An influencer marketing manager worth hiring can tell you what a new customer costs when it comes through creators, and which creator deals they would never sign. That mix of taste and math is rare. Most job descriptions we see screen for neither. They ask for platform names and follower counts.
The Constant Hire team sat down with Lily Comba, founder and CEO of Superbloom, for an internal Lunch and Learn on October 1, 2026. Lily has spent more than 10 years in performance influencer marketing, and every program she ran carried a CPA or ROAS target instead of an awareness goal. She ran the YouTube talent pipeline at Thrive Market from 2016 to 2020. At Seed Health, she spent $20M on flat-fee influencer campaigns that she says generated more than $100M in return. Superbloom, the Chicago agency she launched in 2023, has grown from $0 to $5M in revenue in under three years, according to Lily.
An influencer marketing manager is a performance marketing role that helps DTC and ecommerce brands turn creator partnerships into new customers at a target acquisition cost. Below is how Lily structures an influencer team, what she screens for in interviews, and the one channel she thinks influencer teams should stop owning.
Figures in this article come from Lily Comba's session with the Constant Hire team on October 1, 2026, unless linked.
Lily is blunt about titles. Partnerships manager, ambassador manager, and influencer manager describe the same job, and brands usually pick between them for ego reasons. The title tells you very little. How the program pays creators tells you almost everything.
The real split is influencer versus affiliate. An influencer program pays creators a flat fee upfront for content, whether or not that content converts. An affiliate program pays commission only, after a sale tracks.
Affiliate then splits into two separate jobs. Creator affiliates are individual people, often micro-influencers, posting on social with a link. Publisher affiliates are editorial sites, like a Wirecutter listicle that earns a percentage when a reader buys. Connor Gross, Constant Hire's founder, used Caraway as the example: the brand pays publishers commission through affiliate software like ShareASale.
A candidate who has run one of these models has not necessarily run the other. Ask which one before you read anything else on the resume.
In a flat-fee program, the influencer manager owns the return. Nick Parente from our team summarized the difference on the call. Commission programs settle the math after sales come in, while flat-fee programs force the manager to make the bet before a single post goes live.
At both Thrive Market and Seed Health, Lily worked to a strict CPA target of $100 per new customer. Every flat-fee deal had to justify itself against that number. Approving commission payouts after the fact is a different, easier job. It's also why Lily looks for people who balance creative instinct with real comfort in data.
Commission-only deals are fading. Creators increasingly want money upfront, so brands have moved toward hybrid structures.
Lily also warned that creator rates keep climbing and are getting more arbitrary, with talent managers inflating fees. A manager who accepts every quote at face value won't hold a $100 CPA for long.
At Seed Health, Lily managed a $2M monthly influencer budget with a team of six. That's lean for the spend. Lily's point was that a team that size only works if everyone stays hands-on, including the head of influencer.
Here's the hierarchy she uses.
Her rule for leaders is that nobody stops executing. The channel changes weekly. A head of influencer who loses touch with current creator rates and formats will make bad calls for the whole team.
Ideally, influencer runs as its own function between brand and growth. In practice, it reports to wherever the primary goal lives. For a CPA-driven program, that is usually the Head of Growth. Hire the leader for the reporting line you actually have. In our searches, a growth-reporting program needs someone comfortable defending a CPA number every week.
Lily's strongest opinion of the session was about TikTok Shop, and it changes who you should hire to run it. She considers it an ecommerce channel. There is no storytelling, no brand building, and no long-term creator relationship. It should report to the Amazon or ecommerce team, and an influencer team running TikTok Shop is a red flag to her.
The volume math, based on what Lily sees at agency scale, explains why the influencer manager profile is a poor fit. Treat these as directional benchmarks, not platform data.
Lily also sees weak lifetime value. Shoppers who find a product on TikTok Shop tend to repurchase on Amazon, not on the brand's own site.
The skills that transfer best to TikTok Shop come from affiliate backgrounds, creator or editorial. Affiliate marketers are used to handing over a link and moving to the next creator. Influencer marketers are used to a tight roster and ongoing relationships, and Lily said most of the ones she knows dislike TikTok Shop.
She and Connor both flagged a hiring trap here too. Brands ask for five years of TikTok Shop experience for a channel that has not existed long enough to produce many of those candidates. At real volume, execution often needs a high-volume outreach agency, not one in-house manager.
Lily prefers candidates who worked in-house first and moved to an agency second.
In-house work teaches a candidate how one influencer decision lands on supply chain, finance, brand, and growth. Agency work then adds breadth, with exposure to many brands and many ways of running a program. Lily followed that path herself. She spent her career brand-side at Thrive Market and Seed Health before launching Superbloom, and she told Net Influencer, "I started an agency with no agency experience, and that's been our biggest advantage."
