Bhawna Sethi highlights an important reality about influencer marketing: it is not one job, one role, or one career path. As the Founder of LetsInfluence, Bhawna Sethi points out that people entering the industry often make the mistake of searching broadly for “influencer marketing jobs” without first understanding what kind of work they actually want to do. Her perspective offers a useful framework for anyone trying to find the right entry point into this rapidly evolving industry.
Influencer marketing sits at the intersection of creators, brands, agencies, audiences, and business objectives. That means professionals can contribute to the ecosystem from very different positions. Bhawna Sethi identifies three major routes: talent management, the agency side, and the brand side. Each route involves different responsibilities, different skills, and a different understanding of success.
Talent Management: Building Creators as Businesses
According to Bhawna Sethi, talent management involves working directly with creators. The responsibility goes beyond simply finding collaborations. Talent managers help creators build their businesses by identifying opportunities, developing partnerships, negotiating deals, and managing relationships with brands.
The central question in this role is simple: how can a creator become a sustainable business?
Bhawna Sethi’s distinction is valuable because it changes the way people think about creators. A creator is not only someone who produces videos or posts content. They can also be a personal brand, a media property, and a business with commercial potential.
Working in talent management therefore requires strong relationship-building and negotiation skills. Professionals need to understand creators as individuals while also recognizing their commercial value. They must balance the creator’s interests with the expectations of brands and ensure partnerships make sense for both sides.
For someone who enjoys communication, relationship management, deal-making, and developing people, Bhawna Sethi’s first path provides a clear direction.
Agency Side: Learning the Ecosystem
The second route Bhawna Sethi discusses is working on the agency side. Here, professionals work with brands to execute influencer campaigns from beginning to end.
This can involve creator discovery, shortlisting, negotiations, campaign briefing, execution, reporting, and strategy. Unlike a role focused primarily on one creator, agency professionals frequently have to manage multiple campaigns, clients, creators, platforms, and deadlines simultaneously.
Bhawna Sethi points out that the agency environment can be a strong place to understand both sides of the ecosystem: brands and creators.
That exposure can be particularly useful early in a career. Instead of seeing influencer marketing from only one perspective, agency professionals can learn how brands evaluate creators, how creators evaluate opportunities, how campaigns are structured, and how results are measured.
The skills required here are different from talent management. Bhawna Sethi associates the agency path with execution and strategy. That means professionals need organizational ability, analytical thinking, communication skills, campaign management capabilities, and an understanding of marketing objectives.
For people who enjoy variety, problem-solving, coordination, and campaign planning, the agency route can provide valuable experience.
Brand Side: Thinking Beyond Individual Campaigns
The third path Bhawna Sethi describes is working directly within a brand. Instead of executing campaigns for different clients, professionals become part of the brand’s internal marketing team.
Their questions become broader: Which creators should the brand work with? Why should those creators be selected? Which platform is appropriate? How should influencer marketing contribute to the larger marketing strategy?
Bhawna Sethi emphasizes that this role requires marketing and consumer understanding. That distinction matters because influencer marketing cannot exist independently from a brand’s overall strategy.
A brand-side professional needs to understand the target audience, positioning, customer behavior, campaign objectives, content platforms, and business outcomes. Selecting a creator simply because they have a large following is rarely enough. The creator needs to make sense for the brand, the audience, and the campaign objective.
This makes the brand-side career particularly relevant for people interested in marketing strategy and consumer behavior.
The Better Question to Ask
One of the strongest ideas in Bhawna Sethi’s post is that aspiring professionals should stop treating “influencer marketing” as a single career category.
Instead, Bhawna Sethi encourages people to ask themselves a more specific question: Do I want to build creators, build campaigns, or build brands?
That question can make a career search considerably more focused.
Someone who enjoys negotiating and developing relationships may be better suited to talent management. Someone who enjoys managing campaigns and solving execution challenges may find the agency environment more suitable. Someone interested in marketing strategy, consumers, and brand growth may prefer the brand side.
Bhawna Sethi’s framework also demonstrates why job titles alone can be misleading. Two people may both work in influencer marketing while performing completely different kinds of work.
Choosing a Direction Before Choosing a Job
Bhawna Sethi does not suggest that one path is universally better than another. Instead, her message is about alignment.
The influencer marketing industry needs people who understand creators, people who can execute campaigns, and people who can connect influencer activity to broader business goals. These functions overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
For someone entering the industry, Bhawna Sethi’s advice provides a practical starting point: understand the work before chasing the title.
Bhawna Sethi’s three path framework ultimately turns career planning into a question of strengths and interests. Rather than asking, “How do I get an influencer marketing job?” a better question is, “Which part of influencer marketing do I want to become good at?”
That shift can help candidates build relevant skills instead of collecting generic experience.
Bhawna Sethi’s perspective is useful because influencer marketing is becoming more structured, and careers within it are becoming more specialized. Understanding those distinctions early can help professionals make better choices about the skills they develop, the companies they approach, and the experiences they pursue.
Bhawna Sethi’s central lesson is therefore straightforward: influencer marketing may be one industry, but it contains multiple careers. Knowing whether you want to build creators, build campaigns, or build brands can be the first meaningful step toward building the right career within it.
