A new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study puts a number on what influencer marketing teams have long suspected: manual processes are expensive, and investing in Kolsquare pays for itself in under six months. Here is what four enterprise brands across beauty, fashion and retail told Forrester.
Brands using Kolsquare for influencer marketing recovered €483,000 in time and operational savings over three years, according to independent research published this month by Forrester Consulting.
The savings break down across three areas: time spent searching for and vetting creators, manually monitoring campaign content, and assembling cross-market reports. Forrester measured each against staff hours at market rates and found the cumulative cost of doing these tasks without dedicated tooling totals €863,000 in present value over three years for a mid-sized European brand.
The Total Economic Impact™ study, commissioned by Kolsquare and conducted independently by Forrester Consulting, examined four enterprise brands across retail, beauty, and fashion. It found that teams relying on manual processes for creator discovery, content monitoring, and campaign reporting are absorbing significant costs that rarely appear in budget discussions, because no one has ever added them up.
“With Kolsquare, we can easily see how many people posted, what the EMV is, how much content was posted, and the reach. When we run campaigns, we don't have to check manually who posted or not: we see exactly who posted and when, and we have direct access to the analysis. Without Kolsquare we wouldn't get that level of information. We'd need to look at social media every day to see who posted or not... this is a few hours per campaign saved,” the head of communications at a fashion firm told Forrester.
Forrester's analysis modelled a composite organisation representative of the four companies interviewed: a Europe-based consumer brand operating across 10 countries, running approximately 500 influencer campaigns per year with a team of 40 influencer marketing and PR professionals.
Against that profile, Forrester identified three categories of quantifiable time loss: influencer profile discovery and vetting, campaign content tracking, and report preparation. Across all three, the cost of doing these tasks manually, measured in staff hours at market rates, totalled €863,000 in present value over three years.
Total Kolsquare costs over the same period, including licensing for 40 users across 10 countries, came to approximately €381,000, producing a net present value of €483,000 and a return on investment of 127%.
That figure is conservative by design: Forrester's model counts only direct time savings and excludes any indirect revenue gains, improvements in campaign performance, or brand impact. The actual return for most organisations is likely higher. Kolsquare costs are recovered in under six months, meaning the platform is in net positive territory before the end of its first half-year of use.
Forrester notes that benefits including improved campaign performance, reduced reputational risk, and stronger brand positioning were identified consistently by interviewees but could not be reliably quantified and were therefore left out of the financial model entirely. Their exclusion means the 127% figure represents a floor, not a ceiling.
Influencer marketing has changed faster than the processes most teams use to run it. A few years ago, managing a handful of creator partnerships across one or two markets with a spreadsheet and a shared inbox was workable. Today, brands are running hundreds of campaigns a year across multiple countries, working with creators at every tier from nano to mega, and facing growing pressure to demonstrate ROI with the same rigour applied to paid media. The manual approach was never designed for this environment, and it is showing the strain.
The interviews Forrester conducted with Kolsquare users illustrate what that strain looks like in practice before they adopted the platform. Teams were manually searching social platforms to discover and vet creators, evaluating profiles one by one against follower counts and engagement estimates — a process that doesn't scale as campaign volumes grow and creator markets fragment across new platforms. Content monitoring during live campaigns fell to individual team members scanning platforms in real time, including on weekends.
"Influencers typically publish content on weekends, and every weekend we had to wake up and review all content that was published manually," the influencer marketing manager at a French retailer with 94,000 employees told Forrester researchers.
Reporting compounded the problem. As brands expanded into more markets, each country maintained its own tools, its own data, and its own definitions of success. Results were assembled from screenshots, agency inputs, and disconnected local spreadsheets — a process that got slower and less reliable with every market added.
"At European scale, doing reports was a challenge as there was no harmony in the data," the Head of PR and Influence at a pan-European beauty brand operating across 15 European markets told Forrester.
The competitive environment makes this more consequential, not less. As more brands invest seriously in influencer marketing, the difference between teams that can move quickly on the right creators and teams still manually trawling platforms is a strategic gap. Speed of discovery, quality of vetting, consistency of measurement — these are now competitive advantages, and they are difficult to build on a manual foundation.
Forrester's financial model captures time. The interviewees described something harder to price: a function struggling to be taken seriously.
Four unquantified benefits came up consistently across interviews.
Internal credibility. Without standardised metrics, influencer marketing teams found it difficult to present results to leadership with confidence. Data varied by market, definitions of success differed by team, and cross-market comparisons were unreliable. After adopting Kolsquare, consistent reporting gave teams a defensible evidence base — making it easier to justify budgets, demonstrate contribution, and earn standing alongside other marketing functions.
Reputational risk reduction. Creator selection based on follower counts and instinct carries exposure that is easy to underestimate until something goes wrong. Kolsquare's credibility indicators, content history, and audience data allow teams to vet creators against brand values before committing — reducing the likelihood of partnerships that become problems.
Competitive intelligence. Several interviewees flagged the platform's listening and monitoring capabilities as an unexpected source of strategic value: tracking which creators competitors are activating, monitoring brand mentions across markets, and benchmarking share of voice over time. This shifts influencer marketing from a pure execution function toward something closer to brand intelligence.
Team experience. Removing weekend monitoring and manual data assembly changes the day-to-day reality of influencer marketing roles. Interviewees described spending less time on data hygiene and more time on strategy. In a function where talent is competitive, that shift has retention and recruitment implications that don't appear in any ROI model.
"Kolsquare is the basis of our work," the Head of Communications at a French fashion house told Forrester. "To analyse the pertinence and fit of influencer profiles it's just perfect."
Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with decision-makers at four organisations which have adopted Kolsquare as their influencer marketing platform: a French retailer (94,000 employees), a pan-European beauty group (15 countries, ~15,000 employees), a beauty and skincare brand operating across 20 EMEA markets, and a French fashion house. Interview findings were aggregated into a composite organisation and stress-tested against Forrester's TEI risk-adjustment framework before financial modelling was applied. Kolsquare provided customer contacts for interview but did not participate in the interviews. Forrester retained full editorial control over the study.
The full study, including the methodology and detailed financial model, is available to download now.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
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