Before building anything, I needed to understand who we were actually talking to. Early organic content, including a six second TikTok that brought in over 10,000 followers overnight, surfaced something more valuable than reach. The comments became a direct line into what this audience needed from a brand in this space, what they'd been missing from healthcare, and who they trusted. That insight became the foundation for the entire influencer strategy.

From there, I built the program around three things:

Strategy first. Every influencer initiative was built around what the community had already told us, not around follower counts or trends. That meant a deliberate mix of real patient stories, organic UGC, and partnerships with micro and macro creators, each chosen for a specific role in building either trust or broader awareness. Before any content was made, I spoke directly with each creator to understand their own story and where it genuinely connected with the product, so the content felt like their experience rather than a script.

Process and infrastructure. I developed the full operational backbone for the program, including a vetting process for finding creators who genuinely fit the brand, brief templates that balanced direction with creative freedom, contract and usage rights management, content review, and a whitelisting strategy that extended the life of top-performing content well beyond its original post date.

Iteration based on data. Every piece of content, whether it came from the brand or a creator, fed back into the strategy. What performed organically informed who we partnered with and what we briefed them on, which is part of why the program scaled the way it did.

By the time I left, the program included 50+ active creator partners per quarter on a $75K budget, drove 3M+ monthly views, and the organic channels behind it had grown to a combined community of over 200K.

More on the full story on my Substack, Consciously Considered — Part 1 and Part 2.