking, monthly comprehensive reporting, quarterly strategic analysis

Performance analysis and reporting consumes 15-18% of monthly time, transforming performance metrics into actionable insights that justify program value to leadership.

This isn't just pulling numbers that gather dust in a spreadsheet—it's organizing and distributing these insights across the broader marketing team to inform decision-making. The data collected here feeds directly into monthly reporting and quarterly strategic planning, so it needs to be reliable and consistent.

Weekly performance tracking includes:

• Revenue data analysis and trending
• Commission tracking and affiliate payout calculations
• Creator content performance metrics
• Data organization for broader marketing team
• Performance insights distribution to inform decision-making

Monthly internal reporting compiles:

• Performance summaries by creator and campaign
• ROI analysis with cost-per-acquisition metrics
• Revenue insights and attribution modeling
• Strategic recommendations for program optimization
• Executive-level program justification materials

Quarterly business reviews include:

• Comprehensive performance comparisons across quarters
• Strategic planning input based on data trends
• Goal-setting for upcoming quarters
• Program scaling recommendations

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Campaign Planning & Execution

Frequency: Daily content reviews, weekly campaign coordination and brief creation

Campaign planning and execution requires 12-15% of monthly time, focusing on comprehensive campaign brief creation and coordination with internal marketing calendars.

Campaign planning activities include:

• Defining campaign objectives in line with broader marketing strategy
• Establishing content guidelines and brand standards
• Setting realistic timelines and milestone deadlines
• Coordinating content deliverables
• Managing campaign budget allocation

For upfront paid influencer content, coordinating the timing of these campaigns with your internal marketing calendar requires careful planning and communication. Having your influencer marketer do this on a weekly basis ensures creator content is amplifying rather than conflicting with broader marketing initiatives (A.K.A that paid partnerships don't end up getting lost amid a big product launch!)

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Affiliate Program Management

Frequency: Daily technical support, weekly hygiene maintenance, monthly and quarterly audits

Broader affiliate program management, aside from the creator relationships themselves, includes troubleshooting any technical issues creators are experiencing with your platform or with discount codes or affiliate links, as well as monitoring for any fraudulent activity.

In other words, it's all about maintaining the technical infrastructure that supports your creator partnerships and commission structures.

Unless you're running your affiliate program completely out of spreadsheets (NOT recommended for scalability!) Your influencer marketing manager is also responsible for managing your software platform and communicating with your Customer Success Manager. This daily/weekly touchpoint ensures you're maximizing your platform's potential and resolving any creator-facing issues quickly.

Weekly program hygiene includes:

• Top performer check-ins and optimization
• Approving/declining new program applications
• Monitoring for code leakage and fraud
• Platform maintenance and updates
• Creator-facing issue resolution

Monthly/quarterly program audits involve:

• Reviewing which creators are driving conversions
• Removing inactive partners from the program
• Re-engaging stagnant affiliates with new incentives
• Analyzing partnership productivity trends
• Optimizing commission structures based on performance

This maintenance work ensures that an influencer marketer's time and resources are focusing on active, productive partnerships, rather than letting inactive relationships accumulate.

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Cross-Team Collaboration

Frequency: Daily social team sync, weekly cross-functional collaboration

Daily coordination with your internal social media team/manager ensures that influencer content aligns with your brand's broader social strategy and upcoming campaigns. This helps to prevent conflicting messaging and ensures cohesive brand representation across channels.

As is the case in any business, collaboration can be tricky to implement and takes a lot of time and effort to maintain. Holding a weekly sync ensures teams like paid media, design, content and organic social are aligned on launches, key promotions, and content boosting strategies.

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Strategic Planning

Frequency: Daily trend monitoring, quarterly strategic planning and experimentation

Daily trend monitoring involves:

• Consuming industry podcasts and newsletters
• Tracking platform algorithm changes
• Monitoring emerging best practices
• Identifying new campaign opportunities
• Staying current with competitive landscape

This continuous learning ensures campaigns stay relevant and effective in the rapidly changing influencer marketing landscape.

