Let’s start with the good news. More than 80% of brands say influencer marketing works (yay!).
Now for the reality check. Influencer marketing in 2025 isn’t easy, and an 80% success rate doesn't just happen.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025 gives even more clarity: “The influencer marketing ecosystem stands at an inflection point, reshaped by unprecedented technological advancements, shifting consumer behaviors, and increasing demands for accountability.”
But there’s a silver lining.
New technology is giving brands better ways to manage complexity and build stronger campaigns. The right tools can help you match with trusted creators, protect your brand, stay ahead of cultural shifts, and tune into your community as it evolves.
Brands that build the right stack will have a clearer edge in campaigns that count. Let’s look at five tools helping them do exactly that.
1. Gia by GRIN: Automate and scale creator program management
Before scaling your influencer marketing initiatives, you need to establish the right foundation. This means picking a platform where you can manage creators, campaigns, and performance in one place. And, in 2025, AI is an essential part of the foundation.
One of the newest (and most advanced) creator marketing tools is GRIN’s Gia, an AI teammate designed to automate the manual, time-consuming aspects of the job, freeing marketers to focus on relationships.
Here’s how Gia works. It’s embedded directly into GRIN’s creator management platform and draws on more than a decade of proprietary data to automate core tasks across your program.
As your creator programs grow, Gia adapts—learning how your team works and becoming an AI teammate that grows with you.
This matters because, according to GRIN, 91% of brands already use AI in creator marketing, but most tools are still simple plug-ins that can’t scale real execution. That’s what sets Gia apart. It does the work instead of just making suggestions.
Here’s what Gia can do for you:
- Automate creator outreach while keeping a personal tone
- Recommend fair rates based on compensation trends
- Simplify onboarding
- Manage performance and retention of top creators
To illustrate why Gia’s at the top of the list, here’s what the difference between working with Gia and without might look like.
Without Gia, managing a campaign with 100 creators could take 20 to 30 hours of manual sourcing, another 10 to 15 hours sending personalized outreach, and several more hours tracking performance across spreadsheets.
With Gia, you can automate sourcing and outreach in minutes, simplify onboarding, and track performance automatically.
2. Viral Nation CreatorOS: Match with the right creators and run smarter campaigns
There’s a reason why influencer marketing has such high success rates, and it all has to do with trust. Stats show that 69% of consumers trust influencers when making a purchasing decision. But here’s the thing. That stat is slightly misleading as trust isn’t automatically baked into every creator deal.
To establish trust and get customers to love your brand, you have to know what creators your audience vibes with and partner with them.
We’ve seen this work for and against brands—even ones using the same creator.
For example, when Bud Light partnered with the (absolutely amazing and total Queen) trans influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, its conservative audience boycotted the brand. The backlash resulted in a 28% drop in sales, according to MarketWatch.
When Lush partnered with the same beauty influencer to create the Late Bloomer Bath Bomb, the audience response was a complete 180 from the Bud Light campaign.
The creation of Mulvaney’s Late Bloomer Bath Bomb to celebrate her memoir Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer was well-received, resonating with Lush’s audience. And 75% of each purchase went to support trans-led organizations.
This all begs the question: How do you find the creators who are a match for your brand, especially when the same influencer can draw such different responses from audiences?
Well, you need a tool that’s the Yente of creator + brand matchmaking. Ahem…Viral Nation CreatorOS.
Viral Nation CreatorOS uses AI to find creators who match audience and campaign goals.
It also helps you manage those relationships and run the full campaign lifecycle.
More specifically, the tool:
- Scans creator content for brand safety
- Consolidates deliverables, budgets, and performance data
- Matches campaign tasks with posts and performance metrics
- Provides deep reporting, including sentiment analysis, attribution modeling, and media value visualization
If you’re looking for a tool that helps you select the right creator and makes it easy to manage the full campaign, Viral Nation CreatorOS is a great place to start.
3. Viral Nation Secure: Identify and manage brand safety risks in creator content
Selecting the right creator is an essential first step in creating winning campaigns and avoiding backlash. However, protecting your brand often requires going deeper than audience-creator value alignment.
You need to uncover potential risks hidden in the depths of cyberspace before you enter into any potential partnerships.
