Influencer Marketing Platform

The Challenge

The client was managing influencer partnerships manually — spreadsheets for tracking creators, email for content approvals, and manual bank transfers for payments. As their network grew past a few hundred influencers, the process became unmanageable. They needed a platform that could automate the entire workflow from campaign creation through performance reporting and payment.

Our Approach

We mapped the complete campaign lifecycle: brand creates brief, influencers apply, content is submitted for approval, posts go live, performance is tracked, and payments are calculated and disbursed. Each stage has different stakeholders and approval flows.

The frontend is built in React with separate dashboards for brands and influencers. Brands see campaign performance, content pipelines, and spend analytics. Influencers see available campaigns, content submission tools, and earnings history. NestJS handles the backend with a task-queue architecture for asynchronous operations like social media metric fetching and payment batch processing.

Redis manages the real-time notification system and caching layer for social metrics. The payment engine calculates earnings based on campaign terms (flat rate, per-engagement, or hybrid) and batches payouts on configurable schedules.

Key Technical Decisions

Social API aggregation layer. Influencer metrics come from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter APIs — each with different rate limits, data formats, and authentication flows. We built an abstraction layer that normalizes metrics across platforms and handles API failures gracefully with retry queues.

Content approval workflow engine. Campaign content goes through configurable approval stages — draft, submitted, revision requested, approved, published. Each transition triggers notifications and audit logs. The workflow is configurable per campaign, not hardcoded.

Escrow-style payment model. Campaign budgets are held in escrow upon creation. Payments release to influencers only after content approval and performance verification. This protects both parties and automates what was previously a manual reconciliation process.

The Outcome

The platform now manages over 1,000 influencer relationships and 500+ campaigns. Content approval cycles dropped from days to hours. Payment processing that previously required a full-time coordinator is now fully automated. We continue to add features including AI-powered influencer matching and cross-platform campaign analytics.