Quarterly strategic planning includes:

• Aligning program goals with larger brand objectives
• Setting performance targets and KPIs
• Planning budget allocation across initiatives
• Developing creator diversification strategies
• Designing A/B testing frameworks

Experimentation activities focus on:

• Testing new incentive structures
• Trying tiered commission models
• Exploring additional gifting strategies
• Increasing payout structures for top performers
• Sourcing within new niches to diversify creators

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Administrative Tasks

Frequency: Monthly budget oversight and payment processing, quarterly contract and tech stack management

For programs with hundreds of creators, processing payouts alone becomes a serious administrative task. Add in tracking program spend and planning upcoming budgets, and you need someone who can provide a high level of oversight of your program's financial performance.

Quarterly contract renewals refresh agreements with your long-term partners. Quarterly tech and tools reviews evaluate what's working (or not) with your current tech stack.

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5 signs you need a dedicated influencer marketing hire

The bottom line: Influencer and affiliate programs are a relationship-based game. There's a ton of performance optimization opportunities that compound over time when managed well—but when neglected, they degrade quickly.

If you're running into the following difficulties, these are clear signs that you need to seek a dedicated owner for your influencer marketing/affiliate program:

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1. Influencer marketing tasks are creeping into daily workloads

If founders or senior marketing hires are spending time daily on influencer marketing tasks, this signals that creator marketing has moved well beyond so-called "side project" territory. If you're personally responding to creator DMs, manually processing payments, or troubleshooting affiliate links regularly, you're effectively subsidizing your creator program with expensive strategic time that is better located elsewhere.

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2. You're not acting on opportunities to optimize your creator program

Creator programs are constantly generating optimization opportunities—if you know where to look. Performance data reveals top performers to double down on, high-performing content suggests new campaign directions, and creator feedback highlights where program improvements can be made.

But when these insights are unactioned (or even unnoticed) because nobody has enough bandwidth, you're leaving revenue on the table systematically.

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3. Creators are asking you for better communication or support

When creators start requesting more frequent check-ins, faster response times, or clearer guidance on content, it's the clearest external signal that your program doesn't have the support it needs–and neither do your creators. If communication issues go unchecked, this typically leads to creators going inactive and reputation issues that are expensive to reverse.

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4. Your affiliate program is growing, but there's no time for proper hygiene management

If your program is continually adding new creators without a dedicated influencer marketer, that means everything is good, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

While program growth is a good thing, a "growth at all costs" mentality will hurt you in the long run if you don't have time to practice basic program hygiene.

Over time, your program will stagnate thanks to inactive creators, outstanding program applications, and code leakage, all of which skews reporting and makes your program significantly less efficient to manage.

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5. Cross-team communication keeps breaking down

If whoever is running your creator program isn't carving out time to sync with other teams on Black Friday plans or other big promotions, it's a clear sign that you need a person who is dedicated to bridging these gaps and building some cross-functional harmony. If your influencer marketing strategy has reached this level of siloing, it's time to take action.

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Bottom line hiring considerations

• Never forget the cost-benefit reality. A skilled influencer marketer doesn't just manage programs; they scale them—turning creator partnerships into a flywheel that keeps producing revenue.
• It's not as risky as you think. Yes, hiring an influencer marketer is an upfront cost. But the risk of not hiring is stalled program growth, rising creator churn, and wasted marketing dollars.
• Dedicated ownership equals investment. An influencer marketer isn't just the guardian of your program; they are its champion. They do this job because they are passionate about building relationships. Trust us: They are more invested in the success of your program than the unfortunate social manager this responsibility has been thrown at.

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How Superfiliate can help with your influencer marketing hiring needs

Still not sure whether your program needs a dedicated influencer marketing hire? Check out our "Day in the Life of an Influencer Marketer" audit tool.

How to use this resource:

1. Download and open the PDF below
2. Go through each section line by line and mark off the tasks that someone on your team is consistently handling on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. Leave blank any of the tasks that aren't routinely being managed.
3. Count up your checkmarks in each section.
4. Identify where the biggest recurring gaps are. For example, is reporting consistently showing up as a neglected area? These gaps represent your untapped growth opportunities that could be addressed with a dedicated influencer marketing hire.

If your audit shows large sections unchecked, that's your signal: The essential work of creator marketing and partnership management just isn't getting done, and your creator program isn't going to reach its potential.

This is when it's time to move from "making do" to making the hire—and SuperMatch is here to help you do exactly that.

SuperMatch is Superfiliate's free service connecting brands with top influencer and affiliate marketers who can help you execute this checklist from day one. Send us your role description, and we'll post it to our private LinkedIn group of active talent in the space! Simple as that.