I spent last Tuesday watching a brand's marketing manager scroll through a spreadsheet with 400 creator names. Some cells were colour-coded (green for "responded," yellow for "maybe," red for "no reply"). Some had notes like "messaged on Insta" or "waiting for rate card." One had "met at a party - seemed nice."
This is how most beauty brands manage creator relationships. And it's why creator programmes feel chaotic.
Finding the right creators
The first problem is discovery. Most brands find creators the same way: someone on the team spots them on social media, likes their aesthetic, and adds them to the spreadsheet. It's entirely subjective, inconsistent, and biased toward whoever the team already follows.
A better approach starts with data. Who is your customer? What creators does that demographic actually follow and trust? Whose content drives measurable engagement - not just likes, but saves, shares, and comments that indicate genuine interest?
Tools exist that can analyse creator audiences by demographics, interests, and purchasing behaviour. A creator with 30k followers whose audience is 75% your target customer is worth more than one with 300k followers where only 10% overlap. But you can't see this from their grid.
Automating outreach without losing the human touch
Personalised outreach matters. Creators can spot a mass DM immediately, and it signals that you don't actually care about them or their content.
But "personalised" doesn't mean your marketing manager has to hand-write 400 individual messages. It means building a system that personalises at scale: referencing specific pieces of content you genuinely appreciated, explaining why their audience aligns with your brand, and making the ask clear and respectful.
The outreach should feel personal because the selection was personal - you chose this creator for specific, data-informed reasons. Communicate those reasons.
Automate the follow-ups, the scheduling, the contract distribution, and the brief sharing. Keep the initial outreach and relationship-building human.
Ensuring diversity
This is where the "spotted them on Instagram" approach fails most obviously. When discovery is driven by who your team already follows, you end up with a homogenous creator roster that doesn't represent your actual customer base.
Diversity in creator programmes isn't just an ethical imperative - it's a business one. Customers want to see people who look like them using and recommending products. A foundation brand that only works with creators in a narrow range of skin tones is leaving both audience trust and revenue on the table.
Build diversity requirements into your selection criteria from the start. Set targets for representation across skin tones, ages, body types, and geographies. Use data to find creators across communities you might not organically discover. And audit your programme quarterly to ensure you're meeting your own standards.
Tracking performance that matters
Most brands track creator performance using engagement metrics: views, likes, comments. These feel good but tell you almost nothing about business impact.
What you should be tracking:
Cost per acquisition. How much did you pay this creator, and how many customers did they drive? This requires proper attribution - unique links, discount codes, or pixel-based tracking.
Customer quality. Do customers acquired through this creator buy again? What's their average order value compared to customers from other channels? A creator who drives 100 one-time purchasers is less valuable than one who drives 30 customers who buy three times each.
Content value. Beyond the direct partnership, did the creator produce content you could repurpose for your own channels or ads? Some creators produce content that works brilliantly as paid social creative - that's additional value beyond the partnership itself.
Scaling without chaos
The shift from managing creators in a spreadsheet to running a real programme requires three things:
A central platform where every creator relationship, contract, brief, deliverable, and performance metric lives in one place. Not scattered across email, DMs, Google Sheets, and someone's memory.
Clear processes for every stage: discovery, vetting, outreach, contracting, briefing, content approval, payment, and performance review. When someone leaves the team, the programme shouldn't collapse.
Regular performance reviews that inform future decisions. Double down on creators who drive results. Part ways respectfully with those who don't. And keep testing new creators to avoid over-reliance on a small group.
Creator collaborations are one of the most powerful tools in beauty marketing. They just need to be run like a business function, not a side project.