The Operational Burden Crisis: Why manual processes are choking influencer marketing growth

This article puts forward that the influencer marketing industry is suffering from a productivity crisis due to manual, admin-heavy processes that waste resources and limit growth potential⁠⁠. We suggest that automation is the solution, highlighting how UK kitchenware brand Joseph Joseph transformed their influencer marketing by automating processes - increasing partnerships sixfold while maintaining the same budget⁠⁠. Companies that adopt automation quickly will gain competitive advantage, while those clinging to manual processes risk falling behind⁠⁠.

The influencer marketing industry faces a productivity challenge.

In 2025, global spending on influencer marketing is projected to reach £25 billion. Brands are pushing to run more frequent campaigns each year because influencer marketing is now becoming part of the standard marketing model

However, the channel is highly admin-heavy: marketing teams spend too much time managing campaigns instead of focusing on strategy. This creates two major problems: wasted resources and missed partnership opportunities.

The Hidden Economics of Manual Campaign Management

Brands fail to understand the extensive amount of work that goes into running influencer marketing campaigns. The entire process requires time to locate suitable influencers and establish personal contact with them and manage contracts and track content and approve posts and process payments and generate reports. The method requires extensive time and produces multiple errors while being highly inefficient.

A UK kitchenware brand, Joseph Joseph, experienced this firsthand. They spent over a year using manual methods that limited them to working with only two influencers per budget cycle. Their Head of Brand Marketing said: "We would normally have to go back and forth, working with only two influencers max for a similar budget.... Plus all the communications and checking in. It's just really time-consuming."

This isn't unique to Joseph Joseph. It's a widespread industry problem. Manual processes unnecessarily restrict how many influencers brands can work with and limit campaign effectiveness.

This burden creates a bigger issue: brands giving up on influencer marketing completely. When companies can only work with a few creators due to resource limitations, they often don't see good results. This leads them to think influencer marketing doesn't work, when really it's their approach that's flawed.

Success in social media marketing requires both creativity and volume. Social platforms favor regular, varied content at scale. Brands limited to just a few partnerships by manual processes are at a serious disadvantage.

Research shows that influencer campaigns hit their stride when they draw on a mix of creators rather than zeroing in on just a handful of big‑name stars. Yet pulling together that kind of diversity by hand is virtually impossible. Many brands end up mistakenly concluding that influencer marketing simply doesn’t work for them.

The Resource Reallocation Opportunity

The benefits become clear when brands switch from manual to automated processes. Joseph Joseph saw this firsthand. By automating their work, they increased their influencer partnerships by 6 times—going from just 2 influencers to 12 quality creators while using the same budget.

The results show how much more effective this approach was:

• 1.6 million people reached through better influencer selection in their first campaign
• 197 people reached per £1 spent showing great value for money
• 30 pieces of content produced across a variety of platforms ready to amplify the message.

Best of all there was no need to bring on staff or tangle things up. The same marketing specialist who used to shepherd two influencers now steers twelve successful partnerships all while cutting down on manual labor.

Beyond the promise of efficiency: boons that automation delivers

Moving away from tasks to automated processes does more than simply shave off time. Automation can tackle jobs that people just can’t manage at scale:

Better Decisions Through Better Data Automation can spot fake accounts that humans might miss. For example, in the Joseph Joseph campaign, automated tools identified 149,506 accounts (16% of followers) as fake or inactive. This meant 84% of the audience was real - something impossible to check manually when working with large numbers.

Predicting What Will Work Best AI can analyze past performance to predict which creators will likely succeed. This helps brands plan ahead rather than just react to problems, something manual processes can't do because there's too much data to handle.

Consistent Quality Manual work varies because people are different. Through automation brand guidelines, content quality and performance measurements are applied uniformly across every partnership.

How This Affects the Entire Industry

The shifts taking place in influencer marketing echo the changes, across marketing. Companies that embrace automation, reap advantages:

Scale Up Smarter, Not Pricier When manual methods are used, each extra campaign usually requires hiring staff and spending money. Automation by contrast allows growth on a scale without demanding a proportional increase in resources.

From the grind, to seeing the big picture When the endless tide of admin work recedes, teams can zero in on what matters—crafting strategies forging lasting relationships and nurturing the business for the long haul.

Stack Your Learnings Into Fresh Foundations With all your campaigns in systems, you can easily spot patterns (some tools can help with that as well) and remodel your strategy and messaging in following campaigns.

Mapping the Road Ahead: Putting Strategy Into Action

Brands that want to fine-tune their workflow fare by sprinkling in incremental tweaks instead of trying to rewire everything in a single bound. Here’s a concise collection of the approaches:

Start by handling straightforward high‑value tasks Launch automation on the chores that gulp up hours but hardly demand a mind. Pinpointing influencers logging outcomes and shooting out the old messages are the usual low‑effort picks. The upside shows up fast, handing the crew a confidence boost in the tools.

Keep the Reins on the Big Decisions When automation works as intended, it behaves less like a replacement and more like a teammate that lifts the mundane off our shoulders. The core of a campaign—its planning, the spark of direction and the nuanced art of relationship building—remains firmly in hands while the repetitive grind‑heavy tasks are handed over to automated tools.

Augment Your Existing Systems Rather Than Replacing Them Automation hits its stride when it dovetails with the way you already get things done than sitting as a foreign add‑on. When fresh tools slide into your existing tech stack without a hitch, people take to them readily. The payoff improves.

Competitions Stark Reality

The Joseph Joseph story does more than highlight one brand’s triumph—it signals a shift across the sector. Companies that still rely on tactics will find themselves lagging behind those that use automation to locate, manage and fine‑tune influencer partnerships.

Mark Dugdale of Joseph Joseph summed it up neatly: his team spent a full year wrestling with limits only to switch to streamlined scalable processes that now crank out results in a single month. The shift from being shackled by chores to gaining a strategic edge—captures where influencer marketing is headed.

Marketing leaders confront a decision: adopt automation enough to lock in a competitive edge or risk falling behind. Companies that shift quickly will spearhead the next wave of influencer marketing.

Manual influencer marketing is fading fast. Automation has stepped onto the stage. Only the brands bold to ride this new wave will come out on top.

The insights in this article draw from industry research and real-world campaign data, including analysis of operational transformations achieved by UK brands implementing AI-powered automation in their influencer marketing strategies.