I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately after running several influencer campaigns across LATAM and the US. The problem we kept hitting was exactly what everyone talks about: campaigns end, relationships disappear, and you’re back to square one recruiting for the next thing.
But over the last year, we’ve started experimenting with a different approach—treating influencer relationships more like business partnerships than one-off transactions. The shift happened when we realized that the best creators in LATAM have deep expertise in their local markets that US teams just don’t have. Instead of sending them a brief and hoping for the best, we started bringing them into strategy sessions early, sharing our playbooks, and asking them to teach us.
What surprised me most was how much creators valued this. When they saw we were genuinely interested in building something lasting—not just extracting one campaign and moving on—they became way more invested. We started seeing creators proactively suggesting improvements to briefs, connecting us with other creators they trusted, and even mentoring our newer team members on cultural nuances we kept missing.
We’ve also started documenting what works. After each campaign, we sit down with the creator team and literally write down what succeeded and why. That playbook becomes foundation for the next campaign, which means we’re not reinventing the wheel every time.
The hardest part? It requires patience and a longer timeline to see ROI. But the creators we’ve built real relationships with consistently outperform new ones we bring on, so it pays off eventually.
Has anyone else found ways to keep these relationships alive between campaigns? What does that actually look like operationally?