I’ve been in this cycle for months: present a budget for influencer campaigns, get push-back from leadership about ROI, scramble to explain why the number makes sense, get approved, run the campaign, then struggle to prove it worked.
The problem is I don’t have a library of real data to point to. Every time I propose something, it feels like I’m making an argument based on intuition, not evidence. And when campaigns do perform well, I’m too busy executing the next one to document what actually happened.
Last week, my CMO asked me flat out: “How do you know micro-influencers are worth it for our segment? Show me the data.” I didn’t have a clean answer. I had some vague sense that they worked better in certain scenarios, but nothing I could point to.
I started thinking about what would actually help: a real repository of past campaigns, their budgets, their outcomes, and what we learned. Not just “this campaign performed”, but “here’s what we budgeted, here’s what we got back, here’s why it worked or didn’t.” That’s the thing that would actually change how I allocate money.
Who else is building something like this? What do you track in your case study database? And more importantly—how do you actually use it to make better budget decisions without spending all your time documenting?