Disney and YouTube learned this the hard way.
In 2017, both companies ended their partnerships with PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg) after a Wall Street Journal investigation surfaced multiple videos on his channel containing anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery.
The Journal’s review found over nine videos with offensive content, some dating back to 2016, months after Disney’s Maker Studios had launched a YouTube Red series with him.
This is the perfect example of why brands need tools that continuously scan creator content to identify risks that might not surface during initial vetting.
Viral Nation Secure protects brands from this exact problem. It helps brands catch issues before they enter into harmful partnerships.
How? The tool scans up to 15 years of creator content across major platforms, including text, video, audio, and images. It flags anything that falls outside of a brand’s risk tolerance, across categories like hate speech, drug use, and other high-sensitivity topics.
Additionally, the tool works at scale. Brands can scan hundreds or thousands of creators and adjust sensitivity settings as needed. That means faster approvals and fewer surprises down the line.
4. Spate: Predict new trends that shape influencer campaigns
Spotting risks is critical, but so is spotting what’s next. To build campaigns that land, brands need to stay tapped into culture as it changes, because trends can shift in an instant, and influencers are often the ones driving those shifts.
For example, take the Mob Wife Aesthetic, which exploded on TikTok in early 2024. One viral video declaring “Clean girl is out; Mob Wife era is in” sparked a wave of content, sending fashion and beauty brands scrambling to meet the moment.
Brands that can’t move quickly (or tune in to what their audience wants in an instant) miss the window. Influencer campaigns that hit late feel off. Worse, they miss the opportunity entirely.
Spate helps brands stay on top of trends. How? The platform analyzes over 20 billion online search signals and more than 40 million beauty-related TikTok videos to answer three questions:
- What’s the next big trend?
- Who’s owning the space?
- How should brands position the trend?
Spate’s predictive modeling also helps brands distinguish between short-lived fads and trends with staying power. The platform also identifies white space opportunities by pinpointing areas where consumer interest is increasing but competition remains low.
For marketers shaping influencer campaigns, this intelligence is gold. It shows which messages will resonate so that brands can brief creators with data-backed guidance—not guesswork.
5. Brandwatch: Monitor community sentiment and cultural shifts in real time
We’ve covered a hot new AI tool, creator alignment, brand safety, and staying ahead of trends. But, there’s at least one more piece to the influencer marketing puzzle: understanding how to navigate cultural shifts and community responses to them.
Let’s start with one of the latest brands under fire—Duolingo.
Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, announced that it was becoming an AI-first company.
So far, the Duolingo community response has been overwhelmingly negative. This was reflected in Duo’s “Mama may I have a cookie?” video where users took to the comments to express their dissatisfaction.
Comments included,
- “Mama, may I have humans running the app? Deleted because of AI use.”
- “Deleted the app because language learning is human at its core and humanity is lost when we hand our ability to communicate to robots.”
- “Mama, how about you don’t put AI first…”
And, as Heath Ahrens pointed out, “One user with a 3,285-day streak said, the app now feels ‘hollow.’”
Grimace.
So, what’s the solution? How do brands understand which cultural shifts will resonate with their community and which won’t?
Brandwatch helps answer that. The tool analyzes conversations across social platforms, forums, and online communities in real time. It surfaces new sentiment trends and flags shifts in how your audience is feeling.
In other words, Brandwatch gives brands an early pulse on whether a new direction, product change, or cultural moment is likely to land well or trigger pushback.
With this kind of insight, teams can adapt messaging, adjust timing, or even rethink strategy to avoid the kind of rapid community fallout we saw with Duolingo’s “AI-first” announcement.
Final thought: Stop playing catch-up and start leading (with the right tools)
Influencer marketing has never been about running a perfect playbook. It’s about building campaigns that move with culture and connect with people in ways that feel real. The tools you use—from creator matching to community listening—shape how your brand shows up and how it’s remembered.
Brands that keep a close pulse on shifting values, changing conversations, and community sentiment will earn trust and stay relevant where it matters. That takes more than keeping up with trends. It takes paying attention to what your audience says and wants, then moving accordingly.
Influence isn’t sold. It’s built.
