Kolsquare: The Total Economic Impact™ Study

Building a business case for influencer marketing investment is rarely easy. You know the work is delivering results. Proving it in terms a finance director will actually accept is a different challenge altogether.

This study does that.

Kolsquare commissioned Forrester Consulting to run a Total Economic Impact™ assessment: an independent, structured evaluation of the return on investment enterprises can expect when running influencer programmes with Kolsquare. Forrester interviewed four senior decision-makers at major consumer brands across retail, beauty, fashion, and skincare, then built a financial model based on their real experiences.

The composite organisation they modelled: a European brand running 500 influencer campaigns a year across 10 countries, with a team of 40 PR and influence professionals.

Before Kolsquare, these organisations were already doing influencer marketing at significant scale. The problem was not the ambition. It was the way things were set up. Each market had its own approach. Some used agencies. Others had their own tools. Several were working off spreadsheets. Finding creators meant hours going through social platforms one profile at a time, with no shared way to judge fit, credibility, or audience quality. Pulling together a report meant chasing data from different teams across different markets and hoping it was consistent enough to show leadership. It rarely was.

Kolsquare brought everything into one place. Same platform, same data, same dashboards across every market. The time that used to go into admin went back into actual campaign work.

Forrester put numbers on three specific areas:

- 45 minutes saved per influencer profile. Search filters replace manual research. Teams find and vet the right creators faster. Over three years, that time is worth €360K in net present value to the composite organisation.

- 5 hours saved per campaign on content tracking. Posts, reach, engagement, and EMV are collected automatically in one place. No more checking platforms separately. No more weekend catch-up. NPV over three years: €226K.

- 10 hours saved per country-level report. One data source replaces the mix of local spreadsheets and agency exports. Reports that used to take days now take a fraction of the time. NPV over three years: €278K.

Those are the figures Forrester could quantify. The study also covers what this means for brand salience, campaign performance, internal credibility, reputational risk, and how teams experience the work day to day. These are real outcomes, but harder to put a number on.

If you need to build a business case for influencer marketing infrastructure, whether for a CFO, a CMO, or a procurement team, this study gives you the evidence to do it properly.

Download the full study. No charge.