The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

While examples of influencer marketing can be traced back to the 1920s, the social media variant that dominates conversations today is under two decades old — and in that short window it has grown at a remarkable pace.

A few figures illustrate the trajectory:

• 57% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2020.
• The industry was predicted to reach $5–$10 billion in 2020.
• 93% of marketers surveyed report using influencer marketing.

With that kind of growth, however, come serious growing pains. Some are straightforward business challenges; others are genuinely hard technological problems that platform vendors are still working through.

The Main Technological Challenges Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

1. Influencer Fraud

A few statistics worth knowing:

• According to the 2019 Influencer Marketing Survey by Mediakix, 50% of marketers cited fake followers as their primary challenge.
• Analysis from Points North Group found that one large cosmetics brand spent $600,000 on impressions that were either never seen or seen only by fake followers.

Influencer fraud tends to cluster around two related problems: fake influencers and fake followers.

Fake influencers are social media accounts designed to look like genuine content creators — typically built with stock photos and purchased followers. There is usually a real person behind the account, but the audience and influence are entirely fabricated.

Fake followers, meanwhile, are used by both outright fraudsters and legitimate influencers alike. Because many brands set minimum follower thresholds before agreeing to partnerships, artificially inflating an audience count becomes a straightforward way for genuine influencers to unlock more lucrative brand deals.

The downstream effect mirrors what the display advertising industry has experienced with ad fraud: brands grow distrustful, pull back spend, and the whole ecosystem suffers. Vendors that can offer credible guarantees — real influencers, real audiences — are positioned to capture a disproportionate share of brand budgets as scrutiny increases.

2. Measuring ROI

A few statistics worth knowing:

• According to a MediaKix survey, measuring and improving ROI is the single biggest issue brands face when working with influencers.
• Nearly 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram as part of the marketing mix, according to research by Influencer Marketing Hub.

Unlike display advertising or paid search — channels with relatively mature measurement frameworks — influencer marketing faces real headwinds when it comes to proving return on investment.

Part of the difficulty is structural: brand awareness, a primary goal of many influencer campaigns, has always been hard to quantify. But there are also specific technical limitations making things worse.

Instagram posts, for instance, do not support clickable links. That eliminates click-through attribution entirely. If an influencer includes a short URL or a link to copy manually, the user has to paste it into a browser — and without referrer information being passed along, the brand's analytics platform logs that visit as direct traffic rather than crediting the influencer campaign.

The same referrer-loss problem occurs on other social platforms when users tap links inside mobile apps that open in a browser. And beyond both of those scenarios, a meaningful share of users will simply search for the brand on Google after being exposed to influencer content — once again handing credit to the wrong channel.

One viable path forward is borrowing from offline media measurement. Time-based attribution models, similar to those applied in TV and radio measurement, offer a credible framework for connecting exposure to downstream behaviour without relying on referrer chains.

3. Campaign Automation

A few statistics worth knowing:

• 72% of marketers believe influencer marketing can be automated (MediaKix).
• 67% of marketers identified finding the right influencers as a significant challenge (MediaKix).

Running an influencer campaign involves a surprising number of slow, manual steps that are ripe for automation. The main ones include:

• Discovering suitable (and verifiably genuine) influencers.
• Managing outreach and ongoing communication.
• Handling contracts.
• Processing payments.

Platforms that build features to streamline these workflows are solving real operational pain for their customers — and creating a stickier product in the process.

Opportunities for Influencer Marketing Vendors

The clearest opportunities for vendors lie in directly addressing the technological challenges above. Fraud detection, attribution infrastructure, and workflow automation are all areas where better engineering translates into measurable competitive advantage.

There is also a broader strategic point here. The AdTech and MarTech industries have seen waves of new vendors arrive with little to distinguish one from another. The platforms that consistently win clients are the ones with a genuine point of differentiation — not just a feature checklist, but a clear answer to the question of what hard problem they solve better than anyone else.

The influencer marketing industry is no different from any other emerging vertical in this respect. The vendors that spot the gaps, build the right technology, and earn brand trust will be the ones that grow with the market rather than getting swept aside by it.