Influencer marketing, as Polina Zueva sees it, is no longer a discipline that can afford to sit at the edges of a brand’s marketing stack. After nearly a decade of working across platforms, agencies, and global brands, and a formative period inside TikTok itself, Polina has built her career around the argument that creator partnerships should be evaluated, structured, and scaled like any other revenue-driving channel.

“Influencer marketing is not about vanity metrics,” Polina says. “It’s more about results.”

Today, Polina works as a self-employed independent influencer marketing strategist and consultant, advising brands on integrating creators into performance-driven marketing systems. She brings a global perspective shaped by campaigns executed across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as hands-on experience managing both in-house and agency-side influencer operations. 

Her work focuses on acquisition, conversion, and measurable return on investment, rather than awareness alone.

A Career Built Inside the Creator Economy

Polina’s professional background spans some of the most formative layers of the modern creator economy. She spent more than two years at TikTok, where she worked directly on influencer marketing partnerships for major global brands including Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi. During that time, she helped organize large-scale creator events, live streams, and training programs, and led cross-functional creative teams that produced hundreds of short-form pieces of content.

“I’ve worked in TikTok for more than two years,” she explains. “I’ve been responsible for partnerships with big brands.”

That experience gave her an inside view into how platforms evaluate creator performance, how content formats influence user behavior, and how brand objectives are often diluted when influencer marketing is treated as a standalone tactic, rather than part of a broader marketing strategy.

Before and after TikTok, Polina worked extensively with fintech, gaming, crypto, fashion, and B2C apps, running campaigns across Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Nigeria, and beyond. In later roles, she helped build scalable micro-influencer programs, managed celebrity partnerships, and automated internal workflows using AI-driven tools.

Across these roles, one pattern became clear: many brands were investing in influencer marketing without the operational discipline they applied to paid media, lifecycle marketing, or product growth.

Why Influencer Marketing Still Breaks Down for Brands

Despite years of industry growth, Polina believes many brands still struggle with influencer marketing for a familiar reason: a lack of structure.

“In my previous experience, I often saw that a lot of creative experiments are pretty chaotic,” she says. “Brands just pull different briefs to bloggers without measuring anything.”

According to her, too often influencer campaigns are launched without hypotheses, testing frameworks, or clear performance benchmarks. When results fail to materialize, the channel itself is blamed rather than the execution.

“Sometimes, they think that influencer marketing is vanity metrics,” Polina explains. “You just do your stuff, pull briefs, and hope to see some results.”

For Polina, the absence of a testing culture is one of the biggest contributors to wasted budgets. She argues that influencer marketing teams need to operate with the same rigor as any other performance function; building hypothesis logs, tracking outcomes, and using insights from failed tests to inform the next iteration.

“We really should create this hypothesis log,” she says. “We should know how to work with hypotheses, how to track progress, how to make conclusions from these conclusions to come up with new hypotheses.”

Integrating Creators Into the Full Marketing System

Another persistent issue, according to Polina, is the tendency to isolate influencer marketing from the rest of the organization.

In her consulting work, early conversations with brands often start with a deep dive into product positioning, existing marketing channels, and internal goals. If influencer marketing isn’t connected to product strategy, lifecycle flows, or paid media, she considers it a structural red flag.

“Sometimes, brands really think that influencer marketing is something separate, but if it’s a separate thing and it’s not connected, it’s not going to work. It should be a part of the whole marketing strategy,” she says.

This systems-level view also shapes how she evaluates a brand’s previous influencer efforts. When brands say influencer marketing “didn’t work,” Polina probes deeper.

“If it didn’t work, why do you think it didn’t work?” she asks. “Even if it failed, we can get a bunch of conclusions.”

From One-Off Deliverables to Creator Ladders

One of Polina’s most distinctive ideas is what she describes as a “ladder” approach to creator partnerships, i.e., a shift away from buying isolated deliverables toward building structured, multi-format funnels.

“For now, it’s better not just to buy deliverables,” she says, “but to buy the whole structure, the whole system, the whole funnel.”

In practice, she notes that the ladder often starts with short-form content designed for discovery, followed by longer-form videos that build trust and explain value, and finally community-based touchpoints that help close the loop. Crucially, each format plays a different role in the buyer journey.

“Very often, the long-term format brings moderate views,” Polina explains, “but the impact of it – credibility, trust, storytelling – it can be the last video before sign-up.”

Treating all formats the same, she warns, leads brands to optimize for the wrong outcomes.

“When brands try to measure everything based on CPM (Cost per Mille), it’s not very fair,” she says. “The value of these formats is different.”

How Creators Themselves Are Adapting

Polina notes that many creators arrived at this funnel-based thinking on their own.

“We saw that one, two years ago, creators started to understand the funnel and started to create this funnel inside their own social media,” she says.

In fintech campaigns, in particular, she recalls creators proactively proposing multi-step content plans that moved audiences from short-form discovery to long-form explanation and into community engagement. For Polina, this alignment between creator intuition and brand performance goals signals the ecosystem’s maturation.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

When brands ignore format differences or attempt to shortcut the funnel, Polina believes that the consequences are straightforward.

“The main risk is just to waste budgets,” she says.

In the worst cases, she adds, brands emerge from expensive campaigns with little to show for their investment and with reinforced skepticism toward influencer marketing as a channel.

“They spend a lot of money, but they see zero results,” she explains.

That narrative, Polina argues, damages the broader industry, particularly when failure stems from poor execution rather than structural limitations.

Performance, Measurement, and the Attribution Problem

Even when brands believe in influencer marketing’s potential, measurement remains a sticking point.

“For most brands, it’s not obvious how to track results,” Polina says. “That’s why they’re still unsure.”

Her approach combines traditional tools – including promo codes, UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules), and spike tests – with a broader acceptance that influencer marketing often indirectly drives conversions. In her view, the inability to perfectly attribute outcomes shouldn’t prevent brands from scaling what works.

“Even if they have results, if they can’t prove it, they can’t scale it,” Polina says. “That’s the main thing.”

AI, Automation, and Managing at Scale

Polina sees artificial intelligence as a turning point for influencer marketing operations, particularly when working with micro- and nano-creators at scale.

“Previously, the main struggle was how to manage a lot of bloggers using not a lot of manpower,” she says. “Now with AI agents, it’s easier to do it.”

She emphasizes that AI’s value lies less in synthetic influencers and more in automation: streamlining outreach, accelerating creative testing, and reducing operational friction within influencer teams.

Why B2B Influencer Marketing Is Still Early

While much of the conversation in the creator economy focuses on consumer brands, Polina believes B2B influencer marketing remains underdeveloped.

“I really believe that B2B influencer marketing will be growing,” she says. “It’s not late.”

From her perspective, the same principles apply: trust-building formats, clear value articulation, and systems-based execution, adapted to longer buying cycles and smaller audiences.

A Systems-First Philosophy

Ultimately, Polina’s advice to brands is less about specific platforms or creators and more about internal capability.

“Invest in creating systems,” she says. “Use more AI automation.”

She also stresses the importance of experience over headcount. “One senior specialist who knows how to manage this system now can manage everything,” she says.

As influencer marketing continues to professionalize, Polina believes the brands that win will be those that treat creators not as a media shortcut, but as a core part of a structured growth engine, designed, tested, and scaled with intent.

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