Influencer Marketing 101: The Full Workflow from Sourcing to Retro

A global creator campaign breaks into five stages: strategy, sourcing, vetting, negotiation, retrospective. Most failed campaigns don't die from lack of budget — they die in stages one and two, with a vague strategy and creators picked by scrolling feeds on vibes.

Strategy means answering three questions: which countries, what outcome (awareness or direct conversion), and what you'll pay per conversion. Those answers decide whether you need head creators or mid-tail ones — for conversion-driven campaigns, ten 50K-follower niche creators almost always beat one 500K generalist.

Sourcing is about translating "feel" into filters: country, follower range, recent average views, category, tone. Natural-language search tools compress this from days to minutes — pull a long list in bulk, then hand-pick, instead of opening profiles one by one.

Vetting does two things: a fake-follower check to drop botted accounts, and an audience report to confirm demographic overlap with your customers. Expect these two steps to cut a third of your list — that third is exactly the budget you would have wasted.

For negotiation and retro, two rules: write data-disclosure and content-usage rights into every contract, and review every campaign on three metrics — real CPM, cost per engagement, cost per conversion. Feed the winners into your own creator roster. The compounding advantage of global campaigns lives entirely in that iterating list.