The reverse path is harder. Candidates who started at agencies can be siloed. When they move in-house, they need longer onboarding because they have never worked through a brand's internal approval chain.
This is the opposite of the order Joanna Wallace, founder of CreativRX Consulting, recommended when she spoke with us about how to spot a weak creative strategist. For creative strategists, she argued, agency reps build instinct fastest. For influencer managers, the internal context comes first. The right background depends on the role, which is one reason generic marketing screening misses on both.
The biggest shift Lily sees affects what an influencer manager spends their week doing. Brands want large volumes of creator-made content to run as Meta ads, and creator deals are now as much about ad inventory as about a post on the creator's own feed.
According to Lily, Meta is lowering CPMs on partnership ads to push brands toward them. The cost advantage shows up per customer more than per impression. An Agentio analysis of $130M in partnership ad spend found a 5% lower CPA than the same creative run from a brand account, even with 19% higher CPMs.
Pair that with the hybrid fee structures above, and the influencer manager now needs working knowledge of paid social, not only talent relations. That's also where the role splits from a UGC creator, who supplies the content but doesn't own the deal or the CPA.
Asked which brands run influencer programs worth studying beyond AG1, Lily named Merit, Lola Blankets, Jones Road Beauty, Hiya, Brooklinen, Timeline Nutrition, Spindrift, and Branch Basics.
Colin Hale asked Lily the question most founders ask us: at what point should influencer marketing move from an agency to an in-house influencer manager?
Agencies fit early-stage brands spending $50k to $250k a month on influencer, she said, because they bring infrastructure on day one and several people for the price of one hire.
Past that range, she recommends building an adequately staffed in-house team while keeping an agency partner. The agency keeps the brand exposed to what's working across other accounts, and the in-house team keeps decisions close to the P&L. From what we see in searches, hiring one manager to replace an agency outright tends to lose both. A bad hire in a channel like this costs more than the salary.
Arjana Sanfilippo, a recruiter on our team, asked Lily for her favorite interview question when vetting an influencer marketing manager. Her answer was "Who is your favorite influencer?"
The favorite influencer question tests taste, judgment, and whether the candidate actually watches the channel. Strong candidates name someone specific and explain why that creator or campaign works. Weak ones reach for the biggest account they can think of.
The follow-up should test the other half of the job. Lily looks for people who balance creative storytelling instinct with real comfort in data and analytics, so ask how they would know whether that favorite creator was worth the fee.
Then test writing. Lily called strong writing the non-negotiable skill. Creators get flooded with pitches, and the ones that win use clear subject lines, persistence, frequent and considerate follow-up, and a willingness to get on a call. Over time, a network of talent managers cuts outreach friction. We'd add one step to Lily's process: have candidates write a short outreach email to a real creator. It tells you more than a portfolio deck.
The failed influencer hires we see are usually fit problems. The brand hires a relationship person for a CPA program, an influencer marketer for TikTok Shop, or a single manager to replace an agency at $250k a month in spend. We call the fix the pay-model-first filter, built from Lily's session. Decide the pay model, set the CPA, choose the reporting line, and only then write the job description.
Screen every influencer marketing manager for the same few things. Can they defend a flat-fee deal against a number? Do they have in-house context? Can they name a favorite creator and explain why? Can they write?
Generalist recruiters tend to screen for platform names and follower counts, and they rarely separate creator affiliate, publisher affiliate, and influencer experience. Constant Hire recruits only for DTC, ecommerce, and CPG brands, from creator managers up to the executive team, and draws on a database of vetted ecommerce candidates. Book a call and see your first interview within 5 business days.
An influencer marketing manager sources creators, negotiates deals, and decides the channel mix for a brand's creator program. At performance-driven DTC brands, they also own the return on flat-fee deals, which means every partnership has to justify itself against a CPA target. Lily Comba worked to a $100 per-customer target at Thrive Market and Seed Health.
Influencer programs pay creators a flat fee upfront for content, so the brand carries the ROI risk. Affiliate programs pay commission only after a tracked sale. Affiliate splits further into creator affiliates, who post on social with a link, and publisher affiliates, such as editorial listicle sites. Many brands now use hybrid deals: a smaller flat fee plus a percentage of revenue or ad spend.
According to Lily Comba, no. She considers TikTok Shop an ecommerce channel built on volume and heavy discounting, often 50% to 80%, with weak lifetime value. It fits better under the Amazon or ecommerce team. Candidates with affiliate backgrounds usually transfer to it more easily than traditional influencer marketers do